This is a discussion worth having:
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This is why I try to get my friends on rapamycin! And why you need to make friends with younger people who are your biological age.
But yes I see the issue brough up in this article in my parents, who have lost almost all their friends. But the bigger issue for my parents (and many in the 90s) is that their health is such that they don’t have the physical strength and abilities to get out and socialize as much, so they are forced to stay in their home, or otherwise limit their social activities due to health reasons.
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Yes. For most people, quality of life is more important than quantity. In order to have quality we must have good physical, mental, and emotional health. Otherwise, it will be difficult to have the strength required to carry on despite the loss of friends and loved ones. We just won’t want to.
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I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot lately due to my work. I agree it’s very a very important subject that many of us don’t like to think about. While obviously I don’t want to go myself anytime soon at the same time I’ve learned a lot about what I personally want to avoid at the end of my own life. I recently read Being Mortal by Atul Gawande and I highly recommend it for anyone in the medical field or anyone generally interested in how we can start to handle end of life issues better. It would be great if more people could maintain their healthspan longer and go quickly and painlessly when their time comes but in the meantime I think it’s important to do better for people now. Sorry if this is a controversial viewpoint but I witness so much needless suffering when people aren’t educated properly about their prognosis, the limits to what our current technology can do and their end of life options.
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Just to second the vote for reading this book… its a great book, especially as we see our parents get older.
Also - this topic generally is related to the topic of “sense of purpose” in life, as covered in this thread: Strong Sense of Purpose in Life Promotes Cognitive Resilience Among Middle-Aged Adults
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I’m 71 and I love to be around younger people. The problem is that most young people want to be around people in their own age group. In Japan older people are generally respected and even revered. In our culture not so much. We wind up isolated in nursing homes or assisted care facilities.
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@Sextravert, I agree. We have to do a better job keeping people hopefully healthier longer to avoid that scenario but if it cannot be avoided there are ways to make nursing homes better but it will take a lot of work. That book I mentioned goes into the concept of the utmost importance for people to feel like their lives have meaning and purpose for improving their health and having the best quality of life possible. In one nursing home he talked about being responsible for even just a small house plant gave some an uptick in their mental, emotional and physical state. There’s so many simple things that can be done for people. I do feel from what I’ve seen doing consulting work in various nursing homes over the years that it’s not always horrible and there’s a real effort being made towards continuing improvements. That’s why I think end of life issues are so important to contemplate way in advance in order to lessen our loved ones or own chances of being caught unaware and unprepared. I think it would be wise for families to have frank talks about these issues and be clear on everyone’s wishes. I will stop now. Sorry, I’m just really passionate about this subject. 
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I have gotten just one person to read part of the FAQ on this site. I think the subject is too intimidating for most people. I’m sure we all know friends, acquaintance’s, and relatives who could benefit from rapamycin and/or senolytics. We’re just ahead of the curve here.
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I think there is this feedback loop in aging. People decline in health, which makes them feel less like engaging in the world, which gives them less reason to want to live… and it just continues until people are quite disabled and also quite disconnected from the world.
If people could maintain health, it might never trigger that first slow drifting away from being engaged with life.
If you could live with the energy of a 25 year old, I can’t imagine many people would say they were tired of life.
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I perfectly understand that.
“it has nothing to do with being human anymore”.
And that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. I don’t fear death.This physical decay, you’re not allowed to live normally anymore, yes, I do fear that.
Aging is a disease.
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I understand what are you saying but there is another side of this. I am 48 and my health is not declining and have the energy of someone at least 15 years younger, but I have noticed that what ages me or is giving me a sense of age is a decline in social life. I work a lot, a have many social connections connected with work and not so much time for friends. I also noticing that it is harder to meet new people and form really meaningful connections in my age comparing it to when I was 25-30 years younger. The relationships are really different and sometimes I feel isolated (not really, but then a again the feeling is real). I stay at home more, read, keep my interests alive and I was talking to a friend last week who’s husband is getting to 70 how he is retired, mostly at home and content with this at the moment and how she is a generator for the social connections, but how she sees that she too sometimes just wants to stay at home and read. And we talked about importance of being with others, doing things with other, that relationships is what keeps you young and interested when you can share your interests and thought with others. And this is something that declines with age and it is for some people the start of feeling old. Not necessarily the health first. With psychological wellbeing decline health and body seems to follow into a vicious cycle.
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It feels like there are so many layers to this I don’t know where to begin. It’s definitely a huge topic especially for people who are trying to bend the normal timeline for humans.
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Sorry to say it doesn’t get any easier. At 82 I have already outlived almost all of my friends and many in my family, including my wife. I often feel I am the “Last of the Mohicans”.
What I have going for me are my daughters and grandchildren who see me often. And, the fact that I am an introvert and don’t really ever feel lonely when I am alone. I could easily have been the desert hermit prospector.
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This article really affected me. I’ve been trying to put my feelings about this article into words and it’s been hard. I’m going to dump a few thoughts here:
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If people are going to have longer and longer lives (maybe many times longer) I really believe we have to start thinking about life as cyclical. Right now, the common path of school → job → marriage → kids → kids leave home → retire → wait around for decline… this path ALREADY leaves a lot of people lonely and lost after midlife. It seems the most successful people today have “multiple lives” restarting and relaunching different aspects of their lives many times. Not just getting shot out of a canon at 18 and just seeing how far you fly until you hit the ground, left out in the field to die. We need to structure society so that people can have new launches and relaunches of many kinds throughout their lives.
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The idea that euthanasia is being proposed as the solution here instead of rethinking the perception of humans as single-use objects… this supremely bums me out. We’re talking about how to how to dispose of the supposedly “used up” humans that are “lingering on too long” rather than talking about how to create a world where people are not left isolated and feeling useless. While I do support anyone’s personal choice to die the way they choose, I don’t think euthanasia is ever a “solution” to anything. Individuals can choose what they want, but as a society, our solutions should be around fixing and improving to the best of our abilities.
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Let’s hope that the solutions should be about improving lives of the aged population. However, at the present they are not. I don’t think that it’ll become a priority for the society in the foreseeable future or before we eliminate poverty, hunger, homelessness, and lack of medical care for all. Only after that, MAYBE, we will start looking into improving life for our aging population. Why to improve life for the elderly if children are starving? What is more important for the society: children or elderly? Resources are limited, therefore the choice won’t be in the elderly’s favor imo. Therefore, let’s try to delay aging as much as we can 
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Absolutely! I do think it’s more a question of allocating resources more than not having enough. There’s enough food in the world to feed everyone many times over. Every developed country aside from the United States ensures that everyone has medical care. We just choose to not spend our money fixing those things.
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Man, I can really relate to this.
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