When I was little people died by age 70 mostly around 1950 when I was young and a toddler. One reason they chose 65 as a retirement age in the 1935 for Social Security was that most people were dead by 70 at the latest. So, the theory then was that 65 was a good age because people would continue to die by 70 at the latest.
However, this is no longer true especially places like the U.S. and Canada, Europe and Japan where the standard of living is higher than most other places on earth (generally speaking).
So, it could be said now that people are living to 100 to 110 years of age in the U.S. like they used to live to 65 or 70.
For example, in the 1950s people 45 years old often looked like people that are 65 or 70 now. This was pretty obvious to me at the time. And people now 80 or 90 years old now often look like people did at 65 then in the 1950s.
It's true that people die at literally any age.
However, the point I'm trying to make here is that if you can make it to 65 and get on social security and Medicare then often you make it to 90 or 100 or beyond that even. And more and more people are keeping their mental and physical faculties active too.
For example, I'm 75 but I can still do most things I could do before in life. It's true I gave up riding my KLR 650 simply because of my hernia in that I can no longer pick up my motorcycle if it dumps over on one side or another. Another thing I have somewhat given up to some degree is skiing. This is a very hard one for me because under ideal conditions I likely could still ski as long as I was skiing at a lift. But, the hard thing now for me is getting up after I fall down skiing. It's much harder getting up from the snow than it once was and I need to use my ski pole to get up and sometimes take one or both skis off to do this.
But, things like riding a bicycle or walking my dog in the forest or along the beach I'm okay with. However, I do have to be careful around river rocks or on steep sandy stairs going down to the beach or I can also fall down now.
So, what I'm saying here is that even though I'm presently 75 years old I can still do most of the things I used to be able to do in life so my quality of life really hasn't diminished the way I would have expected it to by now especially when I was growing up in the 1950s.
Another factor at least here in the U.S. is that there is no Draft forcing young men into the army or military the way it was when I grew up until the mid to late 1970s.
What is good about this is that Military PTSD is very limited among American Young men compared to when I grew up in the 1950s when almost every man then was crazy from fighting in World War II and women were often crazy because their father's, brothers', and lovers and husband's and friends' all died in that war. So, grief was what was the most present in the 1950s as people recovered from that war.
It was a very depressing time to be a child growing up just from all the grief people were experiencing from everyone who had died in World War II and also then from the Korean War too.
So, we have every reason to believe that people are going to be living longer and longer. And it is now possible that even I might live to 100 years of age or more.
It's true some people don't want to live that long and will find a way to be gone.
However, I believe if you have a family (I'm a grandfather, father and husband) that there is still reason to go on as long as you have all your marbles and don't become a burden to your family. As long as you can contribute it's good to still be alive and helping your family survive everything that comes in all their lives.
By God's Grace
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