Thoughts on aging, from Glenn Reynolds.
I’m a few years older, but I view things similarly. I, too, have noticed more of my cohorts shuffling off this mortal coil (e.g., Chuck Lauer two or three years ago, and Mark Hopkins a year or so ago, though he had clearly been in poor health for a while).
I hope I have more than another twenty healthy years, but I obviously can’t count on it. And I don’t really know what “retirement” means, other than being able to do what I want to do, as opposed to what I wouldn’t voluntarily do if someone else wasn’t paying me to do it. I don’t golf, or have any hobbies, really, and I want to stay involved in space in what (despite my having lived through Apollo) is rapidly becoming the most exciting period of my life for that industry. I am still trying to make interesting things happen, and generate enough income from it for us to travel and enjoy life more while we have our health.
What important in next 20 years?
Biden gets elected and get a nuclear war??
Solar energy works?
Fusion?
It seems we might start mining ocean methane hydrates within 20 years.
It also possible we might explore the lunar polar regions sooner than 20 years.
I should read a book or 3.
I was promised a nuclear war when I was a kid and have yearned for one ever since. I even wrote a short story called “Age of Aquarius” about the Cuban Missile Crisis gone awry. I’ve been waiting for 60 years. They’d best hurry.
In 20 years time.
Artemis is still not going to launch on schedule?
I’m a decade behind, but I spent the weekend discussing retirement and what it might mean to us with my wife. We too thought we might never retire, and thought so not in a bad way, but closer to “better to be the oldest guy in the weight room than the youngest guy in the nursing home.” In my family, it seems the lifespan after retirement was extremely short.
Back in October, we took a two-week cruise. Two weeks is an interesting time limit. Young couples and certainly families don’t seem to manage two-week vacations like this, judging by the passengers. My wife and I balancing either side of 50, we were in the youngest percentile. But it wasn’t just age we noticed. Most of the people we were with retired long ago, and travel almost constantly. About the only person we met, besides us, that was still working routinely was a travel agent taking a trip with clients.
Another interesting thing about that trip was the general fitness of the passengers. In recent years, we noticed a trend of major vacation destinations filled with people from mid-30s on up using electric scooters to get around. It is near an epidemic at certain venues. However, on this trip, with a generally older crowd, there was just a handful getting around by scooter, and those few were closer to my youthful percentile. I’d be sad for these people, but I think they’d be in better condition if they received less pity.
What was clear to me was, if I wanted to waltz through my later years; then it is about working to stay busy and active nor trying to hobble through using technology to keep me moving. I could retire and just stay active. The one thing none of these people suffered was having someone else tell them what to do. They did what they wanted to do, because they had the time, money, and capability to do them. It was quite inspiring.
I’ve been “retired” for 10 years. I wish I’d bought a fifty-foot sloop instead of a house on 5 acres. I could be getting started on my third circumnavigation about now. I’m73. Hmm. It’d have to be a thirty-foot foot sloop, but maybe…
I retired at 65, and will be 70 next April. My wife (still working at 63) and I bought the house on 5 acres seven years ago, and have been steadily improving it while enjoying the place thoroughly. Though we front on the Occoquan River, I was thwarted from buying a pontoon boat to cruise it when vandals stole our docks. But a couple of years ago, we bought a 97 acre farm in Tennessee, next door to our great niece’s 17 acre horse farm. A local farmer farms our land now, so it produces rental income for us from agriculture. And soon we’ll begin raising beef cattle in a joint venture with our great niece and her husband. The south end of our property is bounded by the Duck River, the most biologically diverse river in North America (and we all know how strong diversity makes us). Access to the Duck is far easier than our current approach to the Occoquan, so that boat experience still awaits. But we still have to build our retirement house on the property, and I’m slowly working on a design for that. I’m really looking forward to building our Tennessee life, after having built our Virginia life.
P.S. I, too, once had dreams of ocean adventures. Many years ago, I read about a guy who had set a world record by crossing the Atlantic in a 6 foot row boat. So I laid plans to beat that record. My boat would be 5 feet long. But noting the privations this guy had suffered during his crossing, I came up with a mitigation plan: I would make my boat 300 feet wide.
Jeff Bezos could no doubt advise you about the best technology and ‘appointments’ for your megayacht.
It’s amazing how cheap blue water sailing yachts can be. I’ve seen ocean crossing boats for under $20K. The price break appears to be around 40 feet. There’s a guy in Ketchikan, Alaska who bought a 50-foot steel sailing yacht for $50K, fixed it up, so he and his gf could live on it at a marina. Apparently, it’s cheaper than an apartment and far less than a house. The guy is a skilled mechanic.
I cross the Duck every day on my way to work. Great party of the country.
I lived in Prince William County from 1958 to 1977, the first half in Woodbridge, the second in Manassas. I spent a lot of time on the Occoquan, Belmont Bay, and the old reservoir, before it was all developed. I used to cross to the Lorton side on the wooden traffic bridge at Occoquan that was eventually swept away in a flood. In Manassas, I lived near Bull Run.
Geez, this thread reads like a Who’s Who of Geezers.
You must think people remember dial phones, overdrive handles on the Ford with a three on the tree, the dot on a freshly turned off TV, series Christmas tree lights, and coal furnaces.
Boy, glad I’m not among you….
I’ve been watching old episodes of The Outer Limits on YouTube lately. One of them had a number of humorous anachronistic concepts of the “distant” future, but one really had me at its layers of irony: a desk phone having a flat (albeit rather thick) flat video screen…and a rotary dial!
Don’t you know that a rotary dial is the latest phone app?
You mean you haven’t been stuck waiting at a crosswalk, while this guy is shuffling across the street while making “szhoop, szhoop, szhooooop” gestures on the toch screen.
Remember, this appeared almost 20 year ago in The Onion about the discovery of the Jules Verne manuscript, “Le Telephon Photographique.”
https://www.theonion.com/long-lost-jules-verne-short-story-the-camera-phone-foun-1819567554
“Rudeness becomes ubiquitous, as the device’s infuriating notification-chimes invade every corner of public life,” McGraw said. “When the ethically bereft begin transmitting images obtained under questionable circumstances, espionage becomes so prevalent as to threaten the integrity of the French populace.”
Oh yeah?
Get off of my lawn!
You’re not a real Boomer unless you had a Magic Drawing Screen, so you participate in “Winky Dink and You.”
I wasn’t allowed to touch the TV knobs at that age. Besides I was way too much into my spring horse and pedal powered fire engine with light and siren to care.
In Larry Niven’s early Known Space stories, the Transfer Booths have rotary dials.