What Happens When We Cure It All?
I’ve made a resolution to myself to start thinking about the future, in the abstract sense. Like a lot of nerds, I’m a hopeless romantic for the future, because the future is where all the cool stuff comes from. And one thing that’s been really arresting is the forward march of medicine, not in the scientific sense, but in the everyday sense.
About a year or so ago, my wife, not in so many words, told me I was fat. She was right; I was 250. She wanted us to do something about our collective health. So, as I fancy myself the world’s okayest hubby, I did some research which boils down to “Your wife will have an easier time of it if you get off your fat ass too.”
A year or so later, my body generally vacillates between 218 and 223, and I’m still technically fat according to the terrible BMI system, but I’ve gotten the pounds off, largely thanks to home exercise machines and eating more plants. I still have plenty of bad habits but I’m slowly chipping away at them; eating less meat in general, eating more lean protein instead of beef, eating more vegetables, walking more. I count calories. And the thing is, I’m not alone.
While there’s plenty of B.S. on the shelves of your average Whole Foods, compare American eating and exercise habits now to them even twenty years ago and there are some striking results. We’re drinking less soda, exercising more, listening to doctors. The hottest fad is fitness tricks as a workout. We’re doing what doctors have dreamed of for years, paying attention to medical research and acting on it.
And there are other breakthroughs coming, most importantly in diagnostics. The Tri-Corder X-Prize has two contenders, both of which promise to quietly change medicine by making doing a basic physical something you can do at home and file with your doctor. Instead of going to a physical every six months or a year, we’ll pee in a cup, blow in a tube, prick a finger, run the numbers, and send them to the doctor. We’re teaching AIs to recognize skin cancer and spot traces of illness on our breath. In twenty years, medicine will look totally different and we’ll barely have noticed.
But it raises a fairly important question; sooner or later, between modern medicine, which is making staggering breakthroughs every day, and our own desire to not die, we may not cure death, but we may cure almost everything else. Every tumor will be nipped in the bud, every would-be hardened artery will be fought with salads and exercise. And what then?
I bring this up because we’re already shifting our “health span,” basically how long we can go around without needing regular care, later and later. A guy my age, right now, should plan to retire at 72. I’m skeptical it’s going to stay there; it will probably be pushed later and later the more I age. I’m not going to be surprised if, by the time I hit 72, I’m told “Oh, no, that was back when we were primitive apes poking at slides. It’s 80, now.”
That’s going to have some serious social implications, some positive, some negative. Boomers clinging to their jobs is an enormous problem depressing wages right now. What happens when the Millennials like me turn out to be clinging to jobs when we were supposed to be dodging coffins in Arizona?
Of course, that’s a good forty years in the future. Then again, saying that out loud makes me feel slightly ridiculous. In my time on earth so far, medical science has advanced more than at any point in human history. Granted it hasn’t all been awesome, but the idea that we’re done reshaping how we survive is ridiculous. If anything, the really weird medical shit is still tuning up with the orchestra. So a better question might not be when I can expect to retire, but whether I’ll just have to get a new career to kill time with the sixty years I wasn’t supposed to have.
