Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Who does 75?


A friend sent me a link to an article published in The Atlantic in 2014, written by a man named Ezekiel Emanuel (too bad he’s not a religious scholar), explaining why he only wants to live to be 75.

His motives for setting this upper limit are all ostensibly generous: he’ll be emancipating his kids to concentrate on their own lives, he’ll have done all he wants to do and contributed all he has to contribute, he won’t be taking up space and resources better allotted to someone younger.  Nowhere in his lengthy essay is there any trace of a notion that his desires are anything but modest. I’ll take the 75 years as my due.

Emanuel’s piece is off-puttingly self-serving, particularly for someone who claims to know when to shuffle that self off. He’ll stick to his guns, he says, despite his daughters’ most earnest pleas. If he gets cancer at or near 75, he won’t get treated. (Unsettling, considering that he’s an oncologist.) And he wants to have a memorial service for himself before he dies.

The article is full of statistics, all of which point toward the fact—which Emanuel seems to regard as a revelation—that one’s later years are generally “not of high quality.” He brings up the concept of the “compression of morbidity,” a term I’ve never heard before but which he cites as a source of many Americans’ dogged determination to live as long as they can. The gist of the idea is that the longer we live, the healthier we’ll be. I’ve never met anyone who believes this.

In fact, a slew of studies, some of which Emanuel mentions, confirms the opposite—that increasing age brings increasing disability. But do we really need a study to show us this? Experience is the best teacher—but then Emanuel was a mere whipper-snapper of 57 when he wrote his piece.

After spending several thousand words in adamantly defending his stance, Emanuel—spoiler alert!--demurs in his last paragraph, saying that he reserves the right to change his mind when he reaches the magic 75. If he’s “still being creative,” he says, then he’ll give it some more thought.

In other words, Emanuel is like most of us: we have every intention of bowing out gracefully when the time comes, but time is not an absolute.
  
Read the article here


Ezekiel Emanuel is an author with his own Wikipedia page. Visit it here

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