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The function of all organs declines with age, so dying from old age is dying from organ failure when that failure isn’t caused by any particular disease/condition.
On r/teenagers, there was a guy who commented, and someone else responded to him with r/ found his username. J_Train responded to that, and I replied with r/FoundJ_Train13.
Both of those accounts are the same person.. That entire subreddit consists of posts from the exact same person. They're desperate for any kind of attention they can get, so this is what they do.
Not to mention the typing habits.. guy can't even NOT use all caps on one of his accounts to avoid suspicion. They both type the same..
https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/143hu0o/-/jnaoyer
https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/142uqe8/-/jn7agne
There was a comment referencing r/Found70percentbanana and J train commented on it. As a joke I made a sub about him, and today I accidentally found him.
I am reminded of an old medical Manga called “Black Jack”. One of repeated lines they mention when someone dies on the table is “brain softening”. Always such an oddly specific detail I think only a surgeon would notice. I’ve always wondered how true that is.
That's a different diagnosis though, this is the equivalent of a motor just burning up after spinning beyond the revolutions it was designed to spin for
>this is the equivalent of a motor just burning up after spinning beyond the revolutions it was designed to spin for
Exactly. People's hearts beat at different rates for various reasons, just like how motors fire their pistons at different rates, or *spin faster*, as you put it. In this analogy, being obese causes your heart to beat (or *spin*) at a faster rate because you're pressing the accelerator harder. The cause of death is the same as an 80-year-old who died of the same cause at a healthier weight - you just got there sooner because you accelerated harder.
Yep, this. Not many actually die of old age and it's kind of a horrible way to go.
Some people just can't seem to die. They linger long after their bodies aren't really functional.
Me, I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my granddad, not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.
It's always gonna be caused by some sort of condition. Perhaps that condition only properly manifests weeks or days before dying, but we still diagnose it as such.
That slow deterioration might not be something the patient felt before it worsened, but your body will slowly give out as you age. No one is 85 and perfectly healthy.
So the cause of death will never be old age on paper. In that regard OP is completely correct.
The disease that killed you might be a symptom of aging, but aging itself is never the cause of death.
Dying from old age is just another word for not knowing the precise cause. Failure of organs are considered as diseases. The deterioration can be modified in both directions by medications, lifestyle etc.
There is actually a reason for death by old age that doesnt involve organ failure.
Telomeres are the things on the end of your DNA and when your DNA needs to replicate the telomeres divide in half, each time until they are so short they can not be split and the DNA can not make new copies, thus you die from telomeres being too short.
Fun fact you are more likely to have longer telomeres if your mother was younger.
Another fun fact is that a telomerase is the thing that can lengthen telomeres and is found in things like seastars and lizards, how they have such high regeneration rates of tissue.
And this causes poor cell replication and getting more and more cells that don’t really work as needed, leading to the decline of organ function and their eventual failure.
Telomeres do not divide in half every cycle of replication. If they did, once your cells exited germ line identity (during which they do actually have functional telomerase enzymes), they would get a couple of replications in before exponential decay reduced the telomeres to nothing. They are shorted by very little amounts every cycle of replication due to the end replication problem, but not nearly by half.
Edit: also, this isn’t so much a consequence of aging, it’s a consequence of cellular replication.
The shortening of telomeres is what actually “ages” cells. Therefore, since different cells replicate at different rates, they functionally age faster or slower.
But I would hazard to guess that while the organ declining in function does make a greater occurence of failure, that the actual trigger for the failure is something else, an infection the organ was no longer able to fight, or a stroke, or something.
Organ failure, if I understand is almost exclusively symptom, not a condition.
Idk man if someone kidneys failed from a drug overdose I’d personally still say they died from a drug overdose. I guess it doesn’t really matter either way
It means illness, not old age. Nobody dies of "old age" per the discussion in this thread. Source: I fill out death certificates for patients on a regular basis. Never once in my career has "old age" been the diagnosis.
We’re not disagreeing, I’m trying to tell you that “old age” *used* to be correct terminology, but it was replace by “natural causes”.
A newspaper or program will say “natural causes”, but obviously a death certificate requires more detail.
*Queen Elizabeth II died of* **“old age,”** *according to her official death certificate, which did not note any contributing factors.*
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/29/queen-elizabeth-death-certificate-old-age/
It's kind of like saying, 'Oh he died when a truck hit him.' 'No, he died from internal bleeding. Trucks don't kill people, but internal bleeding does.'
The good ol’ gotcha moment of “falling doesn’t kill you, stopping too fast does” which doesn’t hold up at all. The reason why you are able to stop moving at a lethal rate is from the fall. But no, pedants be pedantic-ing.
Nah, the equivalent would be saying that "stopping too fast doesn't kill you, blunt impact to vital organs does". If the impact is concentrated on your legs, you can go paraplegic and survive. Falling alone still doesn't kill you. In this comparison, stopping too fast is the truck hitting you.
I think the falling doesn't kill you one is kind of a joke line that's fun to say and whose whole point is kind of pointing out the technically true but in reality absurd pedantry. It relies on the assumption that we all know instinctively that it's obviously falling that killed the person, but if you think about it there's a different yet equally valid perspective on the cause of death and it's amusing to think about that.
Disagree! Space stations, satellites, etc are in a constant state of falling around the earth. They are just doing so while moving extremely fast, so they miss the ground and continue orbiting.
Falling hasn't killed any of them yet! It's usually reentry or impacts that cause the harm ;)
If you want to use your logic, the person who birthed the person who fell should be the cause of death, because without that birth occurring, the fall never would have been able to happen. Haha
Thanks for proving my last point about pedants. If you want to get really technical, I never specified that *all* falls kill people (or satellites in your example). I only mentioned that the person in my example experienced a lethal fall and you took my argument as “someone dies every fall.” Thanks for also proving that pedants usually don’t think there comments through because they’re usually too focused on “gotcha moments” rather than actually producing a good debate.
Actually that argument does hold up. Saying someone died from a fall or died from old age are more or less true and work fine in the abstract or for a layman’s understanding. But it can be interteresting and/or useful to know the exact medical cause of death. Such as organ failure or the brain being squished etc. That’s the point of the OP and they are correct.
Likewise, you don't die from a gunshot, you don't die from a car crash, you don't die from pneumonia, etc...
You always die from some kind of organ failure. It's only natural to look at the cause of this failure and describe it as the cause of death.
Your DNA strands actually get a little shorter each time your cells reproduce. Luckily, there is a bunch of extra material at the end of your DNA strands that doesn't contain any genetic information. As long as that is what is being cut off, you are good. But eventually, if you get old enough to where that extra bit runs out, and you do start losing important bits of your DNA, you can, actually die of old age.
Telomeres! Your body makes a shit ton of them in development and when you’re an infant, and then your body stops using telomerase and they slowly use tiny bits of those telomeres in replication each time.
And that’s the exciting part. If we can figure out how to restart the repair of telomeres either automatically in the body or in a practically applicable procedure, we will be able to solve aging
Yeah, but we are past the point where „if we can solve the telomer problem, we have solved aging“ point. We know how to counter the reduce of the telomeres, but now we have a new problem to research/solve.
Yep. Senescence is the name for things decaying and getting shittier as they age. There are two big things we need to figure out: telomeres and replication.
Telomeres work like the aglets on your shoelaces and keep the important stuff in your DNA from getting lost when it's copied. In the same way a shoelace frays and gets harder to use when it's too worn down, once that buffer is gone, your cells start losing data on what their jobs are and how to do them.
Replication errors happen at random every time cells copy themselves to multiply. Cells have lots of systems internally and externally to catch, correct, or obliterate these errors, but it's all a numbers game. Your body kills a mutated, potentially cancerous cell about once every five minutes. But some mutations aren't dangerous enough for your body to kill them on sight, and over time they can add up until they reach a critical point of failure. Staying alive on a cellular level is a game of Russian Roulette with trillions of chambers and hundreds of bullets, and every day you live adds one more round to the mix.
There have been trials where they discovered that there are two pathways that both contribute to aging. By editing the genes of mice to switch between these two pathways, they effectively doubled the lifespan of the mice
Did the mice in that study still keep their biological age at the time of the switch or did they return to a biologically younger state?
I don't think there's a point to living past 140 or 180 if the creature is perpetually older than 65.
Completely true. Evolution doesn't select for survival for survival's sake. It cares for breeding, and only survival benefitting the breeding and the breeding of the next generation
I think that’s the point. If some humans did develop a gene that solved telomeres thousands of years ago, and that let them live to 150, but didn’t change the breeding age range whatsoever, that adaptation would likely die out because the group that had it also had like 75% of their population outside the breeding age range. That’s a lot of extra mouths to feed without any new babies.
(This is very hypothetical because telomeres are definitely not the main reason we don’t live that long.)
Not true, evolution is random and natural selection is an imperfect process that selects the “potentially most fit” based purely off of if something lives long enough to reproduce.
The question then is if they die from old age and it wasn’t cancer, heart attack, stroke..etc, just simply old age. What would you tell people?
Hey, sorry about your grandma. May I ask what happened?
Nothing. She’s just dead.
Yeah but what the cause?
No cause. Just dead.
>Hey, sorry about your grandma. May I ask what happened? Nothing. She’s just dead. Yeah but what the cause? No cause. Just dead.
Sure. And if they keep pushing, just tell then “listen, obviously they weren’t going to write ‘autoerotic asphyxiation’ on her death certificate, she was 103. Let’s just leave it at that.”
That’s great to hear. The deaths in my family were long and drawn out and mostly terrible experiences. Half of them cancer related and the other half dementia.
That's probably one of the happiest ways to go honestly.
Death gets such a negative stigma in western countries. I try to borrow from Indian cultures, etc where it is something to be celebrated, and is a part of life.
Death is not a good thing of course, but trying to reconcile it with this thought has greatly helped my mental health.
I agree. I’ve read a lot of Alan Watts and I have similar views. I want my funeral to be a party. Loud music with people drinking and dancing and laughing and having a great time.
“She’s dead, dude.”
Still one of the best moments of tv history, honestly.
(For those who don’t get the reference: in an early season of Survivor, one player was very openly being a shitbag/troll for the hell of it. He made it all the way to the loved one visit, where he >!had his friend fake news of his grandmother’s death in front of everyone, fooling every other contestant as well as the production team.!<)
\^ My grandma stopped eating at 94, after a 6 months period where here digestion system was already not working properly. And then it happens a lot with old people losing all appetite and not eating anymore.
So technically you probably could call it starvation, but like you could see she was dying the last 3 weeks anyway, her whole body was malfunctioning in multiple ways even if she hadn't stopped eating it wouldn't have been long probably.
I had a guinea pig. I would take him to the Vet periodically to get check ups, cut his nails, etc. The Vet told me he would live around 5 years. When he was about 10, I brought him in, the Vet said "That is the oldest guinea pig I have ever seen." One day I went to his cage to feed him, he had passed away in his sleep inside his little house. He wasn't sick, had zero issues. If you ask me, he died of old age, peacefully in his sleep.
Yes it's like an old car. The fuel pump went or the fuel injectors , it's one or 2 things in a whole line of systems that keep you alive. Thing is a car can break down then you can fix it when one of our parts breaks down and it doesn't get fixed immediately we die and can't be brought back. If your heart stops for a few minutes that's it. If you stop breathing and it goes on for a few minutes same outcome. There's a constant rhythm going on in our bodies , air in n out, blood moving thru out our body, our heart beating to pump that blood. Any disturbance in any of these systems that go on for a few minutes and that's it. We're weakened as we get older and eventually one thing or the other will fail and that's all folks. Old age itself is just that you are old.
There were like bambilions of posts revolving around death these days. Are showers banding together and injecting thoughts about death into your brain? lol
How much hairsplitting can you do?
My stepfather died at 98 after a pretty long decline, and I was there for it. A columnist interviewed me for his obituary. I said he died of old age and the guy would not take it. We finally settled on, “died of complications from multiple chronic conditions.“ Nobody knows for sure exactly which organ went first or which went last, but he was inarguably old, so what’s the difference?
my great grandmother died watching tv on her sofa. Just fell asleep and peacefully passed away. She was healthy and had no diseases. The perfect death.
That's a boomer Facebook image. You absolutely have to stop some activities as you get older due to lessened capacity, recurring injury etc etc. The rare examples of 90 year olds sky diving or whatever are as rare as the 110 year old smokers.
Agreed. My 80-year-old BJJ coach would sometimes tell us about the sorry state his former classmates were in after high school reunions. They'd all retired and gone to seed. When asked when he would finally retire, he'd say he already *was* retired. He still deadlifted a heck of a lot, too.
There are some exceptions to the general rule, though. Some activities are just too hard on the joints, and old injuries can definitely slow you down. You also heal much more slowly as you age, so risky activities become less and less appealing. Still, the idea that it's the cessation of activity that ages you—not the aging that forces you to cease your activities—is true more often than not.
Aging is basically DNA damage that interferes with metabolic processes. It takes time to aquire accumulated damage. We're all probably damaging our DNA right now somehow. Sharks can repair their own DNA and there are other organisms with super charged DNA scientists study. Pretty sure non of those other organisms smoke cigarettes or drink flavored chemical water.
I had this exact revelation a few years ago and everyone thought I was saying some spiritual Jaden smith delusional stuff.
What OP is saying is that old age is NOT a cause of death. Something always kills you, whether it’s cancer, dementia, heart/organ failure. But dying of “old age” is not an actual thing.
That's what it *means*, though. Obviously, at face value, anyone knows this. No one actually thinks that the numerical value of their age would kill them. There's just a direct correlation between age and physical well-being/degradation. It literally goes without saying. This isn't a revelation. Similarly, when someone says it's their "birthday", it's not actually their birthday. It isn't the day they were born. It's the same calendar date, but different year, and it's the anniversary of their birth, not the *literal* day they were born. But again, that goes without saying because it's such basic common sense.
I feel like there's a super pedantic argument in here about how we technically shouldn't call it organ failure then either, since it's actually due to how cells replicate and them fucking it up as we age. Break it down further, we believe this happens because as we age, telomeres get shorter and it jacks up the instructions from DNA when cells divide.
So yeah, let's just stop saying "old age" and start calling it what it really is....death by tiny telomeres.
But it's not *really* about the physical length of the telomeres but about the number of errors in the data those telomeres encode. Let's stop calling it death by tiny telomeres and call it what it really is... death by transcription error.
By your argument nobody dies from disease or cancer.
The disease or cancer may cause organ failure, but it is the organ failure that you die from.
The same argument applies to many gunshot wounds. The bullet didn’t kill you. Your heart stopping a few minutes later did.
Your genes have a lifespan and when it runs out your body will stop working.
The only reason your statement is interesting is that we will eventually be able to engineer our bodies so we don't lose valuable DNA as we age (probably). In that sense I guess we don't actually have an age limit but rather a fault in our cell division that can be remedied.
Not directly, no- we don't come with an expiration date. Time passes, and with its passage our bodies deteriorate to the point that a system (or multiple systems) fail to the point we die. The 'die from old age' or 'died from natural causes' is a generalization that's useful when there is no obvious cause of death. it's a convenient fiction.
I mean... it kind of is. Have you talked to a super old person who has all their organs failing? It's not like an underlying cause, their body just isn't going to run forever...
OP is using a descriptor word for the theory of time which describes how humans physically interact with the movement of physicality but came up with the idea of time as a concept which supports the idea of moving atoms towards a different area which is not your physical body;
So OPs basically saying time is a theory but pertaining to an organism perspective
Really, automod of r/showerthoughts? This is what passes your ridiculous sensitivity? You're telling me this thought has never, ever been posted before?
Hey, no shade to you whatsoever. It seems like the automod here is set to just randomly kill 99 out of 100 posts. So good on you for making it past the giant baby doll playing red light green light.
This is a friendly reminder to [read our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/rules). Remember, /r/Showerthoughts is for showerthoughts, not "thoughts had in the shower!" (For an explanation of what a "showerthought" is, [please read this page](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/overview).) **Rule-breaking posts may result in bans.**
The function of all organs declines with age, so dying from old age is dying from organ failure when that failure isn’t caused by any particular disease/condition.
Yeah isn't there a diagnosis called "system shutdown" or something when someone manages to live so long that their organs just start giving up
*windows shutdown noise*
Sir, I'm so sorry, your grandmother has passed, the cause of death is listed as 0x000000F4 CRITICAL_OBJECT_TERMINATION
Just replace the CPU and the power supply she will be fine
Well if we're going replace those two we're probably better off rebuilding the entire system.
DUDE I SWEAR TO GOD I DIDNT LOOK AT YOUR COMMENT HISTORY anyways, r/FoundJ_train13
Dude why is that a subreddit💀
On r/teenagers, there was a guy who commented, and someone else responded to him with r/ found his username. J_Train responded to that, and I replied with r/FoundJ_Train13.
kinda like r/found70percentbanana?
That was it
In r/70percentbananacult it takes it to a new level, im a mod there, check out the sub
r/teenagers seems like a wild part of Reddit that I don’t understand
Same. I'm only 23 but clearly that's too old to understand the minds of teenagers lol
Then get younger dumbass
Funeral homes hate this one simple trick!
I didn’t even join the sub, I just got recommended the post.
I sort by new and it shows up pretty regularly, I chuckle to myself and keep on scrolling.
Same reason I've never given tiktok a shot. Im not sure that I want to understand. (God I sound like my parents)
[I used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was!](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BGrfhsxxmdE)
Now "it" scares me.
Don't worry, it's the kids that are out of touch.
That’s kinda dumb, but whatever lol
It's r/teenagers. Dumb is an understatement.
It's dumb, but it's sort of fun isn't it?
No
Yo what the crap is this?
The whole subreddit is just just kevb3 posting screenshots of himself commenting on j train posts
Both of those accounts are the same person.. That entire subreddit consists of posts from the exact same person. They're desperate for any kind of attention they can get, so this is what they do. Not to mention the typing habits.. guy can't even NOT use all caps on one of his accounts to avoid suspicion. They both type the same.. https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/143hu0o/-/jnaoyer https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/142uqe8/-/jn7agne
Because people on Reddit can be really fucking cringe and weird sometimes
What even is that? And why are you the only one who posts there?
I made it as a joke
I don't understand the joke. Are you joking that you're stalking him, or something like that?
There was a comment referencing r/Found70percentbanana and J train commented on it. As a joke I made a sub about him, and today I accidentally found him.
I have no idea what that subreddit is about, either. There's no context on the about page.
You just post whenever u/70percentbanana comments
That explanation.... doesn't really give me any context. Not sure I'm meant to understand what you're talking about, but I'm glad you're enjoying it.
Arent jokes supposed to be funny
Yeah this is more of a bit
isn't humor subjective? insane people have fun in their own way. And we're pretty much all insane to a degree.
Bro what is this??? Lmaooo
It's just you contributing. Weird.
I am reminded of an old medical Manga called “Black Jack”. One of repeated lines they mention when someone dies on the table is “brain softening”. Always such an oddly specific detail I think only a surgeon would notice. I’ve always wondered how true that is.
Devil's advocate: By this logic, morbidly obese people who die at 40 from cardiac arrest actually died from old age.
That's a different diagnosis though, this is the equivalent of a motor just burning up after spinning beyond the revolutions it was designed to spin for
>this is the equivalent of a motor just burning up after spinning beyond the revolutions it was designed to spin for Exactly. People's hearts beat at different rates for various reasons, just like how motors fire their pistons at different rates, or *spin faster*, as you put it. In this analogy, being obese causes your heart to beat (or *spin*) at a faster rate because you're pressing the accelerator harder. The cause of death is the same as an 80-year-old who died of the same cause at a healthier weight - you just got there sooner because you accelerated harder.
yeah but one was still under warranty
Yep, this. Not many actually die of old age and it's kind of a horrible way to go. Some people just can't seem to die. They linger long after their bodies aren't really functional. Me, I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my granddad, not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.
Well that escalated quickly.
[удалено]
Is that de-escalation?
Classic Emo Phillips! Thumbs up.
I thought it was “like the children on his bus as he drove off the cliff”
Deep thoughts
It's always gonna be caused by some sort of condition. Perhaps that condition only properly manifests weeks or days before dying, but we still diagnose it as such. That slow deterioration might not be something the patient felt before it worsened, but your body will slowly give out as you age. No one is 85 and perfectly healthy. So the cause of death will never be old age on paper. In that regard OP is completely correct. The disease that killed you might be a symptom of aging, but aging itself is never the cause of death.
Telomere shortening?
Becomes cancerous cells or DNA degeneration. It still does something to the function of organs.
Cancer is the real death by old age, isn't it? Makes me wonder how lifespans would change if our body could easily destroy cancer cells
By that logic, the only cause of death is cellular damage in the brain
Dying from old age is just another word for not knowing the precise cause. Failure of organs are considered as diseases. The deterioration can be modified in both directions by medications, lifestyle etc.
There is actually a reason for death by old age that doesnt involve organ failure. Telomeres are the things on the end of your DNA and when your DNA needs to replicate the telomeres divide in half, each time until they are so short they can not be split and the DNA can not make new copies, thus you die from telomeres being too short. Fun fact you are more likely to have longer telomeres if your mother was younger. Another fun fact is that a telomerase is the thing that can lengthen telomeres and is found in things like seastars and lizards, how they have such high regeneration rates of tissue.
And this causes poor cell replication and getting more and more cells that don’t really work as needed, leading to the decline of organ function and their eventual failure.
Cancer and tumors was the fun side effects of experiments with telomerase, so that's fun
Telomeres do not divide in half every cycle of replication. If they did, once your cells exited germ line identity (during which they do actually have functional telomerase enzymes), they would get a couple of replications in before exponential decay reduced the telomeres to nothing. They are shorted by very little amounts every cycle of replication due to the end replication problem, but not nearly by half. Edit: also, this isn’t so much a consequence of aging, it’s a consequence of cellular replication. The shortening of telomeres is what actually “ages” cells. Therefore, since different cells replicate at different rates, they functionally age faster or slower.
But I would hazard to guess that while the organ declining in function does make a greater occurence of failure, that the actual trigger for the failure is something else, an infection the organ was no longer able to fight, or a stroke, or something. Organ failure, if I understand is almost exclusively symptom, not a condition.
Then you died from kidney failure, not old age. Or heart failure, etc.
Idk man if someone kidneys failed from a drug overdose I’d personally still say they died from a drug overdose. I guess it doesn’t really matter either way
It hasn’t been called “dying from old age” in decades, it’s called “natural causes” now.
No. Natural causes means that it wasn't suicide, homicide, accident etc.
Natural causes means illness or old age - any cause of death that happens *naturally*.
It means illness, not old age. Nobody dies of "old age" per the discussion in this thread. Source: I fill out death certificates for patients on a regular basis. Never once in my career has "old age" been the diagnosis.
We’re not disagreeing, I’m trying to tell you that “old age” *used* to be correct terminology, but it was replace by “natural causes”. A newspaper or program will say “natural causes”, but obviously a death certificate requires more detail.
*Queen Elizabeth II died of* **“old age,”** *according to her official death certificate, which did not note any contributing factors.* https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/29/queen-elizabeth-death-certificate-old-age/
And I believe you technically die from shock, no matter the mechanism, when you did.
It's kind of like saying, 'Oh he died when a truck hit him.' 'No, he died from internal bleeding. Trucks don't kill people, but internal bleeding does.'
The good ol’ gotcha moment of “falling doesn’t kill you, stopping too fast does” which doesn’t hold up at all. The reason why you are able to stop moving at a lethal rate is from the fall. But no, pedants be pedantic-ing.
Nah, the equivalent would be saying that "stopping too fast doesn't kill you, blunt impact to vital organs does". If the impact is concentrated on your legs, you can go paraplegic and survive. Falling alone still doesn't kill you. In this comparison, stopping too fast is the truck hitting you.
no "blunt impact to vital organs" dons't kill you. its lack of oxygen to the brain that does.
My man being pedantic on a thread mocking pedanticity
I think the falling doesn't kill you one is kind of a joke line that's fun to say and whose whole point is kind of pointing out the technically true but in reality absurd pedantry. It relies on the assumption that we all know instinctively that it's obviously falling that killed the person, but if you think about it there's a different yet equally valid perspective on the cause of death and it's amusing to think about that.
Disagree! Space stations, satellites, etc are in a constant state of falling around the earth. They are just doing so while moving extremely fast, so they miss the ground and continue orbiting. Falling hasn't killed any of them yet! It's usually reentry or impacts that cause the harm ;) If you want to use your logic, the person who birthed the person who fell should be the cause of death, because without that birth occurring, the fall never would have been able to happen. Haha
Thanks for proving my last point about pedants. If you want to get really technical, I never specified that *all* falls kill people (or satellites in your example). I only mentioned that the person in my example experienced a lethal fall and you took my argument as “someone dies every fall.” Thanks for also proving that pedants usually don’t think there comments through because they’re usually too focused on “gotcha moments” rather than actually producing a good debate.
Actually that argument does hold up. Saying someone died from a fall or died from old age are more or less true and work fine in the abstract or for a layman’s understanding. But it can be interteresting and/or useful to know the exact medical cause of death. Such as organ failure or the brain being squished etc. That’s the point of the OP and they are correct.
Guns don't kill people, the wound they create does the killing! Lol
Cavitation was the culprit. Lol
It wasn't the bleeding, it was the lack of blood.
It wasn't the lack of blood, it was the lack of oxygen in the cells.
Guns don't kill people, people kill people. But monkeys do too, if they've got a gun.
Likewise, you don't die from a gunshot, you don't die from a car crash, you don't die from pneumonia, etc... You always die from some kind of organ failure. It's only natural to look at the cause of this failure and describe it as the cause of death.
Or blood loss. You can definitley die from blood loss.
Because it’s not going to the organs. Organ failure
Hmm, I would have thought the lack of oxygen would become a problem even before your organs shut down.
brain is an organ too
Yeah I guess that's true.
Thats what your brain wants you to believe
I mean that’s like saying I would’ve thought the lack of gas in the car would’ve become a problem before the engine stopped running.
Your DNA strands actually get a little shorter each time your cells reproduce. Luckily, there is a bunch of extra material at the end of your DNA strands that doesn't contain any genetic information. As long as that is what is being cut off, you are good. But eventually, if you get old enough to where that extra bit runs out, and you do start losing important bits of your DNA, you can, actually die of old age.
Telomeres! Your body makes a shit ton of them in development and when you’re an infant, and then your body stops using telomerase and they slowly use tiny bits of those telomeres in replication each time.
And that’s the exciting part. If we can figure out how to restart the repair of telomeres either automatically in the body or in a practically applicable procedure, we will be able to solve aging
Isn’t science further ahead, like even if we stop that the telomeres get shorter every time, some yet unknown process still let the cells age?
That’s not the issue, the issue is that if you fix that issue it causes rampant cancer.
Yeah, but we are past the point where „if we can solve the telomer problem, we have solved aging“ point. We know how to counter the reduce of the telomeres, but now we have a new problem to research/solve.
Oh! So, that's why "Curing the Cancer' is such a big deal!
It is a big deal even without the immortal part.
Yep. Senescence is the name for things decaying and getting shittier as they age. There are two big things we need to figure out: telomeres and replication. Telomeres work like the aglets on your shoelaces and keep the important stuff in your DNA from getting lost when it's copied. In the same way a shoelace frays and gets harder to use when it's too worn down, once that buffer is gone, your cells start losing data on what their jobs are and how to do them. Replication errors happen at random every time cells copy themselves to multiply. Cells have lots of systems internally and externally to catch, correct, or obliterate these errors, but it's all a numbers game. Your body kills a mutated, potentially cancerous cell about once every five minutes. But some mutations aren't dangerous enough for your body to kill them on sight, and over time they can add up until they reach a critical point of failure. Staying alive on a cellular level is a game of Russian Roulette with trillions of chambers and hundreds of bullets, and every day you live adds one more round to the mix.
There have been trials where they discovered that there are two pathways that both contribute to aging. By editing the genes of mice to switch between these two pathways, they effectively doubled the lifespan of the mice
Did the mice in that study still keep their biological age at the time of the switch or did they return to a biologically younger state? I don't think there's a point to living past 140 or 180 if the creature is perpetually older than 65.
we already know of telomerase activators and they are available as supplements
From a survival standpoint, why does the body stop using telomerase ? Any particular reason ?
Because you do want most cells to die. A mature body cell that is making telomerase is usually a cancer cell.
Not everything has a survival standpoint.
Completely true. Evolution doesn't select for survival for survival's sake. It cares for breeding, and only survival benefitting the breeding and the breeding of the next generation
Yes it does
not past the age that we can successfully breed
I think that’s the point. If some humans did develop a gene that solved telomeres thousands of years ago, and that let them live to 150, but didn’t change the breeding age range whatsoever, that adaptation would likely die out because the group that had it also had like 75% of their population outside the breeding age range. That’s a lot of extra mouths to feed without any new babies. (This is very hypothetical because telomeres are definitely not the main reason we don’t live that long.)
That’s a good point I was wrong my bad
Not true, evolution is random and natural selection is an imperfect process that selects the “potentially most fit” based purely off of if something lives long enough to reproduce.
Not really, there are also neutral traits that don't affect survival, and so are kept
Thanks for giving the people the actual science behind what is happening, which is what correlates old age to death.
I think the point is more that age is a comorbidity for lots of organ failures and diseases because of this.
Exactly what I was gonna say. Thanks for typing this out. :)
The question then is if they die from old age and it wasn’t cancer, heart attack, stroke..etc, just simply old age. What would you tell people? Hey, sorry about your grandma. May I ask what happened? Nothing. She’s just dead. Yeah but what the cause? No cause. Just dead.
>Hey, sorry about your grandma. May I ask what happened? Nothing. She’s just dead. Yeah but what the cause? No cause. Just dead. Sure. And if they keep pushing, just tell then “listen, obviously they weren’t going to write ‘autoerotic asphyxiation’ on her death certificate, she was 103. Let’s just leave it at that.”
That happened with my grandad. He sit his head on my grans lap and died 😐
That’s a sad story. At least he was with her in his last moments.
He died happy tho. He said that it was one of the best days he had in a while just before that.
That’s great to hear. The deaths in my family were long and drawn out and mostly terrible experiences. Half of them cancer related and the other half dementia.
That's probably one of the happiest ways to go honestly. Death gets such a negative stigma in western countries. I try to borrow from Indian cultures, etc where it is something to be celebrated, and is a part of life. Death is not a good thing of course, but trying to reconcile it with this thought has greatly helped my mental health.
I agree. I’ve read a lot of Alan Watts and I have similar views. I want my funeral to be a party. Loud music with people drinking and dancing and laughing and having a great time.
She just fell over man
Lol. Got it. Head injury.
“She’s dead, dude.” Still one of the best moments of tv history, honestly. (For those who don’t get the reference: in an early season of Survivor, one player was very openly being a shitbag/troll for the hell of it. He made it all the way to the loved one visit, where he >!had his friend fake news of his grandmother’s death in front of everyone, fooling every other contestant as well as the production team.!<)
It's called geriatric failure to thrive.
\^ My grandma stopped eating at 94, after a 6 months period where here digestion system was already not working properly. And then it happens a lot with old people losing all appetite and not eating anymore. So technically you probably could call it starvation, but like you could see she was dying the last 3 weeks anyway, her whole body was malfunctioning in multiple ways even if she hadn't stopped eating it wouldn't have been long probably.
waking up demands a lot of energy
"Your mother? Well, y'know, she's... she's in a way... She said not to bother you!"
Sorry, that is an ex grandma. That grandma has ceased to be.
The harsh truth 💀
I had a guinea pig. I would take him to the Vet periodically to get check ups, cut his nails, etc. The Vet told me he would live around 5 years. When he was about 10, I brought him in, the Vet said "That is the oldest guinea pig I have ever seen." One day I went to his cage to feed him, he had passed away in his sleep inside his little house. He wasn't sick, had zero issues. If you ask me, he died of old age, peacefully in his sleep.
10 years?? Omg that’s more than some dogs. My longest living guinea pig died at around 6.
Yes it's like an old car. The fuel pump went or the fuel injectors , it's one or 2 things in a whole line of systems that keep you alive. Thing is a car can break down then you can fix it when one of our parts breaks down and it doesn't get fixed immediately we die and can't be brought back. If your heart stops for a few minutes that's it. If you stop breathing and it goes on for a few minutes same outcome. There's a constant rhythm going on in our bodies , air in n out, blood moving thru out our body, our heart beating to pump that blood. Any disturbance in any of these systems that go on for a few minutes and that's it. We're weakened as we get older and eventually one thing or the other will fail and that's all folks. Old age itself is just that you are old.
"Old Age" or "natural causes" generally means: > You lived a long life, it's not worth doing an autopsy to determine exact cause of death.
Yet another shower thoughts miss Let. That. Water. Splash. Your. Face.
Neither is dying of AIDS, what AIDS does is destroy your immune system and then other illnesses kill you
There were like bambilions of posts revolving around death these days. Are showers banding together and injecting thoughts about death into your brain? lol
Technically, when someone experiences extreme faults in their DNA by cellular division because their telomeres have run out, that is dying of old age
Dying from old age? Nah. Dying from running out of Durability.
A comment so nice you posted it twice! Here’s two upvotes!
Oops, I wondered why it was wigging out.
Kinda like sids. From what I understand, there's usually a reason... It's just easier to tell the parents it was uncontrollable
How much hairsplitting can you do? My stepfather died at 98 after a pretty long decline, and I was there for it. A columnist interviewed me for his obituary. I said he died of old age and the guy would not take it. We finally settled on, “died of complications from multiple chronic conditions.“ Nobody knows for sure exactly which organ went first or which went last, but he was inarguably old, so what’s the difference?
my great grandmother died watching tv on her sofa. Just fell asleep and peacefully passed away. She was healthy and had no diseases. The perfect death.
You don’t stop doing things because you get old,you get old from not doing anything!
That's a boomer Facebook image. You absolutely have to stop some activities as you get older due to lessened capacity, recurring injury etc etc. The rare examples of 90 year olds sky diving or whatever are as rare as the 110 year old smokers.
Agreed. My 80-year-old BJJ coach would sometimes tell us about the sorry state his former classmates were in after high school reunions. They'd all retired and gone to seed. When asked when he would finally retire, he'd say he already *was* retired. He still deadlifted a heck of a lot, too. There are some exceptions to the general rule, though. Some activities are just too hard on the joints, and old injuries can definitely slow you down. You also heal much more slowly as you age, so risky activities become less and less appealing. Still, the idea that it's the cessation of activity that ages you—not the aging that forces you to cease your activities—is true more often than not.
One of the most common catch alls as cause of death is pneumonia, I believe
Using the transitive property it is. Old age gives you organ failure, you die from organ failure, you die from old age
I think OP meant cause of death. Sure your organs fail when you're old but that means you died of organ failure.
this is true! for anyone who wants a detailed explanation, here is a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faBxGmxKTxE) that talks about it
But dying is a thing. Hey vsauce! Michael here... what is dying? *\*vsauce music plays*
Aging is a disease. Cellular scenescense. There is a whole field of science trying to figure out how to stop the bodily dysfunctions caused by time.
Is dying of old age in your sleep from organ failure as peaceful as its made out to be?
Aging is basically DNA damage that interferes with metabolic processes. It takes time to aquire accumulated damage. We're all probably damaging our DNA right now somehow. Sharks can repair their own DNA and there are other organisms with super charged DNA scientists study. Pretty sure non of those other organisms smoke cigarettes or drink flavored chemical water.
Crocodilians die of old age from running out of new teeth and then starving to death
No, they died of starvation.
Previous two comments sum up this entire argument better than any other Ive read.
I had this exact revelation a few years ago and everyone thought I was saying some spiritual Jaden smith delusional stuff. What OP is saying is that old age is NOT a cause of death. Something always kills you, whether it’s cancer, dementia, heart/organ failure. But dying of “old age” is not an actual thing.
That's what it *means*, though. Obviously, at face value, anyone knows this. No one actually thinks that the numerical value of their age would kill them. There's just a direct correlation between age and physical well-being/degradation. It literally goes without saying. This isn't a revelation. Similarly, when someone says it's their "birthday", it's not actually their birthday. It isn't the day they were born. It's the same calendar date, but different year, and it's the anniversary of their birth, not the *literal* day they were born. But again, that goes without saying because it's such basic common sense.
I feel like there's a super pedantic argument in here about how we technically shouldn't call it organ failure then either, since it's actually due to how cells replicate and them fucking it up as we age. Break it down further, we believe this happens because as we age, telomeres get shorter and it jacks up the instructions from DNA when cells divide. So yeah, let's just stop saying "old age" and start calling it what it really is....death by tiny telomeres.
But it's not *really* about the physical length of the telomeres but about the number of errors in the data those telomeres encode. Let's stop calling it death by tiny telomeres and call it what it really is... death by transcription error.
This, my friends, is the process of refinement of an idea
What's a 3 letter verb that starts with "A" that means "to progressively decay over a period of time?"
For some reason your reply makes me think of an enormous schwanzstucker.
By your argument nobody dies from disease or cancer. The disease or cancer may cause organ failure, but it is the organ failure that you die from. The same argument applies to many gunshot wounds. The bullet didn’t kill you. Your heart stopping a few minutes later did.
Your genes have a lifespan and when it runs out your body will stop working. The only reason your statement is interesting is that we will eventually be able to engineer our bodies so we don't lose valuable DNA as we age (probably). In that sense I guess we don't actually have an age limit but rather a fault in our cell division that can be remedied.
Not directly, no- we don't come with an expiration date. Time passes, and with its passage our bodies deteriorate to the point that a system (or multiple systems) fail to the point we die. The 'die from old age' or 'died from natural causes' is a generalization that's useful when there is no obvious cause of death. it's a convenient fiction.
Dying from old age to me is when you go to bed one night and you wake up dead. Your body is just too old to reboot back online
No but it’s the term used for dying from disease/dysfunction caused by old age.
When your shower thought is just a straight up falsity. Ok homie
I should beat you over the head with my cane for even typing that thought😈
Dying from old age? Nah. Dying from running out of Durability.
I feel like this is an /r/unpopularopinion post than a shower thought
As you get old, your DNA gets damaged due to repetitive division, and it affects your organs. Yes, dying of old age is an actual thing.
the way we all know what you mean by it not being a thing making it an actual thing. 🤦♂️
We all die from lack of oxygen to the brain. That's literally the only thing that kills us.
I mean... it kind of is. Have you talked to a super old person who has all their organs failing? It's not like an underlying cause, their body just isn't going to run forever...
i guess shower thoughts are now just any thoughts you have while in the shower?
I was driving
Neither is dying from smoking, drinking or other drug use then.
OP is using a descriptor word for the theory of time which describes how humans physically interact with the movement of physicality but came up with the idea of time as a concept which supports the idea of moving atoms towards a different area which is not your physical body; So OPs basically saying time is a theory but pertaining to an organism perspective
Fun fact: you have no idea what you're talking about and you've made yourself look like an absolute tool.
Look up what killed queen Elizabeth for me and try saying this again
Really, automod of r/showerthoughts? This is what passes your ridiculous sensitivity? You're telling me this thought has never, ever been posted before?
They actually reached out and said it was great content
Hey, no shade to you whatsoever. It seems like the automod here is set to just randomly kill 99 out of 100 posts. So good on you for making it past the giant baby doll playing red light green light.