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submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by deadymouse@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

Example, I heard that some pensioner assembled a rocket in his garage, connected it to a car, and crashed into a mountain at incredible speed and died.

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[-] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 hours ago

I dunno if crazy is the right word, but you do run into people no longer giving a fuck the older they get. However, you also get them settling down and chilling out more as well.

The key to the kind of thing you used as an example is that if you can retire with a decent nest egg, you now have both time and funding to fuck around and find out in ways you can't before that era of life. Mind you, you also have to get there in good enough shape to fuck around at all, but that's tangential to this matter.

In my years doing end of life care, my patients were obviously past they point of getting up to serious shenanigans, but they would sometimes have family that were quite fond of finding fuckery to get up to.

One thing I noticed about old dudes was a proclivity to cars that were well beyond the horsepower needed for daily tasks. Anything from standard sports cars to serious machinery like one guy that had a pro street 55 bel air. Which, since I got to drive the thing, was bitchin!

Now that I'm in my fifties, I get it even more than I did back then. Life is fucking short. None of us get out alive, so there's a tipping point where one's give-a-shitter takes a flying leap. Since life is also often brutal, it makes sense that once you've done the expected bullshit, spending what time is left rotting in a chair by a window ain't exactly enticing.

Only thing keeping my crippled ass from souping up my little 4 banger and seeing how tight I can get it to corner at speed is budget. I'm in that window where my reflexes are still solid, and my experience is deep, so taking opportunities to push the envelope like that makes sense.

I reckon that once I get even older, I'll have less to lose as well, so I might end up doing something batshit like strapping rockets to a car just for the lolz. I've seen the destruction curve of the human body as it ages, so I'm not exactly enamored of longevity what with the shitty quality of life that's nigh inevitable.

But for real, the majority of old folks are just tired and want a fucking nap.

this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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