Age Might Not Be Just a Number

One of the strangest things about reaching the age of 80 is that you can’t help realize the end is in sight. That doesn’t mean I am ill, or even that I have a specific condition that can cause my death. It merely means I now have the sense that I haven’t got all the time I would like to have. I can’t invest in things with 20 year time horizons.

That sense has crept up on me within the past couple of years, and may have something to do with the stress of Covid. How old are the people who are most at risk for Covid? In their 80’s.

Who’s in the hospital with Covid? Old people.

This pisses me off. No one feels more “unfinished” than I do. I have books unwritten, money unmade, friends uncontacted. And I am not in the shape I used to be in or hoped to be in. Nor have I finished learning Spanish.

Not to mention that I keep getting invited into projects I’d like to participate in. For example, democracy is in deep, deep trouble.The wealthy are paving a highway to Mars, or at least New Zealand. The Bitcoin libertarian survivalists are re-investing the family jewels outside banks and leaving the country with their crypto.

Only the “woke” on the left and the extremists on the right are still monkeying with government institutions, as if they still worked. As if.

The more intelligent and worldly are predicting not only that we will have a Civil War in the next year or two, but are taking bets on the month. They are only waiting for the…