A good plan

One aspect of life that’s become a definite improvement due to international competition is the quality of our automobiles. We can comfortably expect to drive most cars for 200,000 miles. That wasn’t true until around the turn of the 21st century.

Let’s look back 100 years or so. A new car lasted, on average, 25,750 miles and was 6.5 years old. Maintenance schedules requiring lubrication to keep the moving parts functioning were standard responsibility of car owners. That’s another good example of the idiocy of a newly popular aphorism “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” which completely discounts preventive maintenance, of anything. Much better is an older quip: “A stitch in time saves nine.”

But our current expectation of 200,000-mile car life still has some predictable common mid-life 100,000-mile breakdowns: the suspensions have fluid leaks from aged seals, while tires don’t have as many flats they still have to be rotated regularly and also replaced, water pumps, transmissions, batteries, alternators… OK,OK, stop. What’s going on in this column? Is this Brian’s automotive repair tips?

Nope. But I’m starting to get the message. Every time I make a plan to stop writing about aging, I run into someone who says they enjoy my columns. Then they add: “especially the ones about aging.” So I’m going to compromise. This is officially my last column about aging. As of right now, that word is no longer in my vocabulary. From now on that concept will be referred to as Living Longer, which is a more positive way to express the same thing.

Obviously, cars offer a solid analogy to us. To our health and fitness. Our health is susceptible to the equivalent of those 100,000-mile breakdowns and our fitness represents the regular maintenance which equips us with what we need to deal with those predictable issues of living longer (see, doesn’t that sound better than the word I’m never using again?). A hundred or so years ago when cars in the U.S. lasted an average of only 25,750 miles, the average human life expectancy was only 47. Forty-seven! Difficult to believe, but true. Much better preventive maintenance for us in the form of protecting our moving parts through exercise, surgeries that can effectively replace worn-out parts, vaccinations that eliminated many childhood diseases (25 percent of all children died before the age of 10), improved sanitation… today’s average lifespan is 79.5 years.

But. We must expect and accept and adapt to those common breakdowns as we live longer. They are not a sign of an inevitable downhill slide. They are part of what we deal with to live a longer, fuller life. And if we take good care of ourselves along the way, we’re in a much better position to handle those predictable challenges when they surface.

I don’t know much about the internal combustion engine, but I do know a bit about the fascinating human body. Almost every day I wake up with a question about it for my curious mind to research. I plan to keep learning increasingly more as I do what I can to continue living longer. Sounds like a good plan. Hope you join me.