by

John Wright

Old age PTSD? What? Isn't PTSD something associated with soldiers returning home psychologically damaged after enduring life threatening battles? Are those damn spoiled old people looking for more pity? We give them Social Security, SS Disability, Medicare and Medicaid, some even have Pensions, and most often have longer lives than earlier generations, and even senior centers now in which to socialize, and still they aren't happy! And doesn't religion, via a promised afterlife, make them feel better or at least more secure about the future?

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ... Some soldiers get it, some don't, even if they have served together, side by side, in battles. It all comes down to how well we deal with threats to our lives, after the fact of surviving one or more life threatening events. This then is one potential connection where old people might eventually cave in emotionally after "winning" multiple battles against loss of their personal life or in actually losing the lives of those very close emotionally, like their spouse or child or best friend.

But why limit the examination of stress effects to the past? Yes, I want us to examine CTSD and FTSD too! Think Current traumatic stress disorder and Future traumatic stress disorder. We will see as we proceed in this article that all three can easily apply to old people ... and for that matter to younger people who have the misfortune of bad luck or of being poorly wired mentally to deal with stress at any age. Why, yes, genetics really does affect our abilities, our performance, and also our weaknesses. Some win. Some lose. Most of us are somewhere in the middle. But wherever you are in that larger domain you aren't like those outside of your specific domain. Not even close. And then there are the random events outside of your control that impact almost all of your experiences as you live among other people outside your nuclear family. They might be mild, they might be hell, and we never actually know what is coming. So we have current fear of the unknown and fear of future unknowns.

Okay, that was enough diversion down the genetics and probabilities lanes. Time to get back on track. The basic idea is our emotional responses are a combination of what we are mentally combined with what we experience. Or, for the purposes of this article on old people, what we experienced, what we are now experiencing, and what we anticipate experiencing in the future. A three banger for sure! It doesn't have to be us personally either. As the world around us changes, and it certainly does in major ways across, let's say, 75 years, we start to disconnect, as a function of aging (role in life), employment, sense of physical wellbeing, reduction in pleasure felt for previously great experiences (jaded or lack of mental or physical sensitivity, all unwanted). Very little in life stays the same ... except for your inner sense of self, learned when you were a child ... and that same person still occupies your consciousness. How do we adapt to a changing world, changes in demands placed on us, and changing/declining abilities as time goes on? We remember a different world, the one we experienced while growing up, and the feelings when we were young adults experiencing higher education, marriage, careers, children, vacations, plus accumulated wealth for physical pleasure and security.

Here we can see that a young person experiencing various parts of life for the first few times simply thinks that all those experiences, in detail, are reality. Well, that is very likely so for the young person, but not for older people who experienced different realities depending on time in history as well as geographic location and such items as weather, the economy, war or peace, etc. My point is that actual changes in reality that are dealt with earlier in life simply as a matter of course become increasingly difficult as we get older, for we no longer easily adapt to change. Call it fatigue with the act of living, or physical tiredness, a cultural discontinuity, or even boredom, but the result is we increasingly disconnect with the world around us, like it or not. It is true that there are a relatively few notable people who stay tightly involved with their society as they age, and some appear never to retire until they drop dead.

Besides medium term cultural changes, and having established our official lives many miles from our birth places, many of we middle aged people experience returning to our home towns to deal with the deaths of our parents. That means, due to their deaths, that the connection to a significant part of our past is being erased! So not only do we have to deal with direct changes in our present personal lives, we also have to revisit our past and see it wiped out when we become orphans in our home towns ... the places from which we established our basic identity. No, you can't go home anymore to mom or dad. They, and your identity where they lived, are gone, and cannot be recovered. The changes in our lives due to typical parental deaths tend to happen about the same time we become aware of our own fatigue and boredom where we work. Does life ever give us a break? Are we actually able to relax in the knowledge that we have done everything to have an enjoyable and stable life about as good as it can be done? I doubt many of us feel that way. I note here that our financial wounds from providing formal higher education for our children in what is currently in 2023 a hell environment have diminished us financially and in hope for a comfortable retirement. So it is understandable if you dig in, with misery, to work some extra years to build some kind of decent retirement asset or assets.

I note here that most of the retired/older people I have known, including myself, were more than happy to be out of the rat race. As we sense our decline in interest in what we are doing, and the sense at work that we are not valued as we were when younger, it becomes easy to understand why we start looking for a way out from that reality. You might think of that as CTSD and FTSD. There is always the unanswered question ... how much time do I have left? I don't want to work until I die. I want to unload my fears and frustrations regarding employment and the world/people around me. I, uh, need a permanent vacation!

That permanent vacation may start out pleasurably and remain so for a variable number of years. Conversely, given marginal financial preparation for retirement, that same "vacation" can be hell. At just the time you are not valued by potential employers you suddenly need more money just to subsist. Think of that as one form of CTSD, and to a somewhat lesser extent FTSD. The simple truth is that soon after retirement the proverbial chickens come home to roost. Think about the quality of your marriage if you have one. Will your spouse welcome additional time with you when it is sort of forced by lack of a job? How soon might you lose your spouse, on whom you depend emotionally, physically and financially, to either divorce or death? Have you in fact become free of financial responsibility for your own children or even grandchildren? Oh, yes, let's not forget that you may be experiencing a whole lot of physical discomfort due to age related health problems.

To me, the considerations represented in the last paragraph are flat out mandatory to prepare for and to anticipate the need for, long before the fact of you giving up your normal income. I know you now see the breadth and seriousness of each of those CTSD and FTSD subjects. Okay, even if you and your spouse love each other and have plenty of financial resources for retirement, you still have to be realistic regarding how long you might have each other. Worse, with each passing year, one or the other of you is that much closer to not being here, and the remaining person is then in a totally unenviable place ... likely physically, probably financially, certainly emotionally. We get weaker through time, like it or not, so fear of the present and the future is completely sane.

We often hear of physicians having older patients who become seriously depressed with the negative realities of old age. We also learn the only real weapon physicians have to address that depression is anti-depressant medications that, let's be honest, to be effective they must to some extent turn you into a non-responsive zombie. You may or may not feel bad depression anymore. You certainly will not, if medicated with anything potent, be experiencing feeling good about life. The depressed people looking for some sense of belief and empathy and belonging via a support group gain very little ... simply the knowledge that life now sucks for all of them, and that is hardly a mood elevator. But at least someone listens, or appears to listen while they are actually caught up in their own distress and lack of hope for a decent future.

Now here comes the big one ... the personal facing of pending death. Hey, it happens to literally everyone. Some die young, some die quickly, some never even realize as it happens that it would happen, or that the time is now. One thing you can be certain about is that for most of us there will be time spent contemplating the ultimate meaning of death, provided the individual has a reasonable level of intelligence. I think of the subject in this paragraph, our personal demise, as finally hitting the target, the bulls eye, regarding stress in old age. It is time to explore this unpleasant reality. It is time to face not being anywhere, anymore, as a conscious entity.

Barring religious beliefs regarding an afterlife there is a truly deep philosophical consideration of the meaning of not existing. It was easy to accept that we didn't exist until we were, at the least, conceived or perhaps gestating. And contemplating our birth is typically a very deep pleasure, for we came from nothing but random molecules and now we are actually here ... we are real ... who cares how it happened, the joy is we really do exist! Yes, I think, therefore I am. Wow! I'm going to do life and experience all of reality! Of course, we sidestep or hide from the idea that there will come a time when we return to nothingness. Those who would spend a lot of time contemplating death while young are usually considered to be mentally ill. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Though said contemplation certainly doesn't lead to happiness or a sense of security unless one is, in terms of a religion with an afterlife, a true believer, a believer in magic that is free from all of the life limitations known here for all forms of life. Yet, realistically, there isn't any magic that anyone can demonstrate, any time in the past all the way to the present. Faith? Be my guest.

PTSD was bad enough, right? You know your scars well. You wish some of the worst events could have been avoided. But at least you survived. For the moment. But, what the hell! "They've had my whole lifetime to figure out a cure for old age and death and, damn it, they blew it! This isn't fair! The people in charge of society are supposed to fix things! Now what am I supposed to do?" Do? Nothing. You do nothing. You have no power to fix anything that big. And, by the way, no one else does either. Now you have major CTSD and FTSD.

After the temper tantrum it is time to think clearly, if sadly. If the loss of life with no apparent future, ergo nonexistence, is real ... then how am I supposed to feel about life in whatever time I have left? Was all of this meaningless? Nihilists would have you so believe, stating that, no matter what, science tells us that the whole universe will have distributed energy insufficient to raise the temperature even one degree above absolute zero (-273 degrees Kelvin). Their point ... eventual death of everything is simply unavoidable. But, of course, throughout history fools have believed whatever they think they know at their time in history won't change in the future. What foolishness! Myopic tunnel vision.

Well, that didn't help much, did it? CTSD is bad enough. But do you have to address FTSD too? Of course you do. After all, what happens to your consciousness when you die? Does it fall apart as your body rots or is incinerated? Or is it part of some timeless, unknown reality to which we return? Oh, my friend, we simply do not know that answer, but we have no special reason to assume our consciousness will continue any more than that of a squirrel that died a thousand years ago.

Any one of you who have happened to read my book, Destiny, will know exactly where I am headed next in this article. To point, it is the total responsibility of humans to pull themselves out of the reality of death by slowly but surely heading towards immortality. Our next truly big deal is genetic engineering to slow/stop aging and eliminate disease. That is where we must focus our energy, via the physical sciences, until we ultimately achieve physical immortality. No, I said immortality, not immorality!

Wake up and smell the coffee. If we continue to die it is our own fault. Nothingness sucks. But a future of exploring the Universe sounds pretty exciting.