Thoughts On Aging 002: Quality And Quantity

At some point late in the last century we thought we were pretty smart, even profound, when we decided that at least as important as how long we lived was how well we lived; thus the idea of "quality of life".

What "quality of life" as an every-day concept seems to mean is that we are healthy, that we live in pleasant surroundings, that we are safe, secure, along the lines that Franklin Roosevelt meant that freedom from fear and freedom from want (along with freedom of speech and freedom of religion) were fundamental.

Roosevelt make his remarks in his 1941 State Of The Union address, in the context of the Great Depression and under the looming shadow of war, and to a nation that had to learn the idea of sacrifice for a common purpose and the idea of a common good. Roosevelt said that these freedoms were for everyone, not just for Americans, but for everyone in the world, because if they were not, then the freedoms of everyone would be in jeopardy from those people who would deny those freedoms to others.

After the War and the Depression came a time of unprecedented material wealth for an unprecedented number of the American people.

This was a time when many people could begin to look beyond "enough" to something more. There were two roads that could be taken beyond "enough", the road of "more" and that of "better".

"More", in the material sense has its limits of usefulness. At some point, merely more becomes clutter; boring; even distasteful. More of the same quickly becomes a matter of satiation and disinterest. "Better" is the more abstract concept and thus infinitely extensible, can always seem to be beyond one's grasp. Thus the attribute of quality can become a way of infinitely extending one's material wants and feeding the consumer market in a way that can never be satiated.

But there is another side to quality, that is anathema to the market since it costs nothing but is still valuable: this is the spiritual and social side of life.

This is not to say that such things cannot be marketed and exploited, love or its ersatz can be bought, fellowship can purchased; but the ideals of these things is that they are freely given, and that is what makes them so valuable.

So when we speak of "quality of life" today, we tend to mean the quality of our material lives, the conditions that we can purchase with money. And while such conditions may be good in themselves, and in many respects are precursors to more important goods, they still fall short of the quality of life that cannot be purchased.

Thoughts On Aging 001: Seventy-Six Is Enough

If you have your first child at twenty-three, then if that child has a child at twenty-three, you will be forty-six and a grandparent. If that grandchild has a child at twenty-three, you will be a great grandparent at sixty-nine.

If you have two children in two years, at twenty-three and twenty-five, and those two children produce two children each in the same intervals, you will have four grandchildren by the time you are fifty. If the grand children go on to produce two children each at two year intervals, then by the time the second cohort of grandchildren produce their second cohort of children, you will be seventy-five and have eight great-grandchildren, four grandchildren and two children.

Over this time you will have raised your children and helped your children raise their children -- your grandchildren. After that, you can pass on the "helping raise" part to your children, who will help raise their children's children -- your great-grandchildren, whom you can just enjoy for at least a year, after which you can drop dead, knowing that you will have fulfilled your biological duty of producing grandchildren and knowing that your children have also fulfilled their duty.