Preparing to Grow Older - Part 1

When do we prepare to get older?

In one sense, our bodies prepare to age when we are in the womb.  Genes, hormones, enzymes, muscles and much much more are getting ready to get older.

But somewhere along the line we can consciously prepare to age.  Kids learn to throw and catch, to dress themselves (including learning to tie their own shoes) and to interact socially with others.  Teenaged boys pump iron and practice skills of many kinds.  Teenage girls learn how to arch theri eyebrows or smile just a certain way and to fix their own hair.

Some kids even learn to read, to write, to do arithmetic and even to think.  "When will I ever use this stuff?" has been asked for many generations.  Then we have to use it and forget when we learned it and how we complained.

I'm more concerned with preparing to grow older than sixty.  At age eighteen a year is 5.5% of the time you have been alive.  That makes a year seem like a LONG time.  At age 60 a year is 1.5% of the life lived.  A year doesn't seem so long.  So when someone says, "Prepare the basics when you are young", the young have a hard time believing they need to do so.

The Basics:
  Survival -- food, shelter, and safety.

You start investing part of your income when you are sixteen or eighteen if you want to survive with food and a roof over your head when you are sixty, or sixty-five or seventy.  You start putting money away for housing early, not later.

"I cannot afford to."  That's what I thought, and what most people think when they are eighteen or twenty.  Now you can eat Top Ramen one or two nights more and save something.  You can do it.

No reason to expect "society" or your parents to bail you out when you are forced to retire, as many of us have been, because we hit a magic age (somewhere over forty-five in many cases).

I'm just talking physical survival.  Next time I'll probe this a bit more.

What have you discovered?  What do you think?  Leave a comment and let us know.