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submitted 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours 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 7 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.

[-] scott@lem.free.as 3 points 13 hours ago

Just look at Trump. That's how crazy they can get.

[-] hanrahan@slrpnk.net 2 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

Why is that crazy?

What about working in a soul destroying job fi 50 years, isn't that "crazy"?

Mama we're all crazy now!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEv6jy_7PQQ

[-] j5906@feddit.org 9 points 19 hours ago

It is better to explode, than to fade away

[-] Quilotoa@lemmy.ca 2 points 20 hours ago

Another question would be who does crazier things, the young or the old?

[-] deadymouse@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago

A difficult question.

[-] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 1 points 20 hours ago

Various forms of mental deterioration cause a lot of the elderly to lose their abilities they had when they were younger. Old people doing dumb things is a rather common tragedy.

[-] disregardable@lemmy.zip 0 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Basically, your brain cells are dying, and they don't grow back. You are slowly losing the ability to do all sorts of things and reason in all sorts of ways. You can see how many more dark spots there are on a brain scan- those are just a lot of mental processes your brain can't do anymore. The other parts of the brain try to compensate, but after a certain point you'll never be able to think as well as you did before.

So you just lose more and more of your cognitive functions until you die.

this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
9 points (90.9% liked)

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