Another Look at 80

‍ After Neil Offen’s recent musing on what it’s like to approach 80 years of age, here’s Robert Reich, fin an excerpt from his Substack, also looking at an upcoming 80th birthday. For the full column, see here. ‍

Let me be very candid with you. I’ll be 80 in June.

Eighty!

When I was a boy, my grandmother had a friend named Jack who was 80. He was the oldest person I’d ever met. I was amazed he was still standing. And still able to walk and talk. I thought he was Methuselah. I regarded him as a fossil from a different time.

Now I’m about to become a fossil from a different time.

Trump will reach 80 10 days before me, but that’s small comfort. He’s not just a fossil. He’s a neanderthal with a reptilian brain. I’m embarrassed he and I are of the same generation.

But there are a lot of us, all hitting 80 this year. More babies were born in 1946 than in any other year in American history up until that time: 3.4 million of us little darlings, 20 percent more than the year before.

This postwar baby boom is about to hit an actuarial wall. We’re going to croak. Over the next dozen years or so, the boom will go bust.

Some of us are aging gracefully, with gratitude for how long we’ve lasted and compassion for ourselves. I wish I could say I was one of them.

I’m getting grumpy. When he first came on the political scene, Trump made me angry. Now he makes me want to puke. …

When I get together with old friends, our first ritual is often an “organ recital” — How’s your back? Knee? Heart? Hip? Shoulder? Eyesight? Hearing? Prostate? Hemorrhoids? Digestion? The recital can run (and ruin) an entire lunch.

The question we jokingly (and brutishly) asked one other in college — “getting much?” — now refers not to sex but to sleep. I don’t know anyone my age who sleeps through the night. When he was president, Bill Clinton prided himself on getting only about four hours. But he was in his 40s then. (I also recall Cabinet meetings where he dozed off.)

How many years do I have left? It’s now thought a bit disappointing if a person dies before 85. Three score and 10 is the number of years set out in the Bible. Modern technology and Big Pharma have added about a decade.

The average lifespan in the U.S. is now 81.4 years for females and 76.5 for males. Why do women get almost five more years than we stupid, fragile, pot-bellied, gun-toting, cigarette-smoking, couch-potatoed, drunken, stressed-out men?

“After 80, it’s gravy,” my father used to say. But how to get on the gravy train? Is there a formula for prolonging the remaining years and living them with more energy than ache? …