You're Going to Die Anyway, So ...

As people age, lifestyles and habits that were less than healthy sometimes get left by the wayside in a later-years attempt to stretch out a lifespan. If you've decided, however, that longevity isn't necessarily what you're aiming for, you might still want to tweak your lifestyle just a little. Getting yourself out to the nearest bookstore, or even an online site like "Indie Bound" will help you make the necessary adjustment. There you can purchase your guide to going out happy, whenever it happens.
The book you'll need is "Old Man Drinks", a 160 page wealth of wisdom on how to pickle yourself with the kinds of drinks that grandpa used to knock back during his barstool days. Recipes for alcoholic age-defiers like Sidecars and Rusty Nails are included along with real photos of real ol' guys guzzling back their poison of choice.
If, however, you have decided that you do want to try and stretch out your allotted time as much as possible, you'll need to do your tweaking in another direction. While the jury is still out whether or not alcohol consumption can contribute to healthy aging, the verdict is definitely in on marriage. Researchers at the New Jersey Institute for Successful Aging (NJISA) have announced in an article in The Gerontologist that being married is one significant factor in successful aging. Their findings are based on telephone surveys conducted with more than 5,600 New Jersey residents between the ages of 50 and 74. If you're single and decide to take the life-lengthening walk to the altar, you could enlist a little help from friends and family, get yourself right out there on the marriage market and maybe even be tying the knot before week's end! According to the good folk at NJISA, this is one modifiable indicator of healthy golden years to come. Just to be sure you're clear on this, however, there's a caveat. Successful aging is not something you can suddenly give all your attention to when you hit retirement in the expectation of reversing years of "pary hearty" attitudes that saw you helping to originate every recipe in a book like "Old Man Drinks". Nope. Unfortunately, as Rachel Pruchno, PhD, killjoy, and the director of research at NJISA says, "Our research shows how aging is a lifelong process. (emphasis my own) The person you become at a very old age is really a function of how you lived your earlier years."
The researchers also found other significant indicators like how much formal education subjects had acquired and whether or not they had served jail time. In other words, while getting hitched is a criterion of successful aging that you can still do something about a little later in life , what you did in your younger years can never be changed and it might just come back and bite you in the ass.
In case it does, consider getting yourself a copy of the abovementioned book. After all, no matter how successfully you age, you're still going to die sooner or later, so you might just want to throw caution to the wind and ride out on a wave of pickled glory!