JULY 2025 SULLYGRAM:  Statisticians predict the number of centenarians will hit 18 million by 2100. US Census says they’ll quadruple by the early 2050s. Bingo! You could be one of ‘em. Me too! Biggest obstacle may be declining by the power of suggestion and geezer stereotype. Granted, I regularly strain stuff, but that’s usually because my reflexes remain lightning fast – creating a sort of whiplash of ligaments and muscles. Doesn’t seem to have affected the vitals.  I just have to focus on slowing down, blending in with the ambient pace. Put myself in sync with the world of muggles. Given that my whole life has been spent OUT of sync, that’s a social plus. It also goes against my ‘druthers. I like being irrelevant (and irreverent). Finding a third place to stand lets you be objective, unaligned, free.

One of the big truths that sneaks up on us about life is just how much our feelings of relevance depends on the memories of other people. It’s a slow recognition. The first death of someone close to you, perhaps in your childhood, is a jolt. You feel bad, and it seems as if something has been taken from you. But the deceased lives on in a sense, because you are their witness. By middle-age, death casts a shadow on your personal context. Each acquaintance who dies takes some relevance out of your life; or to put it another way, a little of you dies along with each passing of a person whose knowledge contained you. You begin to realize that all you are and all you’ve done are vanishing with the passing of witnesses. Relevance…the accumulations that make us germane gradually slip beyond the veil on little cat’s feet.

Ergo, if you live long enough, the attrition of those who substantively knew you will leave you totally without context, a fossil of the past. The victory party for the “last one standing” has only one RSVP.

We talk about life as if it’s a non-stop buildup, but in reality, it’s like the phases of the moon visible because of reflected light from the sun. Furthermore, we are already dying while we are waxing, losing the highs of our hearing by age six. By mid-life, things that were formative are long gone over the event horizon. Waning decades seal the deal, shadows encroach, nibling away at our crescent of reflected light. The only way to beat it – if you so choose – is to forget about mirroring light and start gathering knowledge first hand from the changing world. Illuminate yourself with relevance sourced from that which is newly viable! Creativity enhances enlightenment; so do philosophy and perspective. Above all, curiosity, imagination and intelligent communication will keep you radiant. Dig your heels into the sands of time, and your relevance will fill with water on the incoming tide. Your footprints will simply fade with the next generation’s wave of cultural cleansing.

Consider what the quality of your life will be if – like it or not – you’re in that future wave…the one of countless centenarians soon to arrive. Or the wave of many millions more in their 90s? What could be more unfortunate than to prematurely end up with a body that declines from disuse and a brain that surrenders to neglect? In a way, we become victims of the very goals we set early in life. Whereas we grew up problem-solving, earning a living and securing our material needs, suddenly we retire those capabilities as if they are a suit of clothes instead of our flesh and blood. We spend our lives working toward easy living, pensions, leisure time, only to find that Easy Street has no use for the skills that got us there.

Like moths to flames, we are betrayed by the very thing that attracts us. Moths…a good metaphor (light again, the phases of the moon, the light at the end of the tunnel). Called phototaxis, moths instinctively maintain the same angle of orientation toward the moon that evolution taught them. But artificial light sources trick them into much tighter orbits around lethal human devices. Similarly, the instinctive lure of easy living becomes the siren song that prematurely dooms our physical and mental capabilities. We “retire.” We hire others. We rely on the complex chains that we were once functioning parts of. And like the moths that could not adapt to the relatively recent onset of an illuminated human world, we struggle with the relatively recent phenomena of retirement and leisure time. We atrophy, wither, become vestigial. We may fight it physically – if only for cosmetic reasons – dieting, going to gyms, taking aerobics classes, quaffing supplements. But as motivation flags, we are ripe for sitting life out. In such an age of distractions, hijacking by spectatorship is already in our blood. Entertainment, sports, news – we surrender our minds, pick allegiances, live vicariously.

Retirement means no rules. Yet when we are told endlessly how we should age, we age. Creative thought, objective reasoning, open-mindedness, tend to ebb away with the ditching of the rat race. But that vacuum demands to be filled. Myths of aging rush in, psychosomatic ailments amplify, boredom disguises itself as a lack of energy and motivation. Even sex and sexuality may falter for want of mental stimulation! False angles of light. The power of suggestion is a magnifier that shuts us down far sooner than what nature permits. 

…the good news is that if any of this makes sense to you as an individual – if you’re aware of it – you have the power to turn black-and-white living into Technicolor at any age. You aren’t an actuarial. Candidate for centenarian or not, the sooner you counter the threats to physical and mental optimum, the better your odds for purposeful longevity.

Start with identifying the things that own you. People, habits, routines. Like gang signs, they define your territory physically and mentally. Some are keepers; some are disconnects. Honestly sort that out, and you’ve already done the hard part. Once you nix the negatives from your mind, you can be like a kid on Saturday morning waking up to a sunny day of endless possibilities. Go with it! Scrutinize the world like a child rather than an adult. Instead of feeling lost or overwhelmed, seize the newness of things at your fingertips. Celebrate the wonders and ask questions the way your awakening mind asked as you grew up. The map before you is blank, awaiting whatever stimulates your imagination. There is so much to feed discovery and passion in this age of information storage and retrieval. We have never been closer to understanding the true dynamics of our ultimate purpose. Reality. Existence. What we call science. What we call religion. I don’t want to get lost in the weeds here, but for thinking people, this is absolutely the most exciting chapter in human history EVER. You don’t have to be a philosopher or an intellectual to take a seat at that table. Surround yourself with what or who can aid and abet. Whether or not you have a foundation for what’s coming at you, the encounters are sure to be inspiring.

As for me, I’ll stick with finding that third place to stand and sharing my passion for perspectives with the love of my life and rare people of any vintage. A pure singularity is all I need. You might think I’m very extroverted, but I’m quite the opposite. I take my cues from quid pro quos, the Golden Rule, and whispers in my dreams. “Play it as it lays,” life says to me. And as I like to reply: when you don’t belong anywhere, you belong everywhere!

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan