Recharging

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of recharging lately.  With most pieces of technology we use them to a certain point before they become unreliable.  The time it takes to recharge the battery grows longer and the time it takes for it to discharge when using it gets shorter with age.  I've been thinking about life and considering the human body as a machine - a biological one at that but still it shares many characteristics of a machine.  I've spoken about ageing before on this blog and how the decline in our health seems to happen quite rapidly.  Everything works perfectly for a while until one little problem, after that more and more arise until the sum of all those problems becomes significant enough to impact our lifestyles.

I've been wondering about mortality, and whether like technology, if there is an optimum performance level that degrades over time with the age of the technology.  To give an example, the older your iPod or your laptop becomes, the lower your expectations become as to its peak performance.  When you first purchase it you expect everything to work perfectly, but when you've had it ten years your expectations aren't so high.  You start to care less about it doing everything it once did and start to focus on the one thing you want it to do most of all and hope that it at least does that.

There are those that argue that you can be perfectly healthy at any age, but I would argue against that.  The human body is comprised of its constituent parts none of which are still like new unless you were literally born yesterday.  The body regenerates to an extent but the cells it replaces are not replaced with brand new cells in their factory state but rather with cells that are also aged.  That's counter-intuitive but unfortunately that's how the body works.

So if nothing will ever return to its like-new state, then it's reasonable to assert that the peak performance you can expect is whatever is optimum from the age of the body.  That leads us to the question, is it actually true to say that we should "act our age" or is whatever your body is capable of inherently the true and accurate depiction of your age?  To put it bluntly, if you can still physically do something, is it fair to say that's age-appropriate?  If you are thirty, forty, fifty, sixty etc, and you want to breakdance, or free run, or base jump, and you are capable of doing so, should you still do it just because you can, or do we really have to subscribe to the adage "just because you could doesn't mean you should" and all it entails?

Do you have to come to a natural point of acceptance where you acknowledge the limits of your own physicality and mental dexterity and limit what you do in accordance?  Is it an inevitability of life that your battery will run out more quickly with age and you will need to recharge more often or simply do less if you want to at least remain somewhate functional?