Old same story

The population of our western societies is growing older and older, and somehow there is no way to doubt that this trend shall magnify its effects in the next future.

I work in the very western side of Berlin twice a week: it looks like Maine or Wales somehow - even if I have never been in either place; this part of the city is the one that became rich after the war in a kind of fast way...nowadays next to the several embassies which grew up there in the early fifties, you see old people all over the place...centers where old people can go to live, advertisement of theatre shows that no twenty-five-years-old-person would ever dare to attend; cafés and restaurants looking fake and boring...post offices with cheesy and awefull (not even cheap!) greetings card...
Is it a positive phenomenon the one through which we are all growing older and older?
Do not get me wrong....
If the average life expectancy in Zimbabwe will eventually rise from its actual 35 years (that is a scandal and a tragedy of our times!), I will be very very happy.
But if Großvater Scholz keeps on growing older and older, more and more lonesome, more and more fixed upon his crazy ideas and believes, more and more aside from what is happening all around him until his early nineties, who is going to enjoy that? If Frau Scheidl will live until her 95, eating only saltless vegetables and tofu curry wurst, alone, angry and bitter with her family or with the memories of it, who can actually say that this is plus?

Is it good that our brain will turn into a tired and overstretched machine that has to control over a body which will still be fit in relation to that? Is it worth to get through painful treatments and deeply intrusive surgery, if the absolute difference is some more months spent on a rolling chair?
Is it not unreal and hypocritical the rhetoric of our government over "development", though combined with the apology of the elderly?

Somebody could tell me:"Well, Marco, the longer the better"...is this belief one of the new absolute of our Western morals?
I am not sure that if these people would look at themselves, they would agree with that...in the mass of old people from Berlin and from Venice, from Weimar and from Munich try, you guys, to have a look at their eyes (grey, empty, flat), to measure their patience with the rest of humanity, their loud pessimism, their inability to be on the street, see a child and just smile...it is probably bitter and progressively limiting to grow older; it is usually also very painful and full of losses (phisical, relational, mental, moral)...why do we keep on telling ourselves the story that the third (or fourth) age is a golden period of our lives? Are the first two so bad? Or is it just the last of a series of lies-that-let-us(them)-live-better?

I do think about it and wonder...