Length Matters: Longevity Is Having a Moment

My birthday was Monday.?

At 43, I’ve lived the life of seven six-year olds – my own tee ball team! – two 21-year olds, and over half the life of an 85 year old. As I begin my 44th year, I think it’s fair to say I’m now staring down the back half of my days. My dad, also named Brian, died when he was 85, so you could say I have a template to work from.?

Question is: Is 85 enough?

Days for us humans are in limited supply – aging is a natural process and death is the unavoidable end for us all. This has been the prevailing logic, presumably forever. But between 1916 and 2020, life expectancy in the United States doubled, largely because of extraordinary scientific advances (vaccines, antibiotics, germ theory). And while the last three years (2019-2022) have seen an unprecedented regression in US life expectancy (gun violence, poor diets, opioids), it’s generally true that humans are living longer than ever before. Seeing the progress made over the last century, you have to wonder what life expectancy will be 100 years from now – another doubling??

Pulling that 2123 life expectancy into 2023 is the implied goal of an increasingly emergent field of study and practice, longevity.?

Longevity is the arena of living longer than what is otherwise expected. In the past five years, a small cohort of middle aged men have been leading the public conversation about longevity, a few names you may recognize: Peter Attia (50), David Sinclair (53), Mark Hyman, MD (63), Aubrey de Grey (60), and Bryan Johnson (45). These men consider linear aging optional and lifespan as something to be manipulated – that is, extended through pharmacological, technological, and behavioral interventions. They have developed substantial amounts of content (podcasts, books, protocols), followers, and subsequent businesses. As of this writing, “Outlive,” the long awaited book by Attia – the country’s most influential longevity physician – is the number one overall best selling book on Amazon.

In addition to Attia’s book, the last few months have also seen the most well-known longevity scientist, Sinclair, announce $10m in funding for his consumer longevity startup Tally; and Johnson, the Venmo-founder-turned-biohacking-billionaire, release Blueprint, an anti-aging protocol that includes, among other things, 100 pills a day and claims to reduce the rate of aging by 24%.?

Is the pursuit of ever more life a disavowal of the hard truth of being alive – we break, we age, we die? Is longevity anti-human? Or, is what it means to be a healthy human increasingly about merging our bodies with technology – that is, becoming less (only) human? Real question.

It’s hard to overlook the fact that the leaders in longevity are overwhelmingly white, midlife men, as if longevity is the business of masculinity. Why are men in particular interested in living longer? Because Western hegemonic masculinity is grounded in an assumption of power, and there’s nothing more impotent than a feeble old man, or worse, a dead one. Living longer is living more manly. Length matters.

But let’s be honest, who among us doesn't want to live a long and healthy life? There’s nothing pathological about the desire to not have life cut short. So why not proactively invest in a longer lifespan now, when it’s not too late?

I, for one, have no interest in dying anytime soon. (I can’t imagine anything more unpleasant.) Even still, there’s something unsettling about this longevity moment. I’m resistant. It has something to do with the unachievable pursuit of immortality, and something to do with an extraordinarily long window of effect, which makes any promise for what’s going to happen in my 80s fall flat now, in my 40s.?

But my resistance also comes from an unavoidable curiosity about what it means to be human: Is the pursuit of ever more life a disavowal of the hard truth of being alive – we break, we age, we die? Is longevity anti-human? Or, is what it means to be a healthy human increasingly about merging our bodies with technology – that is, becoming less (only) human? Real question.

Being a human is what I imagine being a parent is like – no one gives you a manual with the exact way to care for this fragile being. We’re all figuring it out as we go and, I choose to believe, we’re all doing our best.?

At the same time, we live in a world where being well is now a moral imperative; to be a good and acceptable person is to be well or to be on the path to wellness. So maybe I’m just grumpy about longevity being an expensive new trend that is the next requirement in a long line of hoops to jump through to earn my wellness card, even if there are extraordinary new learnings that could help me live longer.??

So, to come back to my original question – Is 85 enough? – yes, I think it is. Of course, longevity is vapid if the goal is only to move a terminal date on a calendar. As most longevity experts are careful to point out, there’s a significant difference between lifespan (how long you live) and healthspan (how well you live). There’s no point in extending lifespan without extending healthspan and, I might add, tossing in a healthy dose of happyspan too.

I have no way of knowing how I’ll feel at 85, if I’m fortunate enough to make it that far. But I do know that there’s no sense in preparing to live to 45, much less 85, without an investment in actually living those days.?

So, if longevity can be understood as an intention to live life fully today and for as many days to come, then I’m all for it.?

Brian

For more notes from? Brian McGrath Davis ,?sign up for our?newsletter, follow?@thinkparable?on Instagram, and stay in touch right here, at?Parable.