Being asocial may lead to loneliness, as well as to being alone. Though loneliness may be pretty bad, the real torture is ahead, unless you are there already: being old and alone seems to be worse than it is while you are younger, and probably a little worse than if you are not alone (though even seemingly social beings always have a chance to die alone). Generally, as you may already know and observe, you become slow and frail, experience pain a lot of time, don’t sleep well and forget things, loose teeth, loose hearing and eyesight, enjoy your chronic diseases, and much more! You also lose your job (and probably can not work anyway), and government pays you barely enough to get some food – not to mention any decent medical treatment (well, in most countries). You live in the fear of a variety of things – from bancrupcy to crime, and become more vulnerable to religions. You also don’t have much opportunities left, and pretty much nothing even remotely realistic to dream of. Something along the lines of “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”, basically.
That would probably eclipse most of your current concerns and reasons to be unhappy (well, pain alone does that efficiently), but then there is death. Let’s try to consider the most common natural death causes, and what you are likely to experience in the end!
As can be seen in Wikipedia, the causes do vary depending on environment, so here are the grouped causes, top 5 from each group:
Developing countries:
- HIV-AIDS
- Lower respiratory infections
- Ischaemic heart disease
- Diarrhea
- Cerebrovascular disease
Developed countries:
- Ischaemic heart disease
- Cerebrovascular disease
- Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
- Lower respiratory infections
- Lung cancer
Obviously, avoiding one would lead to another, though it might be desirable to do what you can to avoid the most painful ones, unless you are going to apply for euthanasia (which, unfortunately, is not easy nowadays). But those are not the direct causes; let’s take lung cancer and observe the variety of its possible outcomes:
- Tumor burden – 30%
- Tumoral load in the lungs – 4%
- Tumor load from metastases – 26%
- Infections – 20%
- Pneumonia – 12%
- Sepsis – 8%
- Complications of Metastatic Disease – 18%
- Pulmonary Hemorrhage – 12%
- Pulmonary Embolism – 10%
- Others – 10%, apparently
Now, let’s pick pneumonia out of it: there is something about fluid in your lungs, though it is not clear from Wikipedia what exactly a person dying of it would experience, and it is not easy to find answers to such questions. Well, apparently we will not get any usable and comprehensive statistics on that topic today, but we see that there is plenty of options.
The conclusion is: the last years of your life would likely to be comparable by the amount of pain and despair to all the previous years combined, and there is a lot of ways to die. Better to get prepared, if you have any opportunity to do so; there is a bunch of ways to reduce or to cut out the suffering, including stable income sources and suicide kits.