Photo by Eric Rothermel on Unsplash.
I’m listening to a podcast on planning your life.
“Where do you expect to see yourself in five years?”
Um, I hope I’m alive. After a certain age that’s the first thing you think. Is it sevety? seventy-five? eighty? Maybe even younger if you’ve got a medical condition.
As I wrote in my book, the closest definition to old age is not being able to look ahead ten years.
When you’re forty, you anticipate you can pretty much do the same things in your fifties. When you’re fifty, more than likely you can keep going, if you keep fit and do the right things.
At sixty, it gets dicier. Let’s say you are 68. Most people over 75 experience a major shift. And after 80, it’s a crap shoot. I personally dpn’t believe you can move the needle very much after age 80, give or take a few years.
I’m not sure you gain very much from a healthy diet or medical prevention pills. You do make visible gains from exercise, if you do the right ones often enough, but they don’t stave off major health crises. Lots of fit people get cancer or heart attacks or die young. I’ve seen the studies: they tend to lump everybody over 65 together as “old.
So how do you make any plans? How can you live a meaningful life when you don’t know how long you’ll be able to keep doing the same things? And maybe you know the odds stacked against you living another three, five or ten years.
One way is to completely ignore the whole thing. That’s pretty much what I’m doing. I write books that are coming out in a few months. I happen to like writing books so I don’t want to look for a hobby. Still, my last thought may be, “Why did I spend so much time with that project? It’ll never get finished now.”
Another way is to stop doing anything that might be called “work.” Just live for the moment. You don’t try to produce for the long term; you just do daily activities that begin and end with each day. When you make vacation plans, you check the box for “refundable” in case you can’t make it.
Still, you find yourself saying, “My 8-year-old cat will probably outlive me.” Or, “If I buy new clothes now, I won’t have time to wear them out.”
Planning has a very short horizon. A lot of activities are a long game. A blog or a podcast takes forever to see returns.
Deferred gratification takes on a new meaning. How long will you defer that gratification?
So does that career choice question: “If you had six months to live…”
Because maybe you do. You place your bets and live–or die–with the outcome.
