Being "happy" can be achieved with anti-depressants and being "alive" can be achieved by essentially turning you into a vegetable.
You're happy and alive, yet I highly doubt this is what you had in mind when you wrote that line. You clearly want more than just being happy and alive. You also want to be free and an individual and have an impact on the world and all those other things humans want .. but sadly often times you can only have less and less of those as you grow old.
My reply was semi sarcastic, and targeted at the assumption that being old equals having a useless life.
TFA states that most of the elderly still enjoy being part of a community and contributing to it, sharing their time and the food they grow. So in addition to being healthy and active, they have some kind of beneficial peer pressure to take part in the community. I doubt you'd get the same feeling of happiness and belonging by taking a daily dose of anti-depressants, but I have no experience with those. As for being alive, there's more to it than merely being not-dead :-)
I must admit I reacted mainly to the "ineffectual life" part of the comment which, to me, sounded like "they're not building a startup or trying to send people to Mars so it's useless", but there's a good chance I misinterpreted that part of the comment.
You're not thinking this through thoroughly.
Being "happy" can be achieved with anti-depressants and being "alive" can be achieved by essentially turning you into a vegetable.
You're happy and alive, yet I highly doubt this is what you had in mind when you wrote that line. You clearly want more than just being happy and alive. You also want to be free and an individual and have an impact on the world and all those other things humans want .. but sadly often times you can only have less and less of those as you grow old.