I want to be honest with you. I want to live a long life.
The life expectancy in the U.S. is 79.25 years. As a lifetime high achiever, I don’t consider anything below 90 acceptable.
Then I was informed by several well-researched books that aging can be postponed, perhaps forever. With imminent scientific breakthroughs, the first person to live 150 years is already among us.
Inspired, I have updated my goal to 120 years.
Surprisingly, many friends don’t share my enthusiasm. Old age is no fun. It is plagued with pain and diseases. Why do you want to extend such a miserable existence?
Sorry, perhaps I haven’t made myself clear. When I say “a long life,” I don’t mean one spent in a wheelchair. Instead, I’m talking about a healthy life where you can hike up mountains.
You see, the beauty of “curing” aging, the focus of longevity research, is that it can prevent dreaded diseases like cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s, which are nothing but byproducts of aging.
By now you are probably half convinced. But another question immediately pops up: suppose you are right, what will you do with all the time?
Answer: Plenty.
I would explore a few different careers, beginning as an engineer, pivoting to become a writer, and wrapping it all up with a grand finale as a firefighter. I’d travel the world. Might even visit Mars if Elon Musk figures out the logistics soon enough. Best of all, I will have an army of great-great-grandchildren. I will be sure to shower them with unabashed affection.
Sounds like an amazing life, doesn’t it? But that’s not all. There is something even better: I will see the future.
What does the future look like? I don’t know. That’s exactly why I want to find out.
But I do know it will be very different from today. Why? Because I have studied history. Human progress follows an exponential pattern. Once we hit a tipping point, all previous advancements seem like a flat line, as if nothing has ever happened.
Homo sapiens have existed for 200,000 years, but writing has only been around for about 5,000 years. Looking back, history didn’t truly start until then.
The Industrial Revolution was another watershed moment. If you had lived before it, you wouldn’t have even imagined the thrill of riding a train, sending a telegraph, or messing up with tons of other fun innovations.
The game-changing moments used to be few and far between. But thanks to Moore’s Law predicting the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years, things are happening at a pace more commensurate to a mortal’s timeframe.
The personal computers emerged in 1977, the internet arrived in 1993, and the smartphone was born in 2007. I grew up in an era without the internet or smartphone. Now I can’t fathom how we survived such a primitive existence.
The latest marvel is ChatGPT. It’s only a language model, but it has offered a sneak preview of the future.
I imagine living in a household with a maid as even-tempered and knowledgeable as ChatGPT who also cooks and cleans. When I invite friends to dinner, which I love sans the part of preparing the dinner, I can devote my attention to conversations about politics and movies without worrying about anything else.
I want to be able to travel virtually, visiting Musee d’Orsay and Louvre without enduring the jet lag and the long lines. I want to meet with parents and friends, have dinner with them, and even touch and hug them, although we live on different continents.
I want to inhabit the minds of Shakespeare, Kant, or Thomas Jefferson, feeling how they felt in their natural surroundings at critical historical moments.
I know my imaginative power is limited. I hope you understand what I mean.
People living in that future will look at us with pity. What? They didn’t find out they have cancer until it’s too late? They had to spend four years in school just to master the basics of one field? They had to buy furniture from a store instead of having a 3D printer custom-make it for their home?
In my opinion, the problem is not whether we want to live a long life. It is whether age-prolonging science will arrive early enough.
I know I should keep my optimism in check. But who doesn’t love a little hope? The pace of progress can be startlingly fast. Two years ago, most had not heard of ChatGPT. Now half the world is worrying it will rise up and destroy us.
Seriously, hope has its perks. By inspiring me to wait for the next wave of the medical revolution, hope motivates me to make the most of the tools we already have — eating well, avoiding stress, and exercising — to extend my life.
Speaking of a longer life, here’s another bonus: it can make you rich, because as Einstein famously said, “The most powerful force in the Universe is compound interest.”
About 99% of Warren Buffett’s fortune was made after his 50th birthday. If you manage to snag an extra 15 years, imagine what that can do to your wealth.
So, if you ever find yourself in a tug-of-war between health and other prizes — promotion, fame, money — go with health. If you work too hard without sufficient rest or exercise, you will likely die sooner. With that early exit, you miss out on greater financial success and the chance to witness the future, which would be a real bummer.
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