THIS IS WHY I WANT MORE MEDICAL RESEARCH NOW:

Nearly one in five U.S. adults (46 million people) has arthritis and an estimated 67 million people will be affected by 2030. Osteoarthritis, the most common type of arthritis, currently affects more than 27 million people in the U.S. . . . Add in rheumatoid arthritis, decaying spinal disks, and other joint problems and your odds of eventually living in pain from skeletal pains become quite high. If you aren’t living in pain now you probably will eventually – barring big advances in biomedical science and biotechnology.

Ugh. Aging is a disease, and romanticizing it in terms of the great wheel of life or something is just a species of denial.