2024-10-09 20:54:00
The doctor Ana Claudia Quintana Arantes dedicated her career to palliative medicine and, in addition to being a great professional, she is an excellent writer. In her latest book, “Life is worth living: A small manual for aging happily”, she brings a fantastic metaphor about the preparing for old agewhich I will reproduce freely to start this article that I intend to talk about how to plan the future.
Imagine that, for some reason, you accepted that, if you lived for many years, you would move to the Sahara Desert. You arrive at your destination shortly after sunrise, on your 70th birthday, enchanted by the landscape, the pleasant climate and happy to have lived so long. However, it soon starts to get very hot. As you may know, temperatures can reach 50ºC during the day, and you’ll regret not having brought good sunscreen and sunglasses. Fortunately, night arrives, and the extreme heat gives way to intense cold, with temperatures down to -10ºC, which makes him regret not having brought enough clothing.
You, like me, probably want to live a long time.
And just like living in the desert, living for many years also brings challenges for which, the sooner you start preparing, the better you will be to face them.
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A first thing that you should take with you into old age is a good health.
When we are young, the impact of not taking good care of our health is almost imperceptible. We can overindulge in food, drink, remain sedentary or endure long and stressful working hours, and our young and strong body will cope. However, when old age arrives, the price of these abuses will be immense.
O second point for a good old age is love and be loved.
We need to have good relationships with family and friends. To achieve this, it is essential cultivate old relationships and have the ability to make new onesas it is important to remember that not everyone will be lucky enough to grow old; many will fall by the wayside. I never tire of repeating: having a family is very expensive, having friends is very expensive. Not expensive in money, but expensive in time.
If you don’t set aside time in your life to cultivate good family relationships and good friends, you won’t have them.
O third point is the ability to keep updated and adapted to the world.
We live in a world that is constantly changing, whether in the technological or social areas. There is a phrase, by an unknown author, that says that men are like wine: age refines the good and sours the bad. In the past, it was common to think that people would be tolerant of sour old men. No more. In a society where we will have many elderly people, those who “go sour” will be alone.
Two clues are important: people become sour when they say things like “in my day it was good…”. If you are alive, this is your time. The second clue is that sour people are prejudiced. Prejudice is mental laziness and has no place in the contemporary world.
Finally, it is important to have financial resources for a good old age.
If there is a time when money is essential, it is when we get old. Many say they don’t know if they will be alive tomorrow and, therefore, it makes no sense to give up the present in favor of an uncertain future.
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It’s true, not everyone will grow old, but, just like the desert metaphor, old age is a possibility. So, how to proceed?
For a long time, the idea was preached that, in order to take care of our “future me”it was necessary to mistreat our present “self”. They said that, to save money, it was necessary to sacrifice the present, removing all the superfluous things from it.
Removing the superfluous things from life is a serious mistake, as they are what give flavor to our lives. What we should remove from our cash flow is waste.
There is a lot of waste that is easy to identify, such as clothes that we buy and don’t wear, a subscription to a service that we pay for without using, the interest and fines that we pay due to a lack of financial organization, a dripping tap and so on. Even though they are easy to identify, they are not always simple to eliminate.
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However, there is a type of waste that is more subtle and much more damaging to our financial life: spending to obtain social status.
These are the expenses we make to look like someone different from who we really are. If we dedicate ourselves to eliminating waste from our lives, we will have money for some superfluities and resources to create a boa contingency reserve and to invest in a good planning to face and enjoy our longevity.
With health, friends, the ability to be a pleasant person adapted to the times, and financial resources, it will be much easier to live well in the extra years that the longevity revolution has given us.
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