What do you mean with being terminally ill? Statistically speaking your body will give up at 80 years of age. This is without any special condition like cancer at a young age. You can calculate how long you would have left.
When planning your life you better take into account that you only have so many years left and even fewer productive years. Once you are over 25 you can slowly feel how things decay if you reach 40, 50, 60, 70 it goes downhill faster and faster. There may be dozens of years where nothing bad happens and then there are some weeks where your biological age increases by 10 years and it never really gets back to the level where you have been for so long. No matter what you do, no matter how healthy you are, how much care you take of yourself, one day it will hit you, too.
You are writing like a depressed person. I think age is cool patina, you can get wiser, learn to meditate, i love old peoples wisdom and how they get easily emotional, i have upgraded my health several times since my twenties where i didn't eat as healthily as today, i sleep better, i have understood my bodily rhythms, my emotional life is amazing compared to when i was younger.
I know people who who's always had health issues and i have a grandmother who is 96, she loves her plants and her iPad, always tell me about all the books she's reading, the things she's seen on the internet, she cries with joy when she sees her grandkids and still sees her friends regularly. That's how diverse life is.
Your perspective is one of western youth supremacy, in many other cultures being older can be a privilege, you gain something, doors close but others open. That's how it's always been.
I'm in my 50s, and while my body is definitely not as functional in a raw sense as it was 25 years ago, my overall satisfaction with life has never been higher. I know that over the next 30+ years my body will start to fail in more substantial ways, and if I'm unlucky, so will my mind. But that's fine. There's a whole lot of possible awesome between now and then. And even the 'then' will probably not be so bad as to negate the awesome of that time.
My pleasure. I think we are pretty much biologically encoded to "enjoy" keeping stuff, using it, not throwing things away, and enjoying the different ages like seasons.
This is also why i love my old computer, my old scratched up cellphone, a beautiful old car that still runs fine, - the structural integrity of things that has served more than their purpose. I love them even more than "new things". It just feels good to use them on a visceral level.
It's a kind of mindfulness and appreciation for things like the beauty of the stone that has been rounded by the seawater over millennia, or your old trusty body that has more wrinkles but also works like biological magic if you really think about it.
Another iconic "older gentleman" i have met was a meditation teacher in his 80's in SF, still incredibly lucid, still thinking about science, reality dreams and meditation, experimenting pretty much everyday with "being alive" and sharing it with his community.
I don't find your view and threatripper's view to be contradictory. Nobody is perfectly optimized in all categories all the time, so even as the maxima decays, one can find areas to enjoy improving. Still, that does not negate the fact that the maxima is decreasing. Being aware of aging gives the activities an extra edge that being young does not give.
We can argue that it doesn't make sense the part of the phrase about being terminally will. We can argue that it doesn't make sense to be shot to a black hole, because op will not be able to do it. We could argue that it doesn't make sense because of the environmental impact of starting to shoot people to black holes...
Or we could just enjoy the poetic meaning of it, dream it could be possible and imagine how it would be.
The parent used terminally ill to mean; knowing he was going to die; we all know we are going to die, it's just a matter of how soon. We are all terminally ill.
When planning your life you better take into account that you only have so many years left and even fewer productive years. Once you are over 25 you can slowly feel how things decay if you reach 40, 50, 60, 70 it goes downhill faster and faster. There may be dozens of years where nothing bad happens and then there are some weeks where your biological age increases by 10 years and it never really gets back to the level where you have been for so long. No matter what you do, no matter how healthy you are, how much care you take of yourself, one day it will hit you, too.