I could at least enjoy life with my handful of old friends.

They could enjoy life with their cliques as well--passengers invariably divide up into cliques, on all ships.
And I will say, here, that I would rather travel with an excursion party of Methuselahs than have to be changing ships and comrades constantly, as people do who travel in the ordinary way.

Those latter are always grieving over some other ship they have known and lost, and over other comrades whom diverging routes have separated from them.

They learn to love a ship just in time to change it for another, and they become attached to a pleasant traveling companion only to lose him.

They have that most dismal experience of being in a strange vessel, among strange people who care nothing about them, and of undergoing the customary bullying by strange officers and the insolence of strange servants, repeated over and over again within the compass of every month.