Living in the backwards lane

Let me warn you right now that I am just ranting, well sort of, in this post. Not everything I will type is logical to everyone but at this moment it makes sense to me.
Why is it that we live life backwards? When we are young we have no money and we have no wisdom, yet we make some of the most important decsion about our future during our first couple decades of life. Then we spend the rest of our life dealing with the mistakes we have made during a time when we let hormones and emotions control our thinking. We need money for education and physical development and maintenace. By physical development and maintenance I mean the medical/dental/eye expenses in addition to the nutrition and physical fitness counseling/training we should all start off with to become healthy people. Do you know how many illnesses we as Americans could avoid if we just were taught how to take care of ourselves better? I mean SERIOUSLY think about that! Our older years wouldn't be so hard if we just prepared better for them.
Although we are probably the strongest and most physically fit during the first half of our lifetime and probably more capable of hard labor, quicker reflexes and response time and better able to enduring long shifts and meet deadlines to earn wages, those are the years when we need to create a home and invest time in our family. You can't do that when you are at work for 8-10 hours each day and so full of stress and so low on sleep that you just go through the motions of daily routines. Children need our undivided attention and love to develop fully and in the most positive way. Not to mention that healthier people would probably (in most cases) produce more healthy offspring. When we are older we are more settled and have more time on our hands for some of the things we sacrifice raising our children for. We start off with small apartments then on to a small house and move into a larger home for the growing family and then when it's just down to two we have a huge house and only need a small apartment.

It just all seems backwards to me.