Are we living past our expiration date?

Hi ya! Glad you could make it today. Fill up your mug and wrestle one of those mega muffins onto your plate, why don't'cha? How're you feeling anyway? Aches and pains? We all have them. As we get older, we seem able to find more of them than we knew was possible - and they take longer to dissipate, too, eh! 

Thanks to today's powerful medicines, we are able to keep a person alive purely by feeding them oxygen and keeping their heart pumping, even though the rest of their body is failing.  We can drug people to levels of oblivion to kill pain and symptoms of life-threatening disease so we can keep them physically alive, but mentally dead.  And, law prohibits those who are terminally ill from choosing death over life, even though they are unhappy and living in an undignified and painful state without any hope for change.

Medicine has successfully removed people’s ability to die with dignity.  Instead, medicine forces people to live like vegetables, sometimes not having any idea of what is going on around them.  And, although there are the rare 99+ year olds who have a sharp and alert mind, more often than not, they are extremely limited in their ability to really LIVE life.

Frankly, I’d much rather die suddenly than live to be 100 without very much physical capacity or for that matter, mental capacity.  Living a life that has very little ‘living’ in it seems pointless.  If we could live to 100 and actually partake in what life has to offer, I’d be all for it, but I’m not convinced this is really the case.  Until medicine can extend our quantity of years... and ensure a quality of life that is worth living, I sometimes wonder "Are we living too long?"

I used to say I wanted to live to 100...maybe 200... but pain management for the last 10-20 years of a person's life is not the best scenario. Hopefully the science guys will eventually find answers to all our troubles but I am hearing more and more people beginning to wonder the same thing. With our population living longer, quality of the so called 'golden years' will continue to be an issue. Do you want to live to 100 or beyond? Science seems to think it will happen before too long but...  Do you think medicine keeps us living past our expiration date?

See ya, eh!

Bob