Working it all out
Whenever we contemplate life’s innumerable mysteries, the imaginative scope of the human brain soon reaches its outer limits and we have to resort to head-shaking wonder and quite possibly the issue of whether God exists or not and other similarly-profound matters.
It is almost as if the more that we learn about the vastness and variety of known universe – and I use the word ‘known’ advisedly because there’s quite possibly areas of it that we haven’t yet discovered and maybe never will – the more we appreciate how little we know.
Here’s a link to an article by Andrew Griffin that appears today upon the website of The Independent, reporting upon the recent discovery by scientists that the universe does not seem to be expanding in any particular direction – THE INDEPENDENT
One is always loathe to reveal in public the small extent to which one’s brain has ever applied itself to anything, still less the fundamental topic of existence itself, but I can vaguely recall my first contemplation of ‘What it is all about?”
I cannot put an exact date on it, but as I type I am guessing that I might have been eight or nine years old at the time. I might have been four or five, or even fifteen or sixteen, for all I know.
Whichever it was, I can vividly remember contemplating the issue of where I was, and what I might have been doing, before I was born. And how long I might have been doing ‘whatever that was’ before I was the born on this Earth, in this place, in this era, and to these parents.
Big issues, of course. Some of them too big for a kid of whatever age I was back then.
All that said, this didn’t seem to bother me too much at the time. It was as if I gave a metaphorical shrug of my shoulders and just got on with whatever I was doing at the time, probably just sitting on a school bus looking out of the window along with the rest of my football team on our way to play an away match against a neighbouring prep school.
After all, if you begin trying to get to grip with the imponderables of the universe you’ll soon reach the end of the road and/or disappear up your own fundament. Or indeed sit there forever like a wet sponge when you realise that there are no answers, or at least none that you’ll be able to understand. At some point you’ve got to get up off your butt and get on with your life – what else is there to do?
This morning when I awoke – for some reason I cannot identify – the thoughts outlined above came to me in the context of a conversation I had with one of my brothers yesterday as we (or rather he) was driving back from a meeting at the coast to London.
Families, huh? We’ve all got them, we probably wouldn’t be where we are without them, they matter a great deal … and yet they can also be so frustrating and irritating.
As we sped up a long dual carriageway, my sibling at the wheel, discussing this and that, he suddenly alighted upon the topic of a key phenomenon of 21st Century life – the fact that, as human longevity extends further and further as time goes by, it has affected families in two troubling and society-changing ways.
The first is that – as more and more people live beyond the age of 80 and then 90 – the ‘assistance’ that they leave behind to their descendants in the form of inheritance-led financial help and/or property and possessions is gradually becoming postponed beyond the key stages of life in which those descendants, and indeed their own offspring, might most benefit from and appreciate those gift(s).
Let’s take an example. If you are an adult aged 25 and assume that your parents are going to live another forty-five (not twenty-five) years, you’re probably going to concentrate on getting on with building your own life without ‘counting’ upon inheriting the kind of affluence that potentially could take away your money problems and let you live a comfortable life.
But hey, surely that can be no bad thing in terms of your ambition and approach to life, right?
The second, and connected, change that the general increase in human longevity has brought about is that – the way of all flesh being what it is – as people live longer and longer, the more likely it is that they will suffer exponentially from the types of ailments that always afflict geriatric individuals eventually.
Out of the blue and potential interest, without any particular passion or feeling, my brother then recounted a recent dinner party conversation between he and his wife and another couple who live in Dubai and are familiar to me.
At the time they were discussing personal issues relevant to retirement, including medical conditions, pensions and life planning. Suddenly, the wife of the other couple announced that – simply out of personal preference – she had absolutely no desire to live beyond the age of seventy-five.
She stressed that she wasn’t saying this because she was burdened with a bout of depression, or stress, or anything similar.
It was just that, having seen the indignities and hardships that extreme old age had inflicted upon members of her own (and other people’s) families, she had come to the rational conclusion that, whilst she could see the justification (and joys etc.) of living to one’s mid-seventies, frankly she could not see much point in any human being staying around much longer than that.
I was both stunned and fascinated at the revelation. If there are any Rust readers out there who have been with us since the 2013 start of this organ’s incredible – and I hesitate to use the word – ‘journey’, they might just possible remember that one of earliest ‘coups’ was securing the serialisation rights to Toby Diamond’s then just-published best-selling novel The Departure Solution, now of course a global movie hit starring Tom Hanks, Jennifer Lawrence, Morgan Freeman, Zac Efron and Warren Beatty.
For those whose memories might need a nudge, here’s a link to the first episode, as published on the Rust on 14th December 2013 – THE DEPARTURE SOLUTION
The scheme of the novel, of course, was that at some point in the future, the issues of old age had been legislated for by the policy of giving all over-fifties plenty of cash and luxury items (to enable them to have a comfortable and fun retirement), with the quid pro quo that – on their 70th birthdays – they had to hand themselves in for a euthanized conclusion to their life. No appeal, no chance of avoiding it – that was how human society had decided to organise itself.
Strangely, my brother had neither read the book, nor even heard of it, and so I took a little time to expand upon the background to its theme and then the story, which involved a small group of oldies nearing the age of 70 who decided to band together and rebel against the inevitability of their demise.
I was interested to note at the end of my dialogue we both seem to agree that we’d personally be content with a pre-determined demise at the age of well, not 70 perhaps – but maybe 75 years of age.
It’s one thing boldly saying that in your mid-sixties, of course, but probably somewhat different then still feeling quite so positive about it when one day you reach seventy-four and counting …