The gentle hand of vibrant diversity will be seeing you off to the next world

[MilSpecs]

Incorrect. People actually lived pretty long. You are confusing the infant mortality and the rate at which women died in childbirth with how long people lived. If you made it through your twenties, you were likely to live pretty long time. Averages are not your friend in understanding this.

No, the average lifespan has gone up tremendously, and due to advances in medicine. People have always gotten diseases of age, but now those diseases don't kill them anywhere near as young. There's a ton of data out there to confirm this. You can even look up how long your own ancestors lived (those who didn't die in childbirth or as children) and compare them to your living elderly relatives now. You probably have relatives who are already, on average, much older. This is assuming your current elderly relatives have good health care (we've left that out of this debate entirely).

Again: remove the word average from the equation. The infant mortality rate has fallen. The mortality rate from child birth is now near-zero. Deaths from pandemics have been pretty stable for westerners since 1918. There has not been a major world war since 1945. Averaging all this shit into the human lifespan doesn't help us understand the issue. When you remove those things from the equation, people lived for a very long time. If you made it into your thirties, chances were high you would reach your eighties if not your nineties.

Where did you get this data? Everything I've read uses current life expectancy at a given age, right now, which is clearly much longer than past life expectancy at the same age. Old people live longer.

[Speaker to Animals]

No, the average lifespan has gone up tremendously, and due to advances in medicine. People have always gotten diseases of age, but now those diseases don't kill them anywhere near as young. There's a ton of data out there to confirm this. You can even look up how long your own ancestors lived (those who didn't die in childbirth or as children) and compare them to your living elderly relatives now. You probably have relatives who are already, on average, much older. This is assuming your current elderly relatives have good health care (we've left that out of this debate entirely).

Again: remove the word average from the equation. The infant mortality rate has fallen. The mortality rate from child birth is now near-zero. Deaths from pandemics have been pretty stable for westerners since 1918. There has not been a major world war since 1945. Averaging all this shit into the human lifespan doesn't help us understand the issue. When you remove those things from the equation, people lived for a very long time. If you made it into your thirties, chances were high you would reach your eighties if not your nineties.

Where did you get this data? Everything I've read uses current life expectancy at a given age, right now, which is clearly much longer than past life expectancy at the same age. Old people live longer.

I have read it any many history books and I am surprised you think otherwise.

Think of all the Roman figures you read about. Cato the Elder, for example, died at 85. The guys who died in their fifties and sixties were usually killed in violence.

The problem is that you are assuming all the deaths are equal and somehow applicable to what happens in America today. Most Americans die from accident, age, or disease. Few of us die from violence, pestilence, infant and child mortality, or childbirth. Lots of people died in the past from violence and disease. But when you remove those factors, people lived just as long as we do. Probably even longer, depending upon diet and where they lived. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the average Mesoamerican lived for a very long time if he wasn't killed in the perpetual religious wars. Those guys had the best diet in history.

What happens to Americans is a complex of issues. The big one is that they lose purpose and meaning. Most of them have been living hedonistic lives to some extent, constantly living for pleasure. So when life takes those away, they lose sense of meaning. Families no longer value their grandparents, sending them off to live in these Kafkaesque nursing homes and retirement communities, where every morning people show up for morning chow to be mistreated by the staff and do a head count to see who made it through the night. Okee is not wrong that our society is fucking awful.

But we also don't take care of ourselves. We eat like shit. We don't do much physical work. We don't exercise. You know how many times I hear people say they are getting older so they can't go to the gym? It's the OPPOSITE! You can live a long time in your youth and not do a damned thing with your health. Once you get into your forties, you need to go the gym as much as possible. Build and maintain muscle mass. That's what determines if you can take care of yourself all the way to the end for the most part. People deteriorate with age because they don't use their bodies and the bodies atrophy to the point that they can't even take care of themselves.

When you remove all the external causes of death in history that we mostly eradicated in our generations, people lived pretty much the same period of time as they do today. Perhaps a little longer in some places. Just go through a list of historical figures that died from old age instead of violence or disease. It's right there in your face. Those people didn't have nursing homes.

[TheReal_ND]

Corn

Best diet in history

[Speaker to Animals]

Corn

Best diet in history

Corn, beans, squash, chicken, fish, venison, peppers.. the occasional human, but

[TheReal_ND]

You forgot dog

[Speaker to Animals]

You forgot dog

Bridge too far.

[DrYouth]

I kinda wonder if part of the reason the elderly are increasingly dropped off in crappy nursing homes is that it's the full circle karmic outcome of dropping kids off at crappy daycares from the first possible moment... after which they file off to crappy schools and crappy after school care.
We have placed individual work at the centre of our society and culture and neglect mutual care.
We don't value or support it.
We relegate it to poorly paid strangers... who mostly neglect their charges.
Is it any surprise that narcissism is on the rise, topped off by the rise of Trump, the ultimate celebrity narcissist.

[TheReal_ND]

You forgot dog

Bridge too far.

Not for the Olmec

I kinda wonder if part of the reason the elderly are increasingly dropped off in crappy nursing homes is that it's the full circle karmic outcome of dropping kids off at crappy daycares from the first possible moment... after which they file off to crappy schools and crappy after school care.
We have placed individual work at the centre of our society and culture and neglect mutual care.
We don't value or support it.
We relegate it to poorly paid strangers... who mostly neglect their charges.
Is it any surprise that narcissism is on the rise, topped off by the rise of Trump, the ultimate celebrity narcissist.

Boomers get what they had coming.

[SuburbanFarmer]

I said colloquially the same thing. When people say old folks home, nursing home, assisted living community, retirement village, and sometimes even hospice care, they might be speaking about any of the things in that group. Yes, they are different things...fuck this. Go argue about semantics with TC.

It's not semantics. It's "Give me $50,000 grand right now if you want your mother to live" or "Move heaven and earth and you might be able to keep your mom at home."

It's this sort of excuse making that keeps it going.

Fucking millions of families take care of their elders in their own homes just fine.

I know it. You know it.

[SuburbanFarmer]

When you remove those things from the equation, people lived for a very long time. If you made it into your thirties, chances were high you would reach your eighties if not your nineties.