The missing half of longevity
Field Note · Cognitive Health
“We might be good at adding years to a life. But are we as good at adding life to those years?”
Ask someone in the longevity space what they are doing to live longer, and they will probably tell you very specific practices: cold exposure, cardio, eight hours of sleep, time-restricted eating, glucose monitoring, and so much more. The hardcore biohackers might have spreadsheets, researchers in the longevity space might run randomised control trials, and overall, people will have no shortage of advice and protocols. But ask them what they're planning to do with the extra decades, and the answers are way less concrete and thought through.
I like the idea of longevity, don't get me wrong. I think we should train not only our physical, but also our cognitive and mental body to live longer and stay sharp - that's why I created this platform. But even if the science succeeds, do we have happy people on the other side of the equation? We can optimise ferociously, but what's the end goal and our destination?
Some people claim that, if you look honestly, longevity is just a more sophisticated fear of death. Looking for a holy grail where you drink the miracle water and live forever. Because the tracking, supplementing, constant measuring - it can be a way of at least feeling that you have control over something that you usually don't. But it's also worth asking: what are you actually trying to preserve, and which part of your life? Viktor Frankl, writing from Auschwitz, argued that the will to meaning is more fundamental than the will to pleasure or even survival. People could endure almost anything if they had a reason for it. What was hard to survive, psychologically, was purposelessness. So if we take Frankl seriously, then a movement of longevity that has thorough answers to how but seriously lacks the why suddenly has a major omission.
So, probably longevity as a goal itself is not the right unit. I would argue that a long life is not inherently better than a short one - we probably know this, we probably have at least some examples of people who lived long and struggled all their lives, and people who died young and full of life. What I think matters is the ratio: how much of your life is spent doing things that feel to you like the reason to live. This may sound too abstract, but what would you do if you suddenly got an extra twenty years? People will say "travel" or "spend time with my family", but those are placeholders, not actual destinations. What are you currently deferring that you'd finally get to? What would you build, learn, make, understand? I think sometimes it's much easier to follow the given protocols than to sit uncomfortably with these questions.
The lab experiment
Write down three things you'd do with an extra decade that you're not doing now. Be specific enough that someone else could picture it. Then ask yourself what's actually stopping you from starting it now and whether the answer requires more years or just a different decision about the ones you have.
