In my hometown of Maumee, Ohio, I figured that the amount of people over age sixty-five was out of the ordinary.
Maybe the pristine conditions of Maumee were some sort of fountain of youth, and people just reached old age and stayed there. Maumee has nothing out of the ordinary, just your everyday ice cream shops, elementary schools and churches, mirroring every other relatively small town
Yet it seems that the majority of the population is celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary and enjoying their “golden years” luxuriously, walking their many animals and eating ice cream unbelievably slowly.
Apparently this is not so, and according to reports from USA Today Americans in general are living far longer than they have in the past.
Centenarians, a rare breed of people that are 100 years old or older are few, but growing with time.
Can we, as college students imagine what it would be like to live 50 years beyond our 50th birthdays?
Chances are that a small percentage of us will be able to see that 102nd birthday and with technology growing at the rate it is now, maybe a long many birthdays after that.
The USA Today cover story printed earlier this week said the number of Americans 100 or older may reach 241,000 in 2020. This is completely insane, not that it would be an entirely bad thing. I know that I am not looking forward to dying anytime soon, and don’t plan on it for a great long while.
If anything it should give Americans hope. Not only will they possibly be able to ward off any fatal illness that comes their way, but maybe they will have a little more time to spend with their grandparents, who could be living 30 years longer than anyone thought possible.
When first reading this article, I was pretty pumped. I love my grandparents and hope that they live forever, what’s more, I am hoping that they passed their invincibility genes my way. I could possibly have over 70 column writing years left in me.
On the rare occurrence that my peers and I start to live far longer than we thought, what are we going to do for all that time? Is life really “short”?
In theory, after you retire from your chosen career, you could start a whole, completely new one, that is, of course, if you are up to the challenge.
Harry Winn, 84, certainly was.
In another story in USA Today about the growing population of aging Americans, Winn decided to retire as a chemical engineer at age 56 to become a real estate agent.
This would not be my second career of choice, but still, older people are driving nicer cars than I am, and someone has to be footing the bill.
I suspected that they had just invested well, but maybe their current jobs are the ones paying for the Miatas seen flying around Bowling Green’s city corners.
After taking in this information, how many of us actually want to live to be that old?
Sophomore Michael Phillips who was not exactly excited to hear that he could possibly be a centenarian ion one day, said, “I wouldn’t want to see all of the people around me dying, I mean, I want to live forever, but let’s not get ridiculous.”
It isn’t like your body stops aging. I think that it would be very easy to say that you just start living in slow motion all the time.
If someone develops a cure for cancer, AIDS and heart disease, we could all start looking forward to at least another fifty years of activity and then we could spend the next thirty years populating senior day at Anderson’s.
Life may get slower, but maybe because you have more time to live it.
So it seems that Maumee is not the senior citizen utopia that I had previously thought. Pretty soon, every day is going to be senior day at the grocery store, and my grandma will probably end up teaching me how to skateboard.
Until that day comes, I’ll just be prolonging my life with every other college student, trying to push fatigue to the limit, maximizing my coffee intake with every waking hour and not even thinking twice about it.
‘#160;
Send comments to Stephanie Spencer at [email protected].
