Margaritaville

In our consumer-oriented society it was bound to happen, a legendary rock star leverages his name to develop a retirement community. In this case, it is 70-year-old Jimmy Buffett who is using the Florida landscape in Daytona Beach to establish an active, 55+ adult community called Latitude Margaritaville.

The $1 billion project features 6,900 homes, 200,000 square-feet of retail stores, a band shell for live performances, and a free shuttle to the beach. It aims to rival the Villages, a planned city of nearly 160,000 people near Orlando.

The prospect of spending one’s golden years in a tequila-cheeseburger haze raises the question: is aging a natural process that should be accepted as inevitable, or is it pathologic, a disease that should be prevented and treated like cancer or diabetes?

One argument used against labeling aging as a disease is that aging is universal among humans. Everyone ages. In contrast ‘classical diseases’ never affect everyone in a population. However, what if we were suddenly hit by a pandemic? The infection would be called a disease while it was spreading around the globe. However, once everyone got it, it would be defined as a universal condition.

Which brings us back to Margaritaville, the tequila-cheeseburger induced haze, and the real debate going on between aging rock and rollers: who was the better band--the Beatles or the Rolling Stones?
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Learn more:
http://www.longevityreporter.org/blog/2016/12/5/biological-aging-is-a-disease-and-it-is-time-to-recognize-it-as-such
http://www.cell.com/trends/molecular-medicine/fulltext/S1471-4914(16)30142-3
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/47264/title/Opinion--Aging--Just-Another-Disease/
http://www.spin.com/2017/03/heres-jimmy-buffetts-inevitable-margaritaville-retirement-community/
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