Psychology 232 - Reaction Paper

Reaction Paper 2

Latacha M Venable

Psychology 232 Chapters 9-10

Section 40

The things that are similar in the two articles are that they both speak about how if you make it to a certain age being cancer and disease free you will likely make it to ninety.  The main differences that I see are that one tells you that if you live a healthy lifestyle you are more likely to live to see an older age.  The second article also speaks about having a second adulthood.  I believe that this is true for a few scenarios.  

        If you have a child early in life once that child is grown you may barely be forty, you still have the opportunity to have a second adulthood.  I do believe with the advances of treatments and medications as well as the knowledge of healthier living we are living to be older.  I also believe that it is genetic to an extent.  My great grandmother died when she was seventy four when she passed away.  She had kidney failure from Lupus.  My grandmother was sixty nine when she passed away and it was from cancer.  Both of them were very active.  My great grandmother use to make me Barbie clothes and got so good at it that she started selling them at the flea market up until a few years before she passed.  My grandmother even though she retired she worked at Walmart, because sitting at home just wasn’t something that made her happy.  

        I honestly wonder if perhaps people didn’t use to live as long as what they did today but we had no way of formally knowing because of the record keeping.  The lifestyles today although some can be healthier for the most part they are not.  The meat that we eat is injected with hormones and antibiotics and the vegetables and fruit is covered in pesticides.  I can’t help but think maybe it’s a tradeoff.  Before technology wasn’t that good, but people had people skills and the food was much healthier.  Diner did not consist of a fast food restaurant, rather something that you worked all year long to make.  

        I don’t know how I feel about living longer.  The world is changing and I personally am in shock at some of the changes that have occurred in my life time.  I remember having a corded phone!  I couldn’t imagine being eighty and thinking about how I was raised and looking at kids today who have no concept of working for anything.  Starting as early as my generation there are people who are just filled with self-entitlement and a belief that things should just be handed to them.  My fiancé’s great aunt is the oldest living person that I personally know, she is approaching her nineties.  She has diabetes and she doesn’t even get to enjoy her old age.  Instead she is busy raising her great great niece and nephews.  But I love to hear her stories of how different things were when she was growing up.