How old is too old?

Age, I tell myself, is mostly a number. If you are fit and lucky, you don’t have to slow down. I pick up weights. I read new books. I listen to Billie Eilish and try not to indulge in narcotic nostalgia.

Yet there are facts. No one gets out of this world alive.

If you look up the life expectancy for an American man on the Internet, you will probably come across the figure 78.7, which people who calculate such things say is the number of years American males born in 2019 may expect to live.

Let’s think about that number. Since 78.7 is an average, we might expect relatively few of the infants born this year to actually die in 2097 or 2098. Some will die earlier, some will die later—maybe there’ll be some sort of breakthrough and some will die much, much later. Maybe by 2100 we’ll have revised our ideas about what it means to die. Maybe we’ll have figured out some way to upload our essence and ditch the carbon-based packing material.

Or maybe environmental catastrophe or that giant meteor our government is not telling us about in order to avoid a panic will strike the planet.

Basically 78.7 is a guess, which doesn’t apply to those born before 2019.

We are vulnerable when we are very young, and teenagers and young adults tend to be more reckless and violent than middle-aged folks. While accident and disease might harvest any of us at any time, if you make it through to 55 or 60 you have a pretty high probability of outliving whatever life expectancy was assigned to your cohort.

For the same reason that the sports books in Las Vegas are considered the best at setting point spreads for football games, actuarial life tables maintained by life insurance companies are considered pretty good at predicting how long a given person can expect to live.

Generally, if you’re a 70-year-old American man in good health, those charts give you about a 70 percent chance of living another decade and about a 20 percent chance of reaching 90.

Women on average live longer than men. According to the Social Security Administration’s Retirement & Survivors Benefits: Life Expectancy Calculator (which you can find at www.ssa.gov/oact/population/longevity.html), a woman born on Oct. 6, 1949, can expect to live 17.3 more years. A man born the same day can expect to live 15.2 more years.

These numbers don’t take anything into account other than the fact that the subject has survived 70 years on this planet. There are more sophisticated calculators out there; I found one “developed by professors of the University of Pennsylvania” that considers such factors as height, weight, race, education, annual income, how often they work out, how much they drink, whether they’ve ever smoked, etc.

I typed in the vital statistics of our current 73-year-old POTUS ,and the table told me he has a 75 percent chance to live to age 80. Plenty of time for a second term.

Joe Biden, now 76, scored a 75 percent chance to live to 85. Theoretically, he’d be good for an eight-year-run.

The calculator says Elizabeth Warren, who is 70, has a 75 percent chance to live to 88 and a 25 percent chance to live to 100.

Bernie Sanders is 78; he suspended all campaign events after undergoing heart surgery last week and it remains to be seen whether he’ll

resume his candidacy.

If he does, he won’t be the oldest person ever to seek the presidency. That dubious honor might go to William Hope “Coin” Harvey, who turned 81 during the 1932 campaign. He was the nominee of his own Liberty Party that he ran from Benton County.

Harvey had become a national celebrity in the 1890s as an advocate of the Free Silver movement and confederate of William Jennings Bryan, who was a presidential candidate at the age of 36. Harvey moved to Arkansas after Bryan’s defeat in 1896, built a railroad, opened a resort with a golf course, and organized a bank. At first he called the new settlement Silver Springs, but he soon changed that to Monte Ne.

In the 1920s, Harvey became disenchanted with civilization and planned to build a 130-foot-high pyramid in Monte Ne which would serve as a time capsule of civilization’s greatest achievements. At the top of the pyramid he planned to place a plaque, to be discovered after the dust and dirt of centuries had buried the tomb, that read: “When this can be read, go below and find the cause of the death of a former civilization.”

The stock market crash of 1929 effectively put an end to Harvey’s pyramid scheme; but in 1930 he formed the Liberty Party, which was predicated on the idea Democrats and Republicans had become indistinguishable and that neither party was prepared to lead the nation out of the Great Depression. The party slogan was Prosperity in 90 Days.

The campaign didn’t go smoothly; Harvey didn’t get along with running mate Andrae B. Nordskog of Los Angeles, who was subsequently dropped from the ticket. There were also attempts to remove Harvey from the head of the ticket, which prompted the chairman of the party’s national committee to write, in defense of the candidate: “I deny that Mr. Harvey is unbearable.”

Am I being ageist when I say I would prefer not to vote for someone older than myself?

I don’t know the answer to that question, though I would prefer it be no. What’s odd is how quickly things have changed. Barack Obama was the first president who was younger than me. I remember how ancient Ronald Reagan seemed when he ran in 1980 at the age of 69. He was 73 when he ran for re-election.

I don’t believe that anyone should ever feel they are too old to do what they want to do. Most things matter more than how long you’ve hung around on the planet. It’s difficult to guess people’s ages; I see 40-year-olds who look older than retirees. I’ve known nonagenarians who could drive at night and dance.

Winston Churchill was re-elected British prime minister in 1951 at 77. I don’t think Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg should retire at 86, but Oliver Wendell Holmes hung on to his seat on the Court too long. He was 85 when he famously wrote, in a majority opinion upholding a statute instituting compulsory sterilization, that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” (Holmes was joined by seven younger justices when he handed down that odious opinion.)

Maybe it’s not the age of these candidates that has me worried.

Maybe it’s just the candidates.

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