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Ageing & Growing Old

Are you growing older?

  • Yes, I am

    Votes: 82 61.7%
  • No, I'm getting younger

    Votes: 28 21.1%
  • Sorry, I don't understand the question

    Votes: 16 12.0%
  • I'm a Mod; I think adding silly polls to chat threads is pointless

    Votes: 7 5.3%

  • Total voters
    133
How can old people not even figure out how to read a credit card? It's a piece of plastic with numbers on it. It's been around for decades.
 
How can old people not even figure out how to read a credit card? It's a piece of plastic with numbers on it. It's been around for decades.
Because some of us only needed a credit/debit card once we had retired - and that, under sufferance. Meanwhile, we carried on as we usually did, with money in our wallet and a cheque account...
 
Because some of us only needed a credit/debit card once we had retired - and that, under sufferance. Meanwhile, we carried on as we usually did, with money in our wallet and a cheque account...
A lot of my elderly customers use a debit card very reluctantly. Many still go to the Post Office and draw out their pension in cash and only use that throughout the week. They may well have a bank account for savings, but not need a card for that account. They also won't use the contactless function and, if they do, their card is wrapped in baking foil in their wallets, against all those thieves with card readers running through crowds.
 
"You can tell you're getting old when the junk of your youth becomes the collectors pieces of the present..."
Jack Hargreaves.
Here he discusses this, in fine form.
 
A wonderful old salt!

One of the last surviving Wren officers to have served throughout World War Two has released a book about her experiences.

Christian Lamb, 101, the daughter of an admiral, joined the Women's Royal Naval Service in 1939. She was in London during the Blitz, helped to plan the D-Day landings from Churchill's war rooms and later became a naval wife. She described her war work as "very, very exciting but very, very secret".

She said she did not speak of her key role in the conflict "for about 50 years".

"After Dunkirk, Churchill spoke and made marvellous speeches about 'we will fight on beaches, we will fight on the hills, we will never surrender. And it summed up exactly how I felt. I always knew we would never surrender," she said.

Mrs Lamb was holding promotional interviews at the Savoy Hotel, where she spent her wedding night in December 1943. ...

Since the war, Mrs Lamb has become a noted expert on the history of plants, and has been heard on BBC Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time.

She said she has no more ambitions to fulfil and, after the publication of Beyond the Sea: A Wren at War, plans to write books that "are only of interest to myself". ...

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-58271337
 
Our Mum served in the WRNS, during hostilities.

She mentioned about mapping rooms within the cliffs at Dover, and a little bit about Bletchley Park - but it was all in passing that She mentioned it.

Here She is being given the once over, Leading WRN Doreen Sherratt...
thumbnail_008.jpg
 
The U.S. government has lowered the life expectancy in the U.S. by one year because of covid.

For males 76 to 75 years, and females 78 to 77 years.

Like in the original movie “ Blade Runner “, I have past my expiration date, holy crap !
 
The U.S. government has lowered the life expectancy in the U.S. by one year because of covid.
For males 76 to 75 years, and females 78 to 77 years.
Like in the original movie “ Blade Runner “, I have past my expiration date, holy crap !
The best way to avoid spoilage and maintain freshness is to stay cool ... :cool2:
 
:omr:
Newly published research indicates certain higher-level cognitive capabilities seem to improve into advanced age rather than declining as widely assumed.
Some Key Mental Abilities Seem to Improve as We Get Older, Proving Aging Isn't All Bad

... As our brains inevitably grow older, some of our mental power is destined to fade, like spatial visualization or our mind's processing speed. Yet research has found there are other mental abilities that can improve with time, such as vocabulary and verbal comprehension.

New research among 702 participants aged 58 to 98 has now identified two fundamental brain functions that seem to get stronger as we get older.

The study had participants complete an Attention Network Test (ANT), whereby volunteers are shown a central arrow and two flanking arrows on a computer screen and asked to press a button corresponding to the central arrow's orientation as fast as they can. ...

Comparing the response times of all their participants and controlling for a variety of confounding factors, researchers found older volunteers were not as good at staying vigilant in the task. ...

That said, when it came to cues that shifted the brain's attention to look at a particular point on the screen, older people seemed to be better at orienting their attention as they aged, and this was true right up until quite old age. ...

The older the individual, the better they also tended to be at canceling out distracting or conflicting cues that appeared on screen – a skill that improved at least until a person's mid-to-late 70s.

The researchers were testing participants' brain processes associated with alerting (being prepared to adapt to new information), orienting (shifting the brain's resources to specific locations in space), and executive inhibition (blocking out distractions to focus on something). ...

The current research suggests older individuals might be slower to respond to novel situations while driving a vehicle, but they are better at staying focused and orienting their attention where needed on the road. ...

This ability to control one's attention is considered a higher-order brain function, and while the authors are not suggesting all executive functions remain intact or even improve in a person's 70s, it seems at least some do. ...

"These results are amazing, and have important consequences for how we should view aging," says neuroscientist Michael Ullman from Georgetown University.

"People have widely assumed that attention and executive functions decline with age, despite intriguing hints from some smaller-scale studies that raised questions about these assumptions. But the results from our large study indicate that critical elements of these abilities actually improve during aging, likely because we simply practice these skills throughout our life."

The findings run contrary to a dozen or so other tests that have found aging impacts all three aspects of attention.

But as the authors of the current study point out, these previous trials had relatively small sample sizes and often failed to control for other factors, like sex and education. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/aging-isn-t-all-bad-some-key-mental-abilities-improve-as-we-get-older
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract from the published research report ...

Verssimo, J., Verhaeghen, P., Goldman, N. et al.
Evidence that ageing yields improvements as well as declines across attention and executive functions.
Nat Hum Behav (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01169-7

Abstract
Many but not all cognitive abilities decline during ageing. Some even improve due to lifelong experience. The critical capacities of attention and executive functions have been widely posited to decline. However, these capacities are composed of multiple components, so multifaceted ageing outcomes might be expected. Indeed, prior findings suggest that whereas certain attention/executive functions clearly decline, others do not, with hints that some might even improve. We tested ageing effects on the alerting, orienting and executive (inhibitory) networks posited by Posner and Petersen’s influential theory of attention, in a cross-sectional study of a large sample (N = 702) of participants aged 58–98. Linear and nonlinear analyses revealed that whereas the efficiency of the alerting network decreased with age, orienting and executive inhibitory efficiency increased, at least until the mid-to-late 70s. Sensitivity analyses indicated that the patterns were robust. The results suggest variability in age-related changes across attention/executive functions, with some declining while others improve.

SOURCE: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01169-7
 
A good innings!

The UK's oldest person living with a heart transplant has said he thinks about his donor's family nearly every day as he celebrates his 90th birthday.

Ted Warner had the surgery at the Royal Papworth Hospital, Cambridgeshire, in August 1990, and was only expected to live for eight more years. Mr Warner, from Leicestershire, is holding a belated birthday celebration on Sunday after turning 90 in June.

"It's all possible because of my donor," he said. "I wrote a letter to their family many years ago and had a little bit of contact, but then they moved with no forwarding address and I could no longer reach them, but that's OK because it must have been so tough for them and what they were going through. I think about them almost every single day, even now. Especially now. You can't ever put into words how kind, generous and unselfish he and his family are for donating his heart to somebody he doesn't know."

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-58361917
 
A good innings!

The UK's oldest person living with a heart transplant has said he thinks about his donor's family nearly every day as he celebrates his 90th birthday.

Ted Warner had the surgery at the Royal Papworth Hospital, Cambridgeshire, in August 1990, and was only expected to live for eight more years. Mr Warner, from Leicestershire, is holding a belated birthday celebration on Sunday after turning 90 in June.

"It's all possible because of my donor," he said. "I wrote a letter to their family many years ago and had a little bit of contact, but then they moved with no forwarding address and I could no longer reach them, but that's OK because it must have been so tough for them and what they were going through. I think about them almost every single day, even now. Especially now. You can't ever put into words how kind, generous and unselfish he and his family are for donating his heart to somebody he doesn't know."

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-58361917

Oh my goodness, for some reason this story warms me right down to my very sou.l.

What a great story, I wish there were more like this out there. Thanks for sharing, Ramonmercao. :)
 
I think this can fit in this thread.

Call An Ambulance, But not fOr MeE


The gun could just as easily be swapped out for pepper spray or something like it. :D
 
A elderly friend of my wife is losing her battle with cancer and it is sad because she was such an active family person.

Since her bones will not make make red blood cells, I assume her time is limited.

So, if you knew you only have a few weeks to live, what would you do.

I don’t know.

Would one take a vacation, or eat everything you ever wanted to eat, or go a long drunk with alcohol ?

Would one go on a spending craze ?

So far, all this person has done is arranged her funeral plans.
 
A elderly friend of my wife is losing her battle with cancer and it is sad because she was such an active family person.

Since her bones will not make make red blood cells, I assume her time is limited.

So, if you knew you only have a few weeks to live, what would you do.

I don’t know.

Would one take a vacation, or eat everything you ever wanted to eat, or go a long drunk with alcohol ?

Would one go on a spending craze ?

So far, all this person has done is arranged her funeral plans.
I think she has the right idea and knows that wasting energy and time on what are really frivolities won't help matters! I'm always puzzled, by the way, why people are always described as having a "battle with cancer." Nobody ever uses that phrase with other equally, or sometimes a lot worse, illnesses. It always seems to be personalised, if that's the right term.

None of us know how long we have left, anyway...
 
I do know of a woman - a friend of my parents - whose doctor concluded this most-unwanted consultation with the announcement that she could finally smoke and drink as much as she liked.

The battle was lost.

A few weeks earlier, she had returned from a holiday-in-the-sun so deeply-tanned that we did not recognize her!

Moderation had not been on the agenda for years. Hard to say which bad habit got her in the end.

If any! She had a similar diagnosis to my mother, who had no self-destructive habits; she had died the year before!

I don't know if Freda smoked and drank away her last months or not but Death was not long-in-coming after the news that she could! :(
 
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My uncle died of emphysema and in his last few months resumed his smoking habit, reasoning the worst had happened and he wasn't going to get worse. But it can't have been the easiest of ways to go, making your symptoms as bad as possible before leaving.
 
I have often contemplated the question of "what would you do if". My very honest answer to myself is that I would continue to live as I do. If I haven't lived as I really wanted to, a couple of weeks is not going to change my behaviour. Not a depressing thought, just content with my life.
 
I have often contemplated the question of "what would you do if". My very honest answer to myself is that I would continue to live as I do. If I haven't lived as I really wanted to, a couple of weeks is not going to change my behaviour. Not a depressing thought, just content with my life.

I wouldn't have anything epic in mind either because I did everything I have ever wanted to do already. I might spend money on frivolous things, like take out/delivery from my favorite restaurants, wait, I already do that to. :chuckle:
 
If any! She had a similar diagnosis to my mother, who had no self-destructive habits; she had died the year before!
As with Alan Rickman and David Bowie, who lived very different lifestyles but died around the same time and age of a similar form of cancer.
 
I have often contemplated the question of "what would you do if". My very honest answer to myself is that I would continue to live as I do. If I haven't lived as I really wanted to, a couple of weeks is not going to change my behaviour. Not a depressing thought, just content with my life.
If I make it to my eighties or more I might give heroin a try. I'm actually semi-serious about this, figuring what the hell...!
 
If I make it to my eighties or more I might give heroin a try. I'm actually semi-serious about this, figuring what the hell...!
Psychedelics could be interesting as well. Psych Pensioners. I’d quite like to find a liberty cap supplier now for occasional use. Haven’t done them for decades - don’t think I can be arsed to go & pick ‘em as per decades ago.
 
Psychedelics could be interesting as well. Psych Pensioners. I’d quite like to find a liberty cap supplier now for occasional use. Haven’t done them for decades - don’t think I can be arsed to go & pick ‘em as per decades ago.
They always used to make me vomit, always had a good trip afterwards though, blotter LSD was always preferable though :pop:
 
A growing number of "grandfluencers" (social media 'influencers' aged 70+) are having success in making connections and attracting followers of all ages.
Social media’s 70-up ‘grandfluencers’ debunking aging myths

Joan MacDonald’s health was in shambles at age 71. She was overweight and on numerous medications with high cholesterol, rising blood pressure and kidney trouble.

Her daughter, a fitness coach, warned that she’d wind up an invalid if she didn’t turn things around. She did, hitting the gym for the first time and learning to balance her diet with the help of a brand new tool, an iPhone.

Now 75, MacDonald is a hype beast for health with a bodybuilder’s physique and 1.4 million loyal followers on Instagram.

She’s among a growing number of “grandfluencers,” folks 70 and up who have amassed substantial followings on social media with the help of decades-younger fans. ...

“It’s so rare to find someone her age being able to do all these things,” said one of her admirers, 18-year-old Marianne Zapata of Larchmont, New York. “It’s just such a positive thing to even think about.”

Both aspirational and inspirational, older influencers are turning their digital platforms into gold.

MacDonald has paid partnerships with the sportswear and supplement brand Women’s Best, and the stress-busting device Sensate. And she just launched her own health and fitness app not so many years after learning how to use digital technology herself.

On TikTok, four friends who go by @oldgays — the youngest is 65 — have 2.2 million followers, including Rihanna. They have an endorsement deal with Grindr as they delight fans with their clueless answers to pop culture questions.

Others focus on beauty and style, setting up Amazon closets with their go-to looks and putting on makeup tutorials live. Lagetta Wayne, at 78, has teens asking her to be their grandmother as she tends to her vegetables and cooks them up ... on TikTok. ...

Most people ages 50 and up use technology to stay connected to friends and family, according to a 2019 survey by AARP. ...

Just 37% of those 70 and older used social media daily in 2019, the research showed. Since coronavirus struck, older creators have expanded their horizons beyond mainstay Facebook and gotten more voracious, often driven by the growing number of feeds by people their own age, said Alison Bryant, senior vice president for AARP. ...
FULL STORY: https://apnews.com/article/technolo...social-media-ad807323409a8a0065fcd58e3f710eca
 
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