Stoicism teaches joy thru simplicity and wanting less
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE
This is kinda personal
This past year is the first year in my life that I really felt old. I don’t necessarily mean due to health issues, although I have had a few over the years and they do get closer together and seem to matter more with age. Some of it has been in good ways: I’m feeling like an elder, like a matriarch.
Last month, I finally finished and filed a Health Care Directive (HCD), which is the Minnesota version of what is elsewhere called a Living Will, or Advance Directive. I like Minnesota’s sensible, descriptive title for this document, and that the designated person to make decisions when you no longer can is called simply Health Care Agent (HCA.) “Advance Directive” is a bit vague, it could be directing anything. And “Living Will?” Well, let’s face it, too melodramatic for us Midwesterners.
What life extension often looks like
If you want to get started on your own HCD (you’re not too young, you know) here is a link to the template and instructions I used, which are very helpful. tinyurl.com/DKRatSSP-HCDtoolkit.
I took the option to fill in the form that asks you a bunch of probing questions about how you feel about medical care, various procedures, and the prospect of your own death. I didn’t prepare for this, I just did a draft version, totally winging it. I was actually a little surprised at the words that flowed from my pen. In answer to the question about how I feel about prolonging my life in the face of illness, I answered something like this:
I feel right now as if I have lived long enough. I have had a very full and interesting life, and the only thing that really keeps me here is curiosity. Once that is gone, I’m out of here. It’s been great. Bye.
This really surprised me when I read it back to my friend and my daughter, who are to be my primary and alternate HCAs. Not that long ago, I swore I was going to try and beat my Dad by living to 100. And there were times when I was disappointed with how my life had gone, feeling that I didn’t do enough to improve the world, and more selfishly, that there were a lot of fun things and places I would never do or go to.
But I now realize that my former thoughts were illusions and that that little blurb on my HCD (which got tidied up a bit before becoming official) is actually my deeper truth.
Zen meditation may increase contentment
Is longevity for its own sake all it’s cracked up to be?
Here’s where the synchronicity kicks in. I found four things that I will discuss along with this issue of planning for your own ending. That’s less than half the external sources I usually dig up for one of these feature articles. But they just fell into my lap. I wasn’t searching, I just happened to see them, separately but all within a week or so, in my internet rabbiting. Two are scholarly articles about longevity, and “health extension” as opposed to “life extension.” One is a beautiful piece about what brings contentment in the second half of life. The last one was a film that I just saw last night called “Can I Get A Witness” which tells an artist’s-view story of a possible near-future utopia where human life ends at 50.
Dr Imre J Loeffler
Hungarian born Kenyan surgeon
S. Jay Olshansky and Bruce A. Carnes co-wrote an article in the Oxford University Press Journals of Gerontology debunking the idea that life extension is on a continuous upward curve and staggering levels of longevity will soon be available to most humans. Besides pointing out several mathematical fallacies embedded in the “proofs” that this will occur, they also clarified that the extreme increase in longevity at the beginning of the curve was due to the eradication of childhood diseases, making far fewer child deaths part of the equation. Recent increases rely on postponing death for very ill old people at great cost to society. Even if society wanted and could continue that indefinitely it has diminishing returns that we can see already.
The late Kenyan physician Imre J. Loefler, described in his obituary in 2007 as a “prolific contributor to medical journals” wrote a 2002 article in PubMed Central (a publication of the National Institute of Health) titled “Is longevity a sustainable goal?”
He advanced arguments that were echoed by the characters in the film I saw, but these are not arguments I knew the medical community was seriously considering. Loefler notes that survival is the goal of the whole species, but
Dr Arthur Brooks
Happiness Researcher
it is not achieved by pursuing longevity at the individual level. He posites that longevity used to be considered a gift that included good health, but modern medicine has now separated life extension from health by keeping people alive who are very ill.
He finished his article with the following short but profound statement:
Ultimately, the pursuit of longevity as a cultural goal lacks moral content and can be regarded as a form of hedonism. All great religions and all great philosophies would have agreed that the question of how long one lived was subordinate to the question of how one lived and what someone had done with his or her life.
Can I Get A Witness?
I saw a piece in Upworthy magazine by “happiness researcher” Dr. Arthur
Brooks giving the secret to being content in the second half of your life. In short, it was a modernization of the old Buddhist and Taoist idea that too much desire or for the wrong things is the path to suffering. He says the key to finding joy in the second half of life is recognizing when enough is enough and reducing unnecessary desires. Further “The real formula for happiness is all the things that you have divided by the things that you want.”
Scene from Can I Get A Witness
This is essentially the philosophy of the near-future world of “Can I Get A Witness.” The way people’s lives are routinely extended if they can afford to pay for it, and the vast gulf between life expectancy of the rich and the poor, are vague memories that fill the year 2055 characters with rage. CIGAW is not available for streaming in the U.S. yet. For now, read about it on Wikipedia, or if you can, slip over the border to Canada where it is available.
