[skybrian]

I agree that it's very useful to prolong the amount of time spent in earlier, healthier stages of life. The treatments described in the New Yorker article sound quite promising.

However, you aren't taking the elderly seriously. It's not "wildly pessimistic" to spend time thinking about what happens after people get beyond that point. This is something that happens to everyone who doesn't die first. It's a normal part of life.

[Retra]

Look, you're the one saying that elderly people are so miserable that we should not prolong their lives.

>It's not "wildly pessimistic" to spend time thinking about what happens after people get beyond that point.

Your thoughts are pessimistic, not the fact that you are thinking. The main purpose of a nursing home is to extend the length of people's lives. If you think this is inhumane, then perhaps you would prefer a crematorium to a nursing home?

There is nothing about extending the life of people who are in a place specifically to have their lives extended that is 'not taking the elderly seriously.'

[skybrian]

You're engaging in one-bit thinking, where things are either one extreme or the other. I didn't say that everyone in a nursing home wants to die! That's something you made up. However, you can find people with very poor health there. Let me quote from the article I linked to:

"In medical jargon, healthy people are “alert and oriented x 3”, which means oriented to person (you know your name), oriented to time (you know what day/month/year it is), and oriented to place (you know you’re in a hospital). My patients who have the sorts of issues I mentioned in the last paragraph are generally alert and oriented x0. They don’t remember their own names, they don’t know where they are or what they’re doing there, and they think it’s the 1930s or the 1950s or don’t even have a concept of years at all. When you’re alert and oriented x0, the world becomes this terrifying place where you are stuck in some kind of bed and can’t move and people are sticking you with very large needles and forcing tubes down your throat and you have no idea why or what’s going on."

It doesn't happen to everyone, but it does happen enough that people who work in health care, or have had to help elderly relatives, or anyone closer to the end of their life needs to think about what to do about it, and set up things like advance directives and medical power of attorney.

There is also the POLST, which is a pink sheet with doctor's orders that terminally ill people put on their refrigerator that tell paramedics not to do CPR (for example). https://polst.org/polst-and-advance-directives/

Although the health care system is usually about extending people's lives, this is not always appropriate. Acknowledging that is just being real about what goes on as people get close to death.