Real Biological Clock Is You're Going to Die

Summary

In April, in a small town on a small island in a small string of islands trailing down from the main part of Japan, the world’s then-oldest person died. Nabi Tajima was 117 years old—the last surviving human being born in the 19th century. Maybe the year 1900 sounds far away, to you. It comes closer. My father was born in 1940. Right now, I am 47 years old. Everyone who was 47 years old when my father was born is now dead. All of them. That entire group of middle-aged people, who made up the adult world when my father was a child, is gone. My father is dead, now, too. He smoked, and it shortened his life. But I lived with him, grew up with him. I was an adult with him. We drank coffee at the dining room table together, read the newspaper, talked on the phone. He sat and talked with my firstborn son when he was little. He held my second-born, as a baby, while he could. The older boy remembers him. The younger boy is seven now. When my father was a boy of seven, Nabi Tajima was 47. I keep sliding the numbers around, and as I do, they shove each other out of the way. The people don’t all fit. *** Twelve years ago, I had not thought about any of this at all. I was 35. My wife would soon be pregnant, for the first time. We had dated for a good long while, been engaged for a good long while, been married for a good long while. We had bought a house in the suburbs and then we had sold it and moved overseas. It was all a sensibly paced series of life events, at appropriate-seeming times. It did not occur to me, in any real way, that as we did this, we were spending down a limited resource. In our social world, in our cultural class, at our point in history, people are brought up to take the opposite view, to structure their lives as if time were something a person accumulated. One is wary of getting married too soon, of having children too young. Adulthood is a condition to enter cautiously and gradually. From certain angles, this breeds disdain—penniless millennials eating...