Reading Notes on "The Price of Longevity" (Part 2)

Part 2 Experience

Chapter 7 Don’t Worry About Tomorrow

We are always obsessed with the sense of control, but we have to learn to accept the loss of control. fact. If you think you are in control of your life and can manipulate it in the direction you choose, then aging is life fighting you because it is not your chosen destination. But if you instead view life as an improvised response to a series of events that happen to you—a response to the objective world. Aging, then, is more like another chapter in a long novel. Unlike previous events, life is always made up of different events, and there are always some events that seem overwhelming. (P135)

Chapter 8 Prepare for Old Age

When enjoying yourself, do not sacrifice your own health or financial security. (P150)

Carl Pillemer of Cornell University elaborated on the difference between "happy despite..." and "happy only when...". The former is the benefit of growing old, or the troubles of youth, and "happy despite" means choosing to be happy, which acknowledges problems but doesn't let them get in the way of contentment. "Only when you will be happy" is to link happiness with external conditions. I will be particularly happy only if I have more money, less pain, and a better spouse or house. "Only when you will be happy" makes people spend a lot of money on lottery tickets or impulse shopping, but it does not really bring any happiness to people. In contrast, Huang Ping did not expect her difficulties to disappear, so she did not link her happiness to the disappearance of her difficulties. She said that when she was young, she thought that immigrating to the United States would solve her problems, but later she discovered that she was just replacing old problems with new ones. Her experience is that happiness is gained by accepting rather than eliminating pain and loss. (P159)

How important is achievement after the age of 80 or 90? In the first year I spent with older people, none of them talked about their career accomplishments—which is surprising considering how much of our lives we spend working or obsessing over work. (P160)

Huang Ping knows how to give up things that were once important to her but are no longer important, and she knows how to choose happiness among all the things she can get. (P166)

Satisfying my false needs was a huge undertaking, but once I started letting go, I was freed to focus on something more rewarding or lasting. It also means I can stop feeling guilty about all the things I feel like I should be doing but don’t. (P166)

Adjust her expectations to the world she faces, rather than against it. This is how she chooses to be happy. (P170)

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Chapter 9 When to strive for treatment and when to give up treatment

Part of John’s happy life is attributed to his ability to remember Shape it into a happy life experience. (P190)

No matter how terrible the surrounding environment is, accepting death is accepting life, and accepting life is living happily. This is John's life experience. (P190)

Chapter 10 Family Relationships in Nursing Homes

Nursing home priorities are to keep the most vulnerable residents alive and healthy while keeping costs down, with safety and efficiency always being prioritized. In the first place. (P192)

We always think that as long as the obstacles to happiness are removed, we can be truly happy, but there are always more obstacles and reasons that make us unhappy now. …It is in the midst of obstacles that we find joy. (P207)

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Chapter 11 Parents are always parents

Life is short, you have to find someone who is truly important and who can make you live well. relationship. (P226)

Chapter 12 The Gift that Will Not Come Again

Facing death, these old people’s answer is: living too long scares them, and death can solve the problem of living. The problem of taking too long. One of their late-life wisdoms was acknowledging that death and aging are part of life. Only young people think they will never die, or that growing old is something that happens to others. (P230)

Research shows that having targets won’t prevent you from developing the hallmark plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s disease, but it can prevent or delay their effects. The researchers explain that having goals creates a "reserve" that allows certain brains to form other pathways to deliver signals and nutrients and continue to function normally. The clearer the goal, the stronger the protection. (P239)

What kind of person you are, you have what kind of needs. (P240)

How can we maintain this state of sobriety throughout our lives without terminal cancer reminding us that life is a gift? How can we train our minds to enjoy this privilege and adventure? This is a question I have pondered over and over again during the year I spent with the elderly. Do we really have to wait until our oncologists say something before we live life to the fullest to the best of our ability? What should be the easiest thing to do - to live like dying is what we try to avoid the most.

(P245)

Jonas wrote in an email: I use the "butterfly effect" theory in my daily life. This is a moral principle and moral responsibility. I must keep in mind that no matter what I do, Whatever you do in one second will affect the next second. Therefore, I try not to do anything negative so that I can best guarantee that the world will be better the next second, or at least not worse. But of course, one positive action of mine may be undermined by 100 negative actions of others, so it may be meaningless, but I still have to follow that principle, you could call it optimism. (P245)

Some people or things seem insignificant, just because we haven’t lived long enough to see their value, or we haven’t experienced enough losses, so we don’t know most of the losses. It can be let go. (P248)

James Joyce's "Ulysses" tells the story of a day in a boring small town, while "War and Peace" spans an era and describes surging passion and spectacular scenes, but does not People can say one is richer than the other, they just see the world in a different way. Whether the lens is a microscope or a telescope, miracles are always in the eyes of the owner. (P249)

The gift the old people gave me is very simple: remind me that time is both limited and surprising. Every day is like Ulysses, both important and ordinary. Every turn has the potential to be surprisingly satisfying or send you to the emergency room. The challenge is figuring out how to live on the road to the bend. (P249)

Whether we are happy or unhappy, time does not matter, but if you miss it, it will never come back. (P250)

Spending time with the old people, I may be closer to the kind of person I was always meant to be. Any pain or fear I had before is still there, but they are now just supporting instruments in my film scores rather than the music itself. (P250)

In his memoir "I Have Nowhere to Go", Jonas talked about standing on the deck of the "General Howze" with 1,341 other displaced people, arriving in New York scene at the time. “We are here to continue the ancient tradition of the early settlers: not to live a better life, but because as exiles and outcasts this is our only escape from certain death,” he said. We did not come to the West to live a better life, nor did we come here to seek adventure. We chose the West and the United States purely out of survival instinct, a cruel physical survival instinct." (P251) < /p>

This seems to me to be a way of looking at old age, or any age: as an unknown and unchosen landscape, full of uncertainty, better than the alternatives. We were all on this cold transport ship, sometimes shivering and seasick, leaving behind the family that had once given us comfort, having our fortunes changed by loss, anxious about what was to come. Bright lights shine ahead of us, and we may grow, or we may wane. Like refugees, we have reason to be afraid: the difficulties lurking ahead are as vast as the land itself. But we will come, scarred but resilient, with all the resources that got us on board in the first place. (P252)

Postscript None of us will live forever

Robert said, "I have never thought about what to do if it rains." He didn't let worries about things that had yet to happen hold him back. (P266)

Even in the storm, you can have a perfect and fulfilling life. These old people are living proof. (P266)

If we live longer, perhaps we have an obligation to live better: wiser, more grateful and forgiving, less revengeful and greedy. All of these will make life better for everyone, especially those who work hard to practice it. (P266)

For many years, I thought that the meaning of life was contained in struggle, and mistakenly thought that relaxation was a kind of escape. Now I am not so sure, and I often want to go back to those years. But, as Jonas said, if you want to be a filmmaker, get a camera.

Behind those words lies confidence and talent that belongs to all of us! (P268)

Finished reading + notes collection on March 10, 2022

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