Fractal Aging

One characteristic of reaching advanced age is that the patterns have become all too familiar. Not that we know much. Nobody really does. But any effort to dig deeply into the details of something will in old age predictably reveal patterns already encountered numerous times before. That sentiment is echoed in Ecclesiastes 1:9: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.” So how old was Solomon—assuming he dictated his wisdom in advancing age? Wikipedia grants him 80 years but without presenting any evidence for that; the Jewish Virtual Library scatters some dates from which I derive maximally 69. In any case, old enough—especially if you had circa 1,000 wives…

Thinking about this feeling—that “same old” feeling—brings to mind tracing, say, a Mandelbrot or Julia fractal image to ever greater levels of magnification, and while the vistas keep changing and can be beautiful, interesting, even mesmerizing, the patterns remain the same.

For this reason alone—ignoring the fact that with advancing age the body gradual weakens, stiffens, hardens—at my age the notion of extending life beyond the standard three-score and ten or, these days, fourscore, is not all that attractive. And supposing science could deliver augmentations, let me call them, so that we could live to be two hundred, three hundred while yet retaining bodies that function as they do in their late forties, early fifties, why, the prospects would not be all that attractive. That would mean working for many more decades with all that that implies for the ordinary human: layoffs, new managements, reorgs, off-sites, airports, committee-meetings, deadlines, budgets, on and blessed on. That same old would soon take on a quite toxic flavor; life would become quite burdensome. And a feature of that future society would be, it seems to me, that the majority of deaths in that evil future would be by suicide. A sci-fi story lurks here, come to think of it, but, come to thinks of it, I’ve already been there and done that.

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The Julia set image courtesy of Wikipedia, by someone called Eequor. Link.