The courageous death of 92-year-old women’s activist Noreen Hewett is a rallying cry, a sea change about death, a Peter Finch moment in Network when he shouts “I’m not going to take this anymore”.
This may be the “I’m as mad as hell” moment that begins to question the longevity industry, and the obsession with superannuating ourselves so we can cruise the Mediterranean until we’re 200.
As such, Hewett’s stance may serve as a touchstone for those who do not want to continue being the poverty-stricken guinea pigs in the longevity experiment in which they did not ask to participate.
Hewett’s ‘no’ to prolonging her already long life inverts the unquestioning assumption that people want to clutch onto life for as long as medically possible so they can eke out 40 years of unfunded existence.
Hewett’s ‘no’ signals that people may begin to insist they do not want to be forced to continue existing so that longevity service providers can avoid litigation.
Financial advisers are caught in this maelstrom of conflicting demands. I’ve had a number of emails from advisers who are running in ever-decreasing circles trying to balance the contradictory demands of clients, the federal government, and the other parties jostling to clamber onto the longevity gravy train.
Another responsibility looks likely to be added to advisers’ purview: discussing their clients’ dying wishes because that view directly affects their living strategies.
In my mother’s living death of 10 years in Alzheimer’s No-Man’s Land, she said to me once in a lucid second that “old age is not all it’s cracked up to be. What’s the point of living till you’re 100 if you can’t walk, can’t remember, can’t look after yourself?”
Last week, as I read Hewett’s inspiring obituary, I was re-watching Charlton Heston’s 1973 dystopian cult classic, Soylent Green, in which Heston discovers the green wafer rations in short supply are actually made of dead people who have chosen assisted death. While I am not suggesting some ghoulish entrepreneur will be listing Soylent Corp Australia Ltd any time soon, someone has to raise the alarm that the contradictions of the geriatric nirvanas promised to us are beginning to collapse under their own weight.
On one hand, an age discrimination commissioner is appointed in NSW and campaigns are run to promote mature workers. On the other hand, ageism is rampant in the private and public sectors.We’re lectured ad nauseum about the urgency of saving for our old age, while simultaneously told our cash hoarding is fuelling the recession we don’t have to have. These contradictions cannot be held together precisely because there cannot be a society in which older people are both discarded and sidelined, while at the same time appropriated for reverential rhetoric about the wisdom of maturity.
Unwittingly, medical science has foisted a secular Faustian wager on the post-modern post-GFC baby boomers who have been threatened with the possibility of living beyond 110 years.
In the classic tales of wagers with the devil, the ending is usually one of two: either the devil wins, or the human somehow outwits the devil who is thus cheated of his soul. But that trickery is always at some cost.
Faust’s wager with Mephistopheles damns Faust no matter what happens in his diabolically-aided search for one moment of bliss. If he does find one such moment, then he serves the devil for eternity. If he does not, then he is free – and continues in his own desperate hell on earth. The devil demands Faust sign his wager in blood.
Hewett’s ‘no’ is a third ending – with no trickery. While medical science could not offer eternal life, it did promise a longer existence. Hewett refused, cheating the longevity industry of another hapless customer.
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