You're Too Old to Believe You Can Live Forever. Instead, Let's Live Right Now
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back
The moment we’re born we begin to die as well. How about we live the moments we’re given?
Do you dread aging? Is that dread ruining your joy?
Fear of aging is a widespread problem, spurred on by societal values around aging. I’ll be addressing this regularly. I’ll also recommend the best books and articles I’ve found on the topic which help us live our best lives right now.
It’s Wednesday, 5:30 am here in Eugene. In about an hour I’m off to the coast to run the sand dunes, part of my rehab for a broken hip. It’s also a wholesale celebration of life.
I love the coast, and I love exercise. I love being able to exercise, after this past year of surgeries and injuries.
Wednesdays are Hump Days at my house. I spend them anywhere but at my work desk. I was a 90-hour a week compulsive entrepreneur. Nearly killed me off, too.
It kills way too many of us. To that:
Is that how we want to go out, dying in our traces for companies which are oh-so-eager to replace us right away?
Worse, what about those who retire and are gone all too soon?
I’m seventy. Time is becoming limited. If my life is a ship, the distant shoreline that marks the end of this life is now in sight.
Ten years ago I began an extraordinary journey to, in part, make up for forty years of intense eating disorders. That disease cost me a lot of life. The hours I wasn’t working, that disorder owned every waking moment. That came to an end almost thirteen years ago.
We’re not living when in the grips of addiction or obsessive compulsive disorder.
I chose life in January 2011. That was just the beginning. Still,
I’m going to die. So will you. So will all things which live right now. We all owe Mother Nature a life, a body at some point.
Yet most of us, I suspect, believe in some tiny magical part of our reptilian brain that somehow, we are so special, we’re going to be that person who will cheat death.
It’s not going to happen to us.
We will slip past death. The world just can’t be the world without us in it.
Yeah, well, it can. The world will be just fine, like it was before we got here. Our egos may not like that much, but that doesn’t change the facts.
Given that inevitability, you’d think most of us would put more effort into appreciating the time we have. That’s what I want to touch on here: life.
Today’s piece was inspired in part by yet another article about a billionaire bro, part of the Silicon Valley club, named Bryan Johnson. This guy spends somewhere upwards of two million a year to stave off aging.
This version of Johnson’ s story, written by TIME’s Charlotte Alter, was the closest I’ve seen to exposing his gerascophobia.
Especially his willingness to take blood from his teenage son in order to lengthen his own life.
Consider that for a moment. Guy is so obsessed that he would use blood from his own child to lengthen his life. It’s one thing if your kidneys have failed and your son’s donation can save your life.
Look, you may think that’s perfectly acceptable. Any parent who even thinks this is okay is seriously troubled, but that’s just me.
Johnson strikes me as just as compulsive about his anti-aging process as I ever was at the worst of my eating disorders. Possibly worse.
You can eat well and exercise like a banshee, but if what’s between your ears isn’t also healthy, you will still age badly.
Oh, that hurts to write, because I’ve been guilty of just that.
If we’re that miserable, why on earth would we want to live longer? Just to eat more Cheetos and beer? Or to prove we’ve still got the biggest biceps on the block? To prove you can push the aging process back a few years?
If we can’t be happy, why stick around past our due date?
Many of the world’s oldest people are also among the happiest, which is one reason that there is so much attention on them.
Where it all really starts
All aging begins between the ears. All of it. Even if we do all the things to take better care of the body, our final years can be miserable. That’s why so many of these extreme efforts are almost laughable, including all the Blue Zone studies, unless we address our mental health.
Stories about the Blue Zones point out the nutrition, exercise, community and purpose aspects of the centenarians. That’s just not enough important detail. The rich emotional health of those centenarians is a key part of their success.
The last chapter of Dr. Peter Attia’s wonderful book Outlive addresses the mental health piece of our aging process.
In the middle of the Covid pandemic Attia had a serious meltdown. Nearly cost him everything: practice, wife, friends, family. He had to do something different, so he sought help. Found it.
Attia writes that the more mindful he became, the less he suffered. The less he suffered, the less he feared death, and of course, aging. The less he feared aging and death, the more alive he is in the moment.
There’s no there, no absolute fix. Only more progress built on tiny steps. It’s a moment-to-moment, 24-7 work-of-art effort.
Some days, the art we create is a Jackson Pollock, messy and all over the damned place. Some days, it’s a DaVinci, pure genius.
For my part, the DaVinci days don’t yet outnumber the Pollock days. As with many of us I have sludge in my bucket that needs addressing. It’s no fun, but it’s necessary if I want more art in what left of my time on eARTh.
Emotional health takes work, as hard as any training program you and I take on at the gym.
(Twelve hours later, at the end of Hump Day)
Today was a DaVinci day.
Eight weeks ago I snapped my left femur neck. This morning I was trudging up these dunes and running down the other side. Every so often I caught my breath, and reminded myself that one out of every three people my age in America dies from a similar injury.
That brings me back right to the moment, the cool sand, the hard work, the bright September sun at the top of the hill. Here I am schlepping up this hill of sand, when other people who broke their hips aren’t going to do this again.
Ever.
I hiked, met new friends, played with dogs.
A DaVinci day.
You bet I’m grateful.
I can do this without thirty doctors on the payroll, which is what Bryan Johnson has at his beck and call.
Bryan Johnson is selling snake-oil hope to folks who would be vastly better served by taking better care of their nutrition, exercise, social communities, their reasons for being alive and their emotional health.
Peddling magical promises to stave off death panders to people’s fear of aging. Worse, it appeals to our collective resistance to putting in the effort to help our bodies and minds heal.
To my mind, he’s traded one addiction (work) for another (try to cheat death). I’ve traded one compulsion for another, too. This is why focusing on longevity without focusing on our self-awareness and emotional health doesn’t get us quality of life.
GQ did a similar article on Johnson, but ended it with this:
The practical implications of this science for the average guy are not so extreme. Barzilai says there are simple steps that people can take right now to make a dent in their own biological age. It comes down to four elements: exercise, nutrition, sleep, and social connectivity. “If you target those four, he says, “then you can really make a major advance.”
The greatest advances come when we also invest in our mental wellness. That makes all the others a joy, for they are self-care.
Johnson will still die, and he may not have lived, assuming he keeps this up. I will still die, and with luck will do so while being busy living out loud.
I’m tired and happy from a day on the coast working the dunes, meeting new people and petting their dogs, all of which gives me great joy.
I drove the coast, caught my breath at the beauty, and was filled with the kind of untrammeled joy that such a day can deliver. Didn’t spend a single moment worrying about how OLD I was getting.
Call me nuts, but it makes far more sense to make incremental and important changes which allow us to live fuller, happier lives rather than invest our time, treasure and emotional energy in stopping what cannot be stopped: time.
You don’t have to be rich to do that.
Let’s live.
Even better,
Let’s play.
Thank you for the gift of your attention. You can’t get that time back and I hope it was well spent.
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