The tra­jec­to­ry being pret­ty much set and relent­less­ly short­en­ing, it seems to me that we who are aging ought to be grant­ed free­dom from an excess of choic­es. Instead,  we get a seem­ing­ly inex­haustible well­spring of advice on how to have a longer and health­i­er, and ergo, hap­pi­er life. So far, all I’ve learned from it is summed up by screen­writer William Goldman’s descrip­tion of the movie busi­ness: “Nobody knows any­thing…Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an edu­cat­ed one.”

For starters, the “guid­ance” comes in con­junc­tion with reg­u­lar obit­u­ar­ies for celebri­ties who were part of my youth, and the inex­orable demise of friends, which ought to make its lack of effi­ca­cy obvious.
That’s not to say all of the ideas ought to be reject­ed. An allur­ing one that arrived up this week is a study which con­cludes that nap­ping is not only okay, hav­ing a dai­ly one will result in your brain being 15 cubic cen­time­tres (0.9 cubic inch­es) larg­er. That’s appar­ent­ly the equiv­a­lent to delay­ing aging by between three and six years.
Since I have a habit of falling asleep dur­ing any TV show except news, that’s both good news and grat­i­fy­ing. The sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence wasn’t detailed, but I’m sure it has a lot to do with nap­ping shut­ting out non­sense, so the brain has more  room for sen­si­ble things as opposed to “the vile and per­ni­cious” of Frank Zappa’s lamen­ta­tion of TV, “I’m the Slime”.
The down­side of a poten­tial big­ger brain came the day after I read that arti­cle, when I was mugged by a head­line that read: “Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Think­ing Every­thing Is Worse.”
Maybe that’s why my brain had trou­ble work­ing through the log­ic of the asser­tion, which brings me to the claim that nap­ping is even bet­ter for you than lift­ing weights.
It cer­tain­ly holds more attrac­tion than the advert for “seniors” that keeps pop­ping up on my com­put­er screen, fea­tur­ing a guy whose face looks like he’s Methuselah’s twin broth­er, and an  upper body and arms so ripped he could also be a semi-suc­cess­ful clone of a steroid-friend­ly Hol­ly­wood “action hero”.
Not a good look on either count.

                                    WHO TO BELIEVE, OR NOT

Conun­drums are every­where. This, from the web­site senior lifestyles.com, sounds like some­thing that makes sense: “Seniors that exer­cise reg­u­lar­ly are less like­ly to depend on others.”
Except, as we “seniors” were taught, when refer­ring to peo­ple, the rel­a­tive pro­noun (if such a mod­i­fied term is still per­mis­si­ble) is “who”,  not “that”, so why would we both­er to read, let alone take to heart, any ensu­ing advice?  Actu­al­ly, what fol­lowed did make sense, but it all fit into the  cat­e­go­ry of “com­mon”, so I could have quit read­ing at the point where my pedan­tic side was offended.
An inde­cent num­ber of the stud­ies on liv­ing longer take the fun out of the idea of doing so.
For decades, “sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies” sug­gest­ed that “mod­er­ate drink­ing” was bet­ter than no drink­ing at all. In fact, it might even help you live longer. Ignore the very good pos­si­bil­i­ty that the research was as like­ly as not fund­ed by the booze indus­try, and you have jus­ti­fi­ca­tion — if any was need­ed beyond the plea­sure of it — for an end-of-day cold beer or a decent glug of sin­gle malt, and a glass or two of wine with a meal.
Cue killjoy.
“A new analy­sis of more than 40 years of research has con­clud­ed that many of those stud­ies were flawed and that the oppo­site is true.”
The piece from which that gloom was lift­ed goes on to note that: “…it’s chal­leng­ing to accu­rate­ly esti­mate the spe­cif­ic effect of mak­ing any change based on how most nutri­tion and lifestyle research is cur­rent­ly conducted.”
To put it anoth­er way: a lot of advice is free for the sim­ple rea­son that it’s gen­er­al­ly worthless.
The excep­tion that proves the rule – appar­ent­ly – is the so-called “Mediter­ranean Diet”, which research over a broad swathe of time and geog­ra­phy indi­cates is“a healthy eat­ing pat­tern for the pre­ven­tion of car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­eases, increas­ing lifes­pan, and healthy aging.”
The vari­a­tion here in Italy, where I live, is espe­cial­ly entic­ing, not least because Ital­ians, being sen­si­ble peo­ple (except when it comes to traf­fic, the envi­ron­ment and pol­i­tics), con­sid­er wine to be food and an essen­tial ele­ment of their culture.
Some of the occa­sion­al dilem­mas of aging are easy to resolve.
For exam­ple, an old guy I don’t recog­nise occa­sion­al­ly app­pears in the mir­ror in the morn­ing. Instead of try­ing to fig­ure out who he is and where he came from, I shave him. We old­er folk were raised to be polite, after all.
The best advice on aging I’ve ever encoun­tered was from a cen­te­nar­i­an, who, on being asked the pre­dictable ques­tion: “What’s the secret to liv­ing to be 100?”, replied: “Don’t die.”
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