In the wake of Robin Williams' death, I recall seeing a statistic floating around which expressed that seniors were the age group with the highest rates of suicide. A quick fact check shows that in the US, those aged 85 and up were the most likely to die by suicide in 2023. As I become older with each passing year, I've become curious why this is the case.
When you are young, you have all these hopes and aspirations and a long runway of potential to fulfill them. Angst comes from having all the ability in the world but none of the freedom. The clock ticks but you don't hear it. It's hope that keeps you going, anything you haven't done yet is because you haven't had the chance to, constrained by a lack of resources and obligations that weren't decided by you. When you're older, you develop the retrospective to compare all the goals and dreams you've had for yourself to your lived experience. Your health and cognitive ability have likely been on the decline, so desire to achieve outstanding goals only breeds disappointment. The ticking of the clock becomes a pervasive sound beating on your eardrums.
Hope is a powerful engine. Your woes become overshadowed by the possibility that things don't always have to be this way, like glimpses of sun escaping beneath a blanket of clouds. But when you age, your woes become metastatic - you aren't getting any younger or healthier or stronger, and that's by design, the natural trajectory of existence. Your best days are behind you and each passing day is likely to be the best you'll have from here on out. You are consumed by the familiarity of grief from constant loss and a changing world around you that you don't understand. The window of opportunity for all your hopes and unaccomplished dreams collapses into a singularity.
I'm not saying that I am anywhere close to reaching this point, nor has it been fully internalized in my mind. I have the privilege of being able to speculate from a fifty year distance as a neutral observer. However, the more I think about this phenomenon and find myself relating to parts of it, the more aware I am of my own mortality and all that I have yet to accomplish in my life. The more it is viscerally apparent my wasted potential and unachieved desires. And yet, I sit here, yet another day conversing into the void, paralyzed by inaction and fears of risk. Perhaps tomorrow something will click in my head, and then begins the rest of my life.