Kicking the Can

This is a very frank conversation about aging. Do not read if your age says you're not old enough to get on this ride.

As someone in my early 60s, I'm supposed to be concerned about the future and the changes that it's going to bring. Just as I was supposed to be confused about the internet, and confused about the youtube, and then streaming, I'm likewise expected to be frightened of A.I. and whatever else might follow, because I'm an old man.

Of necessity, I found myself stumbling over the use of Discord, which I've had to engage with in order to make the online D&D campaign work. And no, I'm not especially good at it, or experienced with it, or anxious to become experienced with it... and it's a bit of a joke with the experienced players, which I don't mind. Where technology is concerned, I've always been a step or two behind the curve.

That does not make me afraid of the curve.

A few days ago my partner and I fell into one of those conversations that people in their 60s have... what is going to happen to us when we can no longer do the dishes, drive to the store for groceries, keep up with the bare minimum of housecleaning and so on. We're not so wealthy that we can hire someone, our younger family are very busy being a young family and obviously, there's a desire not to burden people we care about. I know from experience that there are people our age who have the attitude, "Well, the young will take care of us, that's what they're good for."  This, of course, is evidence of these people having totally forgotten what it was like to be young. It wasn't just that they didn't care, it's that when they were in their 30s, they were telling their friends, "No, I can't go to the bar, I really need this done because we desperately need me to keep this job."

Yet now, these same people assume other 30 year olds will drop the bar and the job to go vacuum their carpets. It's a little funny.

All this is to confirm that, for the most part, people aren't prepared to be in their late 60s, should they live so long. This despite having thirty or even forty years to prepare for it. There's too much resistance, too deep a desire to just argue that no, we're not getting old, or that when they do it can't be that bad, or whatever, to actually sit down and think, this body has a best-before date. Maybe that's something I should consider.

This hits a wall when we find ourselves having a combined ten visits to the hospital, doctor and lab all in the space of a month, ending in nothing actually being "fixed." Because this is the reality of hitting this particular stretch... the stuff that starts to break down does it in a way that can't be corrected. It can only be managed. That is very sobering.

I met this wall when I was 30, when my daughter was aged six, and when my first wife's multiple schlerosis reduced her to a quadrapelegic. This is where I did my training in "no-solution medicine." It was more than sobering, it was catastrophic. Comparatively, every horror I've faced since has the edges smoothed off. That's a part of what makes me me.

Life, if you'll pardon the expression, is essentially kicking a can down the road. When you're young, can-kicking is fun. As you age and start to work, that can-kicking feels awful at first, then you're so busy you've forgotten that it's what you're doing. But then, steadily, as things fall away, as your children move away from home, as your parents die and leave you the pater or mater familias, as friends go, as the places you hung out go, as the things you liked to do once and can't any more, or have simply ceased to be, go, there you are, still kicking that same can, wondering how long this part is going to go on. After all, realistically, I could live to be a hundred. A hundred is the same distance from me now that 24 is. This gives me an awful lot of time to kick a can with not that much else to do.

A different game that my generation likes to play, that my parents generation did without much hope, is this: "How far will technology progress before I'm really old?" That matters, particularly with medicine. My mother had a heart valve installed in 1977, when she was told that it might give her "two or three years, perhaps more."  The valve did not in fact fail until 1995, when she was still alive... and long enough to get a better heart valve installed in another operation, and this time with the adjoiner, "We don't know how long this is going to work."  My mother lived until 2012. She did not die of heart failure. Which is what makes this game, "Will technology keep me alive?" so much fun to play at this age.

I understand that at present, the fastest growing job market — where the numbers of actual workers are increasing at the fastest rate — is aged care. Looking after the old and dying is, right now, a big growth industry. I brought this up with my partner, which inspired the usual discussion called, "Why the fuck we don't want to end up in an old age home," an old favourite, complimented by this technology thing. Usually, as soon as a lot of people start working in a particular growth industry occurs, there follows a desire to automate that thing because there's more money to be made there. I'm sure the gentle reader has noticed there's quite a lot of discussion about robots right now.

Let me walk you through that thinking again. When a sector swells, it attracts capital. When capital arrives, it looks for ways to reduce dependence on labour. The needs of the ailing and the dying are minimal. An 90-year-old does not need a robot to help her prepare for a big party, or anything complex like that. She needs something that can move a spoon to her lips. And change things. And be able to lift her, so the bed can be made. The needs of a 90-year-old makes a very limited yet practical number of things that a robot can be taught to do.

None of those being commit euthanasia, but I know you young people. That's where you all went.

Tamara and I have agreed. We would rather have a robot take care of us in our later years than a person. A robot doesn't make assumptions such as, "You're old, of course you want to watch Wheel of Fortune and Fox News with the other old people here."  A robot doesn't care if you don't conform. A robot can be programmed to just adapt to the patient, unlike a human who recognises, "Hey, the patient is helpless, they can adapt to me."  These are things, trust me, that you'll think about one day.

Oh yes, of course I know that most people my age would cringe in horror at this idea. They live in this fantasy land where "care" means warmth, company, presence, concern... but we're under no such delusions. People suck. Having a person in your home, making decisions for you, about what you need, and what you have to accept now, I did that in my early 30s with my first wife's nurses. And it SUCKS. They are not reasonable, they are not human, they are "educated" with a set of precepts that say, in essence, "my life is really fucking hard, and you're sick, so shut up and make my really hard life easier."

I still bounce against this in hospitals. I did just 6 days ago. I don't mean to disparage nurses, we all depend on them. But they aren't reasonable as people. What they do for a living precludes any possibility of them being that.

On the other hand, a robot is like a toaster. It doesn't work without effort, but when it works, it does not tell you what to think, or what tone to speak in, or what expression you ought to have on your face. You are never judged by your toaster. You don't stuff bread into it at 1 AM to have it carp, "How come you're not in bed yet? I can't be expected to make toast at this hour? Why don't you behave like a responsible person?"

I'm at a point in this post where I want to tell as story about something I said to a nurse before the surgery I had in 2008 for when I snapped my quadraceps tendon on a diving board. She asked me a personal question about my sex life, the question being on her clipboard, and I gave her a wholly blase answer that offended the ever royal shit out of her. She immediately turned to me and SCOLDED me for answering in an inappropriate, albeit joking manner. I won't write the line here. I'm not ashamed of it, its only that in all my trafficking around the internet, I still haven't heard this phrase yet. So I guess, yeah, I'm kinda still out there.

To give a fairly parallel example, George Carlin once did a sketch back in the 70s based on answers you don't give to your parents, though you think of them at the time. It consisted of the parent saying cliche things and then him giving the answer he said he did not give when he was a boy.

One I remember had the parent saying, "How many times do I have to tell you?" and Carlin smugly answering, "Seven."

Oh, how I wish I could have said that to my father. He'd have beaten the shit out of me, quite literally. Anyway, that's about the level of my answer to the nurse.

All this is to say that locking me up in a care centre where the same people feed me, change my diapers and help wheel me into a room where I have to watch a news feed that's obviously tainted with the other old people isn't going to go well. I'm not going to shut up and that means I'm going to lay there in filthy diapers a lot of the time, subject to some nurse's passive aggressiveness. Not looking forward to that.

See? I'm already talking about things in an ordinary blog post than we're all supposed to pretend doesn't exist on the internet.

Yet if I say the words to a robot, one assigned to my actual home, not a care facility, because the government finds it cheaper to house me in my own home than in a grand whatever, well damn, bring that future on, I'll love it. The robot can carry me to my keyboard and I'll spend them morning hitting a key when I can, taking weeks to finish a blog post this long. Sounds like heaven.

The robot might even be programmed to answer, "Oh Alexis, you're so funny."