The thrill is gone. Not.

The rectangularization of morbidity.

It’s not exactly a phrase that glides off one’s tongue, but it’s one that came to me yesterday during an intense pool tabata exercise class. (If you want to know what pool tabata is, shoot me a comment and I’ll be glad to give details.) The instructor was playing music, rather loud music, from a boom box set beside the edge of the pool.  In between huffing and puffing, I found myself singing along to John Cougar Mellancamp’s classic “Jack and Diane,” the refrain of which goes like this:

Oh yeah, life goes on
Long after the thrill of living is gone

And I thought: Right.  That’s what aging has become in America.  It’s about the extension of life in the absence of health and vitality.  It’s about living to 80 or 90 but spending the last ten (if you’re lucky, more if you’re not) years frail, incapacitated, on multiple medications, worried, feeling useless, joyless, disconnected.  It’s about living long after the thrill of living is gone.

I think that’s because our attention has been focused on mitigating the symptoms of illness rather than preventing them, on the extension of lifespan, not healthspan.  Lifespan is the number of years you live.  Healthspan is the number of years you live well.  It’s the number of years you live with the physical stamina to do things that make you and others happy, the mental acuity to take on new challenges, the emotional strength to face challenges with learned optimism.

Increasing healthspan is known as the “rectangularization of morbidity.” It’s when our life-line does not look like a mountain, the physical/ mental peak being at 35 or 40, followed by a slow decline until death. Instead, the graph is “rectangularized,” flattened out.  We hit out peak and then maintain, as long as we can, a long long plateau of health and vitality until the end.   The end is not 15 years in assisted living. The end is a nice quick bout of pneumonia.

When I defined “anti-aging” for myself, when I spent more than a year researching that world and immersing myself in it for the book I wrote (see info on left while excusing this blatant promotion), that’s what I was after.  More years lived well.  More years lived at the top of my game.  More years to huff and puff through pool tabata.