Old Age

Old Age

by Peter Shikli
18 May 2003

Old people get religion, more so than the young -- perhaps because they are going to die and are desperate.

Or maybe that is a view of the old by the young, a view based on youth's preoccupation with the here and now. Perhaps old people are religious because it takes that long to figure things out, to separate the important from the merely urgent.

Not quite old yet myself, I share youth's feeling that death is absurd, or at least not quite fair. I think about how my kids may have the luck to live hundreds of years. In a few decades, advances from the Genome Project and others looking into the basic building blocks of our bodies are likely to put their finger on the clock that winds us down.

Aging is artificial. We assume it's in the nature of a living creature to die, but something, perhaps a trigger based on a clock, has to change the creature to begin deteriorating. We don't just die; our bodies intentionally kill us.

And it makes great sense if you see the purpose of our bodies as factories to produce and deliver sperm. We may think of that as just one of the many fun things we do, that the world revolves around who we are -- but Darwin would disagree. He would argue that our sperm evolved our bodies as the most effective vehicle to satisfy the sperm's needs, or rather our gene's needs, and not the other way around. And once the body had performed its service, it becomes used toilet paper. Something needs to pull the flush handle so our bodies get out of the way of the next sperm carrier. The cycle has to repeat because that is how the sperm picks up the mutations that allow it to win the race against the sperm of the saber tooth tiger or the staphylococcus bacteria.

Our bodies, and who we think we are, that is the overhead and eventually a waste product of the work of the sperm. That God would give this waste product a soul and the keys to heaven, that is just part of the wonder and mystery of spirituality. As far as the sperm is concerned, these thoughts are just an uprising of the servants, and with advances in birth control, a serious challenge to their authority.

And just as a revolution of the robots outsmart us in science fiction, so we are outsmarting our sperm masters. The Genome Project is delivering the maps to their hidden defenses, microbiology is decoding their secret communications, and pharmacology has attacked their command and control. The sperm's relentless but feeble counterattacks take a generation to mount, and the war will be over soon.

Curiously, cancer cells are one of the few types of cells that do not age. As they divide, they do not degenerate and die (unless we interfere). Odds are that once we understand the mechanics of aging enough to stop it, we will also understand enough about cancer to stop it.

Of course this is in line with the objective of doctors, not just to extend our lives as old people, but to have us spend long lives as young people, or at least middle age. Something would still kill us of course, accidents and the like, something quick instead of the slow deterioration of old age. Who could argue against that?

But something would be missing. The time to wind down, to reflect on what life had all meant. To retire from our fast paced world and put the pieces together into what some call wisdom. Our minds may become too tired or feeble to push back new frontiers, to make contributions through our careers. But perhaps old age causes a shift from our heads to our hearts, as part of discovering why we came to live in the first place.

Smile at a stranger. Youth feels awkward, perhaps even defensive. An old person is likely to smile back. Pathetic cry for sympathy, or at least attention? Perhaps, but it could also be that gift of understanding that comes only with years of calm reflection. An understanding of the value of love, even to smiling strangers.

And as such old people grow their understanding of love and the meaning of what has gone before, perhaps they are better prepared for what is to come. I find it comforting that so many of them feel it will be more than just the lights going out. All this talk of death may scare them into churches, but fear of death doesn't make young people that religious. The genocide that swept Cambodia after the Vietnam War, or the tribal genocide of East Africa, in each case the victims were rarely old people, and the shift was less to spirituality as to the opposite, despair.

Once we cure old age, the population explosion may not be our biggest problem. The loss of this natural cycle in the lives of all of us may carry unexpected costs. Not just the lack of grandpa's lap for story time, we may loose part of what it is to be human. It wouldn't be the first time modern science gave us a gift with one hand while quietly taking away something with the other.

I had a friend die in his 50's. The mourners all were saddened that he died in the prime of his life. I was sad because we had made plans to grow old together, to retire to Hungary where we could tell each other stories of our lives, to pontificate on the state of the world, and to take the time to show each other the brotherly love we never had enough time to do right.

Imagine if we lived in a world where some quick form of AIDS took us all in our 50's. Productivity would jump and society may see the upside of the economics, but I believe we all would feel shortchanged. Would that be much different from everyone dying at 200 with a 50-year-old body and life-style? Would we feel like we had 200 years of experience, or just 50 years repeated four times?

And there is the fear of dying. As a youth, the realization that I would one day die terrified me. I'm still not looking forward to it, but the fear is less. Perhaps I've grown stronger, but it's just as likely that the fear ebbs with age. When my father died, he was largely at peace with himself about his death. It would be in keeping with nature to match the needs of its creatures with their circumstances. Youth should fear death so they don't die needlessly, but nature or God or evolution see less need to make the old fear it quite as much. This too would be lost if we lost our old age.

Most of us would die cheated out of what we still had left to do, climbing that mountain or raising our tenth family. We would die afraid and unprepared.

Since I do have faith in our race, I feel we will come up with a solution once we are handed the Fountain of Youth. We will probably come up with ways to grow old artificially, much like we go camping long after we no longer need to live in the woods. There may be old folks' medicine, to slow us down, like some anti-coffee. Perhaps it will become popular to drop out as in Timothy Leary's day, but this time to escape to our rockers on the porch.

The doom sayers may see the loss of old age as punishment for man's continuing meddling with God's plan for us, but that assumes God's plan doesn't include this turn of events. For my children, I actually look forward to it. But I hope they find this admonition from their dad in the attic a few hundred years from now. And I wish them a fine old age.

More ramblings like this: www.shikli.com/blog

Peter Shikli is CEO of Bizware Online Applications. You can view his bio and contact him at pshikli@bizware.com.