Autor: Julio Cesar Tafforelli | Publicado: 2014-07-10T12:48:00-07:00


    
      Greater Personal Wealth Makes Being Old Seem More Tolerable
    

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  Until you get to the point of retirement or incapacity, being older
 tends to mean being wealthier and more influential in your community: 
you are earning, saving, and interacting with people, and that adds up 
over the years. In the first stages of aging, when all you have suffered
 are comparatively minor pains, dysfunctions, and losses, being 
financially secure and well-connected in comparison to earlier years is a
 significant compensation. If you ask people in their 40s whether they 
would trade their present security, influence, and network for the flush
 (and lack of resources) of youth, then you might see some careful 
weighing of options.



Life is a progression
 from a place of time, health, and no resources to a place of resources 
but neither health nor time, and these line items are valued accordingly
 at each stopping point along the way. So we see people spending vast 
sums on medical technology in the last stages of life, not just because 
it is enormously costly to try to compensate for or patch over the end of aging
 with the techniques available today, but more importantly because these
 people consider such an expense worth it. What were unthinkable sums 
for the poorer, younger version of an individual are spent on obtaining a
 little more time or small gains in freedom from pain and disability. 
The future of rejuvenation biotechnology will liberate us from these 
cruel calculations, and that goal is precisely why it is important.


How people perceive their own well-being depends in part on wealth: 
up to a level of diminishing returns the more you have the better you 
feel about life. So the natural progression of increasing wealth with 
age is probably one (perhaps minor) contributing cause of a level of disinterest in work on lengthening healthy life
 and creating rejuvenation. People are moved to action by 
dissatisfaction and discomfort to a greater degree than by ideals, I 
think. If you are more or less comfortable where you are, and none your 
neighbors are one-upping you with those newfangled rejuvenation 
therapies, then why make the effort?


Researchers here are putting some numbers to the relationship between
 wealth, health, and how people feel about being old. Their results 
suggest much as above, that wealth - and all that comes with it - is 
compensatory, but only up to a point. Which is something to think about 
while you are in your 30s and 40s and on top of the world.



Frailty, financial resources and subjective well-being in later life




Quote:
Though frailty status has
 recently been linked to poorer quality of life, the impact of income on
 this relationship has not previously been investigated. Data from a 
population-based panel study, the English Longitudinal Study of Aging, on 3225 participants aged 65-79 years were analyzed cross-sectionally.



Those with greater financial resources reported better subjective well-being with evidence of a "dose-response" effect.
 The poorest participants in each frailty category had similar 
well-being to the most well-off with worse frailty status. Hence, while 
the association between frailty and poorer subjective well-being is not 
significantly impacted by higher levels of wealth and income, financial 
resources may provide a partial buffer against the detrimental 
psychological effects of frailty.