Living Longer Better

[SifuPhil]

It seems that Americans are becoming so enamored of their lazy, unhealthy lifestyles that they're beginning to find fault with people that are actively working to improve both the quality and quantity of their lives.

"In California you see people exercising at 05:15 and it's either great for them or it is part of a really neurotic psychosis where they're desperately unhappy because they're getting older," says Ed Saxon, who produced the film Fast Food Nation in 2006.


"The 55-year-old imagining that they look like a 25-year-old and getting surgery or fanatically exercising to do so - it all strikes me as a bad idea.


"The obsession with looking younger than you are means you are denying reality and you are probably denying your own value in some way."

So much for armchair psychiatry - Mr. Saxon, why don't you stick to making sensationalist documentaries?

"In the US it's almost taken for granted that longevity is a good thing," says Susan Jacoby, the author of Never Say Die.


"A lot of this irrational belief that there are things that you can do to buy insurance against getting older and diseased has to do with our real dislike, in America, of growing older."


Jacoby, who is 67, argues against the "lifestyle garbage" and "supplement garbage" that she says the age-management business is promoting.


"If you look beneath the people who are telling you that you can live to be a healthy 120, there's a guy or a woman who's selling something," she adds.

Bitter much, Ms. Jacoby?

"The fact is, most people who live into their 90s die after "an extended period of disability", Jacoby argues.

"We're just accepting this myth that because we're healthier than ever at 67, it is going to be the case at 87 or 97. But what is true - thanks to some of the dubious advances of modern medicine, which keep people alive no matter what - is that there is going to have to be more thought about taking care of these people."

Thanks you, Captain Obvious!

 

[Ozarkgal]

Of course diet and exercise is a no brainer when it comes to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. What I don't understand is that many people these days cannot accept the fact that growing old is part of life and feel the need to have hideous face lifts ,lip plumping and dental work that make them look like plastic caricatures. I say take reasonable care of yourself and embrace the fact that your body is aging according to plan. Those plastic face lifts are fooling no one.

 

[SifuPhil]

That's true, but I think it also depends upon WHY you get the work done. If you're in the public spotlight, like a celeb or a politician, then yeah, I could see having it done. But doing it just to convince people you're younger? That's silly.

Growing old gracefully seems to be a dying art.

Ha-ha.

 

[TWHRider]

I can't afford face lifts, hair coloring, or getting my nails "did" --- I've got too many horses. I have no choice but to Run With What I Brung - lollol

If I could afford face lifts, I want Joan Rivers' knife doctor. Of all the melting faces in Hollyweird, "mirror mirror on the Wall, Joan Rivers has the best plastic of all". nthego: