Your body starts falling apart faster if you don’t maintain it.
There's a corollary here that I don't see anyone talking about. If you set a good plan to maintain your body fitness from say your mid 30s on, one day you'll be doing that same reasonable workout routine and then you hurt yourself because its too much. Yesterday it was fine, the prior 15 years it had been fine, but now its not, and you have an injury you need 3 to 6 months to recover from. You think its a fluke and, once healed, you go back to your fitness routine and you injury yourself in a different way. Another 3 to 6 months of recovery.
There appears to be a need to modify or abandon parts of your fitness routine as you get older, but there's no guidebook on what to stop doing and when, nor what to be doing instead.