In the wake of Robin Williams death we were surprised to learn that middle aged white men with money problems had the biggest piece of the suicide pie.
Since we fall into that demographic (who really has enough money?) it sparked our interest.
Until this week we believed it was gay teenagers.
We asked ourselves why?
Why are we so prone to off ourselves?
Its not the age.
Middle aged women rarely commit suicide.
Just us guys and were are not only doing it more than anyone else. We are also much more successful at it.
According to the charts we usually need only one try at most two.
At first we thought of loneliness.
Especially in our modern world with its high divorce rates and life long singleness there are a lot of lonely guys out there, probably more than ever before in history.
Oh sure there are a lot of middle aged single women but a lot of the were single mothers first and they or at least some of them have kids and grandkids to keep them connected.
We have two grandsons we are going to be seeing soon and nothing can describe the delicious anticipation we have of holding them in our arms.
But then again lots of suicides have families as well so it really can’t be that or that is not all of it.
So we began to think about retirement.
Not about retiring but the whole concept.
Know why 65 was picked as the age?
It happened back in the 19th century in Germany, in the mines.
To head off labor unrest the mine owners promised a full pension once a miner reached the age of 65.
If they had bothered to notice which they didn’t very few of their cohort ever made it to 65.
Indeed looking at life spans this age we call middle age is actually an almost undiscovered county for our species.
Until quite recently most of us never made it to 50. In Russia they still don’t.
Perhaps some of us, a whole lot of some of us are just not evolved to handle middle age and the golden years that come after it.
Back in the good old days of the 13th century a man was a father in his teens and a grandfather in his 30’s. By the time he hit 40 if he hit 40 his life was pretty much done and he could go to his maker with a smile on his face.
Sad but kind of happy in a way.
Thanks to modern medicine better nutrition and the lack of plague and war we can expect to live almost twice as long as our ancestors stretching back a couple of 100 thousand years.
Some of us may not have adapted.
Interesting question to ponder but we don’t think we will have time for it.
We are planning to introduce our grandson to Space Ghost who is much cooler that Superman and Spiderman put together.