Maybe some of those New Year’s Resolutions can be rethought with this New Year’s Revelation: Father Time is a Liar. Eric Nelson suggests why we might do well to expect that life can get better as we get older in his December 27th CDN article “New Year’s Revelation: Father Time is a Liar.” The implications for your life are worth considering. You will find the first few paragraphs here followed by a link to read the entire article. Enjoy.
PETALUMA, Calif., Dec. 27, 2015 – Well-known bioethicist, author and former Obama administration advisor Ezekiel Emanuel rocked the Twittersphere last year by saying he’d rather not stick around until he reaches what most consider to be a ripe old age. “Seventy-five years is all I want to live,” he wrote in a widely discussed essay in the Atlantic. “I want to celebrate my life while I am still in my prime.”
As Emanuel sees it, “living too long… robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, however, we would do well to challenge such bleak and self-defeating assumptions.
In her article “Why everything you think about aging may be wrong,” reporter Anne Tergesen draws on a number of studies to illustrate why, for instance, depression and loneliness are not more common in old people, cognitive decline is not inevitable, older workers are not less productive and creative ability does not necessarily deteriorate – and may actually improve – over time.
“In many ways,” she says, “life gets better as we get older.”