My plan is to live to at least 140 years old.
When I tell people this, they often think of older relatives in nursing homes or suffering from illness and cringe. They think of being old and infirm, of being trapped inside a decrepit body.
That’s our past and present, though, not our future. Medical breakthroughs are happening at exponential speeds. Replacement organs are already being printed, cybernetics is replacing prosthetics, and medical nanotechnology is a hairs-breadth from actualization. You don’t have to agree with the philosophical underpinnings of transhumanism to see that the next 10, 20, 50 years will see some astounding medical breakthroughs that will bring in an era of extended lifespans for many people.
I don’t think that as a fairly healthy 46 year old, who has the privileges of being (somewhat) middle class and living in a (somewhat) first-world country, it’s unreasonable to believe that I can live another 100 years. My health takes after my father’s side of the family, who all live well into their 90s if they don’t get cut down by cigarettes or liquor or war. What’s another 50 years to that? Not much, really.
Here’s the real issue, then: what would you do with 100 years?
Forty-six years has been a lifetime already for me, seeing amazing change in the world around me as well as living through several personal traumas and at least three different careers. The deaths of my parents and the invention of the Internet & World Wide Web are two vastly different markers in my life, both important in profoundly life-changing ways. Given those kinds of cataclysmic events, I’m excited and apprehensive about the future.
On this first day of 2016, I figure I am looking down the road to 2115. One hundred years. That’s more than twice what I already have under my belt. It’s an enlightening perspective. What am I going to DO with all this time on my hands?
Learn. Explore. Travel. Break out of the limitations I have chained myself with for the last 40 years. That’s enough of that, I think! I don’t know what form it will all take until I’m there living it, but I plan to continue the theme of “change for the better” that I’ve been on for the last 5 years. I’m going to make that bucket list and make plans based on my dreams (instead of my fears). I’m not on the downhill run, I haven’t even made it halfway. I have so much dancing, traveling, drawing, writing, and loving to do!
When I hit 140 years old, which will be in 2110, I want to spend what time I have left then looking back on a life I would envy now.
