What do you envisage your old age to be like?

I consider it every day that I shave. In other words, two or three times per week, for only as long as it takes me to shave.

I really don’t expect to live to an old age. It isn’t something I’m able to see in my own mind.

It’s not that far off for me. And since we had issues with my mother in the last couple of years, I have been forced to think about it.

I hope that we will have enough income to move to a small city with adequate health care facilities nearby and a reasonably low cost of living.

I like to think that I’ll be just like I am now, but old. An 85-year-old punk rock kid with opinions that she can’t keep to herself.

@TheOnlyNeffie When I was a kid the thought of getting old horrified me, to the point I claimed not to want to live beyond about 50-ish. I won’t be seen dead in beige, no way no how!

Yep, not that far off for me either. lol

I have a friendly, non-demanding and non-manipulative personality.
I don’t see that changing. I am sure I will be my usual friendly, talkative, silly self.
I have my health care concerns being self employed and self insured, but…I don’t worry about this too much.
Either I live or I die, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. haha

I love my lifestyle now, and hope to maintain it for quite awhile to come, but, hey, anything could happen.

Learning to live with certain uncertainties is a nice part of being a ‘mature’ person.

You have your concerns but have burned through a lot of neurosis. lol

@ucme I honestly don’t know what it is, I just literally don’t believe that I’ll live to an old age. I don’t really have much reason to feel that way, I just always have. Weird, I guess. I just.. assume I’ll die relatively young.

@TheOnlyNeffie – I hope you’re wrong.

If things go as I plan ( crossing my fingers ) I won’t be in the united states anymore. I will be living on a small country island isolated from the rest of the world with only a few other people. I imagine I’ll be at peace and friendly with everyone. I imagine no money controlling my life and no modern technology. I know I have weird hopes for my future.

@TheOnlyNeffie

I also hope very much that you’re way wrong.

It’s a much bigger speck on my horizon, and as I get older, I find i’m more myself with every passing year, not a bad thing, IMHO. If anyone disagrees, I will smack you with my Nerf Bat. I see more pain, less angst; more smarts, less sweating of the small stuff; more tolerance in general, less tolerance for fools. I’m really liking getting there, and Neff, I plan to live forever, so I expect to see you there, too. And I’m hoping someone else will clean my house, cuz I don’t get better at that.

@JilltheTooth

Zero tolerance for fools. I see a ‘no fools’ sign with a big X at the end of my driveway. lol

Aw, thank you’s! I didn’t mean for that to come out sounding so depressing. haha. I hope I’m wrong, too. ;)

@TheOnlyNeffie

It’s hard to imagine being even 50 at 18.
But, alas you arrive, and ‘you’ are still ‘you’ but…what happened to your body is a mystery. lol

@Coloma did you say it that way because you think I’m 18? (I might kiss you if you say yes!)

@TheOnlyNeffie

I’m assuming you are under 25. Maybe? ;-)

28, but you can have a smooch anyhow. :)

I’ll be skydiving. Into pudding. tapioca.

me <3 stereotypes

I’ll probbaly be that creepy old lady at the end of the street in some creepy house that all the kids think is haunted and when they dare each other to venture near I’ll be all yelling gibberish at them and throw cats in their general direction.

But really I don’t know. I guess I’ll be like I am now, or so I hope. Will I be playing games and watching horror when I’m 86? I don’t like imagining otherwise, but who knows what can change or how my views will evolve/devolve. That’s if I even live that long, and I probbaly won’t even have a house anyways.
So yeah I’ll be sitting on my balcony knocking back mead and be all like, Jason rules, bitches! ’‘cackles’’

I can see this. ^

@Symbeline – I’m down. We’ll be drinking mead in rocking chairs on the porch together, ‘kay?

Hell yeah. Bring your sowing kit; we’ll stab voodoo dolls, too, and imagine they’re all the husbands who left us. :D

@Symbeline

LOL Don’t forget to spike the slurpees in the old fucks home.

@Symbeline Rightly or wrongly….& this is just one guy talkin here… I see you more like the old dear out of the Every Which Way…movies. You know, Clint Eastwood & Clyde the orangutan. She’s really feisty & takes no shit from no one. “Get the fuck off of my porch you nazi muffin!” That kind of thing.

@ucme Haha yeah, gonna make em stiffs dance a little. :D

@Symbeline That sounds pretty rad, I hope your prediction is right. And lol Nazi muffin. XD

Haha @ucme got her names all mixed up…...oh fuck!

Haha, oh shit lol. XD Gettin’ old already. XD

Don’t you dare switch em back or else i’ll look pretty dumb! Whaddya mean what’s new? XD

@ucme I wasn’t gonna. If you Nazi fuck strudels den like it TOO BAAD lol ‘throws cat’’

Big up the third reich… yay XD

“Hey Esther…put on ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’” again….

I think my old age will be a fascinating new adventure when we leave this planet, to escape the continuously expanding grasp of our dying Sun.

Bogus optimism__________▲________

I’ll be right there with you, buddy, remember, I’m gonna live forever!

Welcome aboard, my friend! Our answer to this question is !US!

I’ll be driving all over town in a golf cart, attending classes at a Lifelong Learning College, dancing every night of the week to live music, playing golf, swimming, keeping up with my archery, playing bocce, sitting by the lake painting, going to the casino, traveling, all with my dear husband right by my side…just a few more years if the good Lord is willing and the creeks don’t rise.

Hmm, @iamthemob has me at a loss??? I wonder…..what can it mean?

I’m not sure, but hopefully I’ll be wise and at least mildly attractive for an old lady thanks to mini face lifts and things as I age. I know my hair will be in locs, and I’ll always have the best marijuana =)

Recently increasingly nonexistent. Otherwise a senile perverted old fart in a retirement home who is the one fool who finds a way to kill himself with something supposedly 100% foolproof.

I fully plan on getting a perm and playing canasta. I imagine that I’ll most likely be blind by then, since it runs in the family (yikes! SO not looking forward to that possibility!), so I’ll be demanding that my ungrateful grand kids read to me when they come over for the obligatory annual visit. I’ll also be a little bit grumpy and will gossip with the other old ladies about how so-and-so has a whore for a granddaughter…
Yeah, I’ll totally play into the old woman stereotypes.

@etignotasanimum

LOL, I forgot I used to play Canasta with my grandmother, time warp moment.

@Coloma NICE! I have a group all planned out with my current best friends, assuming we all stay in the area. It’s going to be fun! :)

I don’t have to envision it.

LIfe is wonderful. There are no stereotypical clichés in my life or my friends’ lives. Some ski, some play contract bridge, some haul their grandchildren to museums, some have wild love affairs,some travel, some have cats, most us do some volunteer work, and we all strut our stuff proudly.

Last week here: Milo not shoveling snow

(When I was 64, a lover wrote a poem to my thighs. No one did that when I was 24, 34, 44 or 54.)

Not as good as my 20s.

@gailcalled: ‘dems some gams ya got there, sister. ;^)

I expect I’ll be alone. Everyone but my daughter will be dead and she’ll be off, living her life.

I’ll read alot and spend time on whatever the Internet becomes by then. I expect I’ll still read comic books (should they still be published). I hope to play piano by then and double hope my arthritis doesn’t stop me from playing.

I’ll be a regular at a local restaurant. Read a book, chat with the bartender – maybe play a song or two on the piano.

I expect I’ll die slumped in my chair with an issue of Spider-Man on my lap.

They’ll find my body a few days later when I don’t respond to a video-chat request and my daughter will come home for the funeral. She’ll say a few nice things about me. Maybe that I wasn’t half bad and she was lucky to have known me.

I hope I never stop wanting to go to school…I envision myself as an 80 year old completing a BA in architecture or something.

My main goal right now is to form a cooperative eco-village-like community based on natural living. Hopefully by the time I’m old, my partner and myself, along with my extended family and certain friends, will be living there. Whatever activities we do to keep that going (I imagine a lot of gardening and foraging, a bit of hunting and fishing, and plenty of hand crafts and various other village-type activities), I’ll be doing those, just slower.

@incendiary_dan I will definitely join you!

@Simone_De_Beauvoir: I had a student (6 years ago), was a 72-year-old, retired hand surgeon.

Guy was tops in his field – worked at Mass. General (Boston) for years.

He retired at 70 and bored out of his mind. So he enrolls in college to get a degree in graphic design. I had him as a student in three separate classes. He was a great student and the (much) younger students liked him as well.

@cprevite :)

swearing like a sailor and listening to strange music.

I once had a few classes with an aging dogmatic vegan who verbally assaulted one of our professors, a vegetarian by the way, for “demeaning chickens’ individuality by calling them cute”. It occurred to me later that she always referred to my partner as “cute”. Then she yelled at me and called my belief in traditional animism stupid, before I called her out on her racism and white privilege.

My point? Don’t be one of THOSE older students. Nobody likes mean craziness.

I’m well on my way, since I will be 68 in three weeks. I have slowed down a lot and removed myself from the rat race. I have everything I ever wanted, so I’m perfectly content to sit back and enjoy each day as it comes.

@iamthemob If that’s an Orphan reference I’m totally changing my avatar to something about it.

Sitting in an overstuffed leather chair smoking a Gurkha 1887 and drinking vintage Scotch among my leather-bound volumes, mahogany paneling, various animal heads, and epic hat collection while a dedicated team of French maids service me I mean serve me finger foods and sammiches.

What is the definition of “old age?” I’ve seen people 80 years old that had more life in them than some 20 year olds. Age is just a number.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard Haha that’s pretty cool. And creepy animal heads!

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard Yeah, that was a good answer.

@BoBo1946 I agree 100 percent. I personally see and experience it everytime we go to our house in Florida. People in the 70s, 80s and 90s playing baseball, softball, swimming, running, biking, taking classes, playing golf, billards, dancing every night, flirting, living….you name it!! Much more vigor and life than many of my 20, 30 and 40 something friends.

@cockswain and @Symbeline, thanks guys.

No prob man. Now get the hell off my porch lol XD

@bkcunningham for sure! Age is just a number and has nothing to do with a person’s zest, or lack of, for life!

To all of the kids here (you know who you are; I don’t always, so I’m not making assumptions):

I don’t know anyone among my peers (myself included) who ever imagined that he or she would grow up to be ‘old’. My uncle, who recently celebrated suffered endured his 85th birthday, has finally faced up to the fact that “he’s getting old”.

Facebook has helped me realize this about myself at a somewhat younger age. Since I don’t go to many school class reunions I don’t see people ‘age gracefully’. But now that I have started to reconnect with some of them sometimes my first thought on seeing some of them for the first time in 40 years is, “My god but you’ve aged!” (I don’t say that about all of them, so don’t think that ‘being old’ is necessarily a curse.)

So, since my mind tends toward objectivity, I’m forced to face the fact that I’m probably aging, too. (I know I’m ‘getting older’, that’s just a function of time; ‘aging’ is something else.) Just because I can feel like I’m 17 when I kiss a girl for the first time, or I’m at the peak of physical perfection because I can shovel the driveway and still wash a sinkful of dishes afterward, and I can take joy in being on the water in a boat… well, I have to admit that I’m not kissing many ‘girls’ for the first time any more, and I put off shoveling because my back hurts from doing it yesterday, and I ‘recall’ the joy of sailing more than I practice it. I’m aging. One of these days I’ll probably be ‘old’. I’m definitely not rock climbing any more. But I may go hang-gliding and parachuting.

Aging is okay. I kin live widdit. And if I can, then certainly so can you.

So bet on the fact that you’ll probably be ‘old’ someday, too. Oh, by all means live each day as if it were your last, and grab for all the gusto and all that… but still, do the laundry, keep the day job, invest in your IRA and 401(k) and pay the mortgage.

If I get ‘old’ someday I’ll write again (assuming I still can, and can recall this message, and all), and tell you how it is. So far, so good. Really.