 Who wants to live forever anyway? The human life circle has six main stages, fetus, baby, child, adolescent, adult, and elderly, which we refer to as old. The first five we tend to embrace and take care of. But the last stage, we either attempt to wish away, ignore, disdain, or mask. With a growing ageing population on timely deaths and impaired living, conversations on growing a positive attitude to the inevitable dusk years is paramount. While we are somewhat relaxed while going through the other stages of life, we do not focus on investing in practices that will help tide us over in old age. It is when we have a health incident that we scramble to start living better to bribe old age. Just as inevitable as death is, so is old age. And while we cannot run from it, if we embrace it and work with it, it will be kinder to us. It is never too late to make positive changes, however. We must acknowledge the limitations if we start later rather than earlier to work towards an enhanced old age. Recently, plastic surgery has become the bane of aging. From one face lift to the next liposuction to the lifting of sagging bits, we have geriatrics looking odd with sculpted bodies and faces and doing nothing for enhancing the quality of life. The goal is to use our productive years to prepare for age that will lead to a decrease of everything that we once took for granted. While it is taking for granted on this side of the Atlantic that our children will look after us, it is gradually becoming irresponsible to leave the comfort of your old age to your children. There's a place for that, but reality must be faced. Work, train your kids, make investments, save for your latter years. If the kids turn out right and support you, well, great. If they don't, well, great too. You've provided for yourself. There's a thing called healthy aging which refers to a reduction in the undesired effects of aging. The goals are maintaining physical and mental health, avoiding disorders and remaining active and independent, very important. For most people, maintaining general good health requires more effort as they age, developing certain healthy habits can help, such as following a nutritious diet, exercising regularly and staying mentally active. In this way, people can have some control over what happens to them as they age. Also, several factors influence life expectancy and gaining knowledge is an added advantage. For example, you know, hereditary, what are those hereditary things? Influences whether a person will develop a disorder, know the family history, lifestyle. Avoiding smoking, not abusing drugs and alcohol, maintaining a healthy weight and diet and exercising help people function well and avoid disorders. Exposure to toxins in the environment, well, it's a challenge, but it can shorten life expectancy even among people with the best genetic makeup. Healthcare, regular checkups can prevent disorders or treating disorders after they are contracted helps increase life expectancy. All age may have its limitations and challenges, but despite them, our latter years can be some of the most rewarding and fulfilling of our lives. Time to start being deliberate about taking care of you for you for the dusk of life. Fantastic, fantastic comfort. So, let's go. You know, I really love that talk, I'll tell you why. I've always make sure, when I make friends with senior citizens, I have a lot of old friends, 65, 77, five-year-old friends. Oh, yeah, older friends. And one of the things I've learned about them is in their earlier years, the ones, and I have all kinds, I have the billionaires, I have the rich ones, I have the ones that struggle in a bit, I realize that most of them, the ones that are doing very well, they made decision early in life. In their 30s, in the 40s, they thought about their 70s and 80s and said, you know what, I have to prepare for it. And they made those preparations and it's paying off for them now. The ones are not doing too well. A few of them, you know, life happened, but they didn't plan well enough. So it's very important to put that plan in, especially in your 30s and 40s, very important to start putting those things in your mind because, like you said, it's like death. It's going to come. I mean, it's like people say, I personally, for instance, they will say, oh, they have a child, they're looking for a money, but you've had, you've been pregnant for nine months, right? You know you're going to have a child in nine months. It's similar. You know you're going to be old, so you must prepare and start making plans to make your, you know, your old age more. You know, I've worked within the private sector, I've always done, I've never worked within the public sector. So when I turned 40, my best friend called me, he works in the UK and he said, Kunde, we both turned 40 this year. He turned in October, I turned in December. But he said, you know what? We're going to start investing in stock and we're going to do this and it's money we're not touching. And I said, why? Brothers who even thought they had money? I said, I kept some money for you and you add what you have. Go to invest in stocks and it's going to be for our pension. And I was like, ah, bro, I'm not done, we're just 40. He said, do you see how zero to 40 happened? I said, yeah, it was kind of fast. Secondly, we've been friends, we've been friends who were in crash. So I was like, did you see how fast that happened? The next 40 is that fast. It's even faster. It's even faster. So he was like, come on, we have to start paying for it. He reminds me every month, guy, what are you bringing? Brings on, bring my own food. I'm so preparing and I think you need to really be deliberate about it. I can say, yes, we make a lot of careless decisions. I can say we eat worse than any other generation before. Absolutely. It's less healthy. There's a lot of bio-generated rubbish and which is generally not good for our bodies, which means we probably retire faster than others. But if you look at the bright side, we have enough intelligence to prepare for it. Yeah, when I hit 35, I decided that, you know, number one, I was going to do a certain thing at 40, I hit that milestone. And then I was lucky enough to read somewhere where it said, by the time as if there's one demo, however it's somewhere, the day you hit 40, something breaks. Yeah. And it happened to me. The day I hit 40, I think it was my back pain. I said, hi, it has happened. So immediately, immediately I started regular checkups, changed my diet, water. It just does small things, walking 30 minutes every day. Just those things that we weren't doing, like imagine if I started that even 10 years earlier, how look, and I saw the payoff. I honestly saw the payoff. I don't go to the hospital. I really don't. Mostly I don't. I mean, you have the one two things here and there because your body has to whatever. But the point here is that I don't need to go to the hospital because I make sure I take my ginger, my lemon, and when it's cold I wear my sweater. Being more deliberate, doing mental exercises and all that. And I wish people would just embrace it. If you embrace it, it actually becomes a good thing because now you're not fighting it. So what is it really coming to fight you for? You're not fighting it. I've accepted. I'm old, I'm aging. It will come, I'm not as strong. My knees are paining me. My back is paining me. It's slipping in the middle of the day. I'm not fighting it. I'm not dragging. Besides, I'm not even playing football. So not only for football, I'm not even playing football. Even like now, it's while I'm still young that I have all the time to do all the running around, all the vigorous exercises, all the intensive jobs, eating healthy, it's all pay off later. And all that, live your life to the fullest. Enjoy yourself and you go about taking alcohol, smoking and drinking. I'm not thinking about tomorrow. Everybody's just worried about today. I think that's what my... My generation, I really... The yellow generation. All they are looking forward to is enjoyment. They are not thinking about tomorrow because everything they are chasing is money. And you know, once you have money, you're spending on this, you're spending on that and that's not the healthy way to live. Shall I say a little bit about the issue of, you know, our African parents waiting for us to go to... Yes, yes, yes, yes. Because talking about planning, it's very important that when you're in your 30s, 40s and you have enough time to plan, you begin to plan for your future so that you don't begin to... You won't have to rely on your children. If they give you money, fine. But there is this entitlement mentality, not just with parents now, but with everybody. Like some people just... Even now, parents feel, I sent you to school. I gave you everything. So it's time for you to give me back. Fantastic topic and at this rate, I'm glad that all of us are within the age bracket to actually consciously make changes. So, I mean, hopefully we'll spread the message. And that's the size of the show today. Join us again next week on another edition of The Advocate. Please don't just listen. Share The Advocate with family and friends. 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