> It’s easy to get enough rest if no one else wakes up early and the village goes dead during afternoon naptime. It helps that the cheapest, most accessible foods are also the most healthful — and that your ancestors have spent centuries developing ways to make them taste good. It’s hard to get through the day in Ikaria without walking up 20 hills. You’re not likely to ever feel the existential pain of not belonging or even the simple stress of arriving late. Your community makes sure you’ll always have something to eat, but peer pressure will get you to contribute something too. You’re going to grow a garden, because that’s what your parents did, and that’s what your neighbors are doing.
Great article. This importance of pervasive cultural factors was the key insight for me. I follow an unusual diet that happens to consist of 100% unprocessed foods. I allow myself to sleep when I'm tired. I live somewhere I can enjoy long walks and other fun exercise. I'm never late because I don't set schedules.
> In the United States, you can’t go to a movie, walk through the airport or buy cough medicine without being routed through a gantlet of candy bars, salty snacks and sugar-sweetened beverages. The processed-food industry spends more than $4 billion a year tempting us to eat. How do you combat that? Discipline is a good thing, but discipline is a muscle that fatigues. Sooner or later, most people cave in to relentless temptation.
This is the trouble with following a different lifestyle; almost every aspect of it conflicts with modern culture. Buying vegetables at a store, there's tasty frozen pizza across the isle. Going out with friends, for variety and a normal social atmosphere, modern-influenced food is the only option. Walk into a gas station and there's the chips. Look at cat pics on the internet and there's pictures of beer and bacon. Everyone wants to set a schedule, out of habit if not the belief that stress increases productivity. People call to talk late at night.
Even after forming good habits, every instance of conflict with the culture requires some willpower, and socially, each requires an explanation. The only way I've succeeded is when living a more isolated lifestyle, somewhere remote. That leaves out cultural enjoyment and reinforcement.
I think its entirely possible to live in a Western society and live with those principles ascribed above.
It just takes will power but it hasn't ever been easier. The overall population has more access to healthful, natural foods than in the past. I'm always amazed that on many street corners in NYC a vendor is willing to sell you produce at incredible prices (4 bananas for $1, $2 for a small cart of blueberries, etc) considering that many of these products come from thousands of miles away and are incredibly perishable.
Discovering communities that share your beliefs and lifestyle is also a lot easier today than it has been.
I think a lot of people that don't ascribe to this healthful lifestyle just have different values. Some people like cheap processed food. It's a lot more consistent and convenient than many other food products. I don't believe in any kind of global conspiracy that wants to push foods bad for your health or inactive lifestyles. I guess maybe its less depressing to think that societal forces manipulate people rather than the idea that people make conscious health related trade-offs for their own reasons.
>>Great article. This importance of pervasive cultural factors was the key insight for me. I follow an unusual diet that happens to consist of 100% unprocessed foods. I allow myself to sleep when I'm tired. I live somewhere I can enjoy long walks and other fun exercise. I'm never late because I don't set schedules.
I'd love to do that. But I also love my job so I sit in an air-conditioned office for 8 hours a day. If I am tired I have to drink coffee. I try to eat healthily(only organic food),but it's still not enough. I could abandon all of it and live in a wilderness somewhere,but unfortunately it's not sustainable on a larger scale.
I've been there. I think it's right to do that for what you love. I'm trying to start a business I love that I can do remotely. The sole reason I can do all of this now is remote work with great low-pressure clients.
I wonder about these longevity clusters and whether they aren't just random. If you've read The Drunkard's Walk, (which I highly recommend by the way) there's a similar phenomenon with cancer clusters and the distribution of shells when the Germans were bombing London.
In both cases people rushed to find some explanation for why the events happened in clusters like they did. What were the Germans trying to target? What's in the water/air that's causing cancer? But if you distribute things completely at random, you end up with the same sort of clusters purely by chance.
So if everyone has a given percent chance of living to a certain age, and it's randomly distributed throughout the world, you'd expect that there would be some clusters where groups of people living a long time show up by chance. It's not quite that simple of course, because longevity isn't independent from one person to the next. e.g. if everyone in your family lives a really long time, there's a good chance you'll live a really long time too. But I'd be curious to see if these clusters happen at a greater incidence than one would expect them to randomly occur or if there's even some way to measure that.
I really enjoyed your argument. But why did you weaken it by reintroducing systematic cause:
>> if everyone in your family lives a really long time, there's a good chance you'll live a really long time too
This implies assumption of some sort of cause, which one would then expect to hold in other parts outside that cluster, too. Which I understood as: the island's longevity could be random -- but not really.
As the side note says: "The key to Ikarian longevity is not simply a healthful diet; daily socializing may be just as crucial." And taking a daily nap and drink vine.
This is probably true and helps a lot. But who created the statistics? The pension system there is widely misused. People keep their death parents "alive" on paper to receive their pension for many years. It was so widespread and the loss so great in Creek (and some other EU countries) that the European Union intervened.
That sounds identical to the opening chapter of Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers! [1]
'What Wolf slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they began to realize why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited each other, stopping to chat with each other in Italian on the street, or cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.
In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.
"I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and you'd see three generational family meals, all the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where the women worked during the day, while the men worked in the slate quarries," Bruhn said. "It was magical."'
I know you said you're being sarcastic, but the only way something like that work on any scale is when a social equilibrium is in place, and those are pretty fragile. I guessing wildly here, but I wouldn't be surprised if Ikaria is the kind of place young people leave, so there's hardly any pressure of social change.
Obviously, the oppression and stifling isn't felt, that's the equilibrium, but I would guess that you would feel it very quickly if you tried to rock the boat. I strongly doubt that a openly gay, openly atheist couple (so, totally uncontroversial in most cities in Europe) would enjoy a happy, laid back lifestyle with plenty of daily socialising in Ikaria. I doubt that a straight, church-going couple that had married against their (Ikaria) parents will would do so.
When social conservatives long for the lost world of the past, it's places like Ikaria they have in mind.
It's not like the past won't become the future again.
Getting off-topic for me here, but...
From "The Fate Of Empires" 1978, by John Glubb, who was Lieutenant General and commander of Jordan's Arab Legion:
"The works of the contemporary historians
of Baghdad in the early tenth century are still
available. They deeply deplored the
degeneracy of the times in which they lived,
emphasising particularly the indifference to
religion, the increasing materialism and the
laxity of sexual morals. They lamented also
the corruption of the officials of the
government and the fact that politicians
always seemed to amass large fortunes while
they were in office.
The historians commented bitterly on the
extraordinary influence acquired by popular
singers over young people, resulting in a
decline in sexual morality. The ‘pop’ singers
of Baghdad accompanied their erotic songs
on the lute, an instrument resembling the
modern guitar. In the second half of the
tenth century, as a result, much obscene
sexual language came increasingly into use,
such as would not have been tolerated in an
earlier age. Several khalifs issued orders
banning ‘pop’ singers from the capital, but
within a few years they always returned.
An increase in the influence of women in
public life has often been associated with national
decline. The later Romans complained
that, although Rome ruled the world, women
ruled Rome. In the tenth century, a similar
tendency was observable in the Arab Empire,
the women demanding admission to the
professions hitherto monopolised by men.
‘What,’ wrote the contemporary historian,
Ibn Bessam, ‘have the professions of clerk,
tax-collector or preacher to do with women?
These occupations have always been limited
to men alone.’ Many women practised law,
while others obtained posts as university
professors. There was an agitation for the
appointment of female judges, which,
however, does not appear to have succeeded.
Soon after this period, government and
public order collapsed, and foreign invaders
overran the country. The resulting increase
in confusion and violence made it unsafe for
women to move unescorted in the streets,
with the result that this feminist movement
collapsed. "
No, that is you taking your agenda and layering it on top of a situation where it doesn't actually fit.
Oppression and stifling social norms cause the very same stress that these guys appear to have managed to avoid. It appears that they've found their own norms that, to a naive observer, look stifling or oppressive, when the net effect is that the average level of social comfort actually increases. Call it "traditional gender roles" or "acceptance of social inequality" if that fits your particular bias, but you cannot take such a value judgement and call it "oppression".
>This is probably true and helps a lot. But who created the statistics? The pension system there is widely misused. People keep their death parents "alive" on paper to receive their pension for many years. It was so widespread and the loss so great in Creek (and some other EU countries) that the European Union intervened.
That's actually BS based on urban legends (and inflated by the Greek government at the time for political reasons).
On actual life, this involved a small number, in the hundends, (literaly around 400-500 cases) of people using false certificates for stuff like disabillity pensions which happened in a specific prefecture.
Most of those instances were about bending the law to cover some poor person with pension that didn't really qualify for, but couldn't get any other way (e.g. getting a "blind man disability pension" to some seeing old man who without that would have become homeless or be unable to pay for his healtcare). In cultures were such social help is valued above legality, this is something that happens, exploiting laws or holes in the law, etc.
Of course this bending is counted as "corruption" (the same way that turning a blind eye in a poor families use of electricity when they don't pay their power company bill would), but its impact is negligible and is mostly a way to short-circuit ineffective social care policies in small societies. For actual corruption we have far better (and more impactful) examples in the higher echelons.
It wasn't legal, but it wasn't a "get rich quick scheme" either -- and it was far from "widespread" nor was the loss "so great". If we're talking Amdahl's law this is insignificant as far as the debt is concerned - but being a nice example against Greek corruption in general, it was blown out of proportion and used as an representative example.
Don't believe the hype. The same way the right wing blows some non-representative cases of people getting welfare in the US out of proportion.
In any case, Ikaria, the island in TFA, is not one of those places.
And where have you read about this "widely misused pension system"? I am Greek and I can asure you that this is another one of the "rumors" floating around about Greece which, as all rumors, is a blatant lie.
In fact, the pension system in Greece has been following the European standards since at least 10 years.
I am so sick and tired of outsiders spewing nonsense all of the internet about Greece without knowing any real fact.
If you read the articles -- and if you follow the proceedings in Greece, this is linkbaity headlines.
Title: "120,000 families claiming 'ghost pensions' for relatives who died years ago"
Actual content: "Greece has halted welfare or pension payments to 200,000 people either because they are unentitled to the money - or because they are dead, a Labour Ministry official said on Wednesday."
Not that the 200.000 number includes all pensions under examination -- and most of those were found to be absolutely OK in subsequent checks.
So, first the "dead getting pensions" were far from "120,000" (more close to a few thousands -- and of those "dead cases" most were recent deaths of a few months were the reported death wasn't yet registered (the bureacracy is chaotic).
The final tally was some 40.000 problematic pensions (which in a huge messy bureacracy like Greece includes pensions missing a few supporting documents, having 1% less "pension credits" than needed, etc), and around 2.500 cases of "dead pensioners".
Moreover, of those "dead pensioners" most were cases of people who died with no relatives etc and weren't declared to stop the pension being deposited. Of the 35 million euros deposited to dead pensioners, the state found that the 21 million euros were such and reclaimed it immediately ( http://www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.article&id=380165 ). The rest could be actual fraud cases.
Not as impressive as the BS baity headlines that preceded the investigation one year before. The government merely wanted to give an impression of wide corruption, in order to sweeten the passage of some anti-pension laws.
There are no European standards for pension systems. It's typically one of those things that hasn't been unified.
Both the pension fraud and the early retirement age in Greece where hotly debated and well documented topics, not "rumors".
I think the problem here lies in the different cultural perception of the phrase "widely misused". For Greek values, 1% is a bureaucratic rounding error. For North European values it's sign of massive corruption.
socializing is not part of the recipe. There are plenty of monks who live a life of solidute but follow the recipe above and still live to tell the tale
This story has come up around here in the past (and I also left a comment at the time :P ).
To begin with, this is not a magic Lost/Avatar-kind of island!
I am Greek from another island and I can confirm that Icaria is a very interesting place.
However I think there are two aspects that are mistaken (even by me until recently). People are living a relaxed life but not a work free or "easy" life. They work hard and they live with less modern world amenities than most of us reading this article. The second (less important) is about the diet but this is a long discussion.
IMO what they do lack is everyday stress and pressure from people around them.
I also expect that there are other similar places around the world that I would like to meet.
I want to become like Oscar Niemeyer when I get old. Niemeyer continued to create architecture even after he had passed the age of 100 years. Having his own office made it possible for him to work as much as he wanted. That's how I see myself as an old man, still designing software in an office where I can work as much as I want to. Tending vineyard on a greek Island is not for me.
Doyle Brunson is one particularly famous person who had his cancer just vanish (this is mentioned in the intro to Super System 2). It does happen, either through initial mis-diagnoses or some other mechanism.
However, benign tumors are not cancerous. While 'cancer' is often used interchangeably with 'tumor', I was referring to malignant tumors as it's common knowledge benign tumors can lay dormant.
Is it the island which causes longevity? Or is it that the island is only suitable for hardy, independent old people who are prone to achieving longevity?
You'd have to see the data beneath the surface: have all those old people lived on that island all their lives, or did they come from elsewhere to retire there?
How about islanders who move away and retire elsewhere, and who don't live that long? Is it because they moved away from the island of longevity? Or did they move away because it wasn't suitable for them to live (like that, for instance, they couldn't sustain the agricultural work due to health problems?)
Suppose someone moves away from the island at 75, because he or she requires care and there is nobody there (the kids and grandkids live elsewhere). Suppose that this person then dies half a year later, now a resident of another city or region. Will that death still be counted against the island so that it drags down its longevity average?
Stress is the demon. If Ikarians don't face the typical Western job/money/schedule-associated stress (and I'm not saying they don't face other stress like family or social pressure), that's a huge advantage for them.
Physical activity also has been shown as a major differentiator. People who walk more than 7,000 steps daily have lower cardiovascular mortality (http://www.athleteinme.com/ArticleView.aspx?id=296). As a bonus, they are all getting enough Vitamin D from walking around in the sun.
I'm sure the diet helps, but it's probably a supporting factor.
The proliferation of co-working/co-living spaces is a positive trend I'm seeing that could lead to longer, happier lives. I'm hoping to see communities like this pop up all over the world - instead of everyone growing their gardens and vineyards, we'll be growing our startups or lifestyle businesses while being surrounded by a community of friends.
I spend a lot of time in a journal club discussing human behavior genetics with researchers who include researchers on extreme old age. That's a data-mining study, and would not impress other researchers in the field (or even get published in a better journal) without being replicated in an independent dataset. Spurious gene-correlation studies of this kind are a dime a dozen.
Food for thought is that the heritability of longevity as discovered in twin studies is actually not particularly high.
for me - the environment has a huge affect. utopia for me would be a distributed global community based in various exotic locations that are +50% self sufficient.. where everyone contributes to building social or eco progressive products, services, and biz models. with possibilities for virtual schooling ( for those w/kids )
Let's assume every claim in this article is true. Let's say that if you follow a certain diet, move to a certain island, make certain friends, and have certain genes, you will live to the age of 100.
So what?
Best case, you get an extra decade or two of life. This may seem amazing, but to be honest, it's ineffectual life. This extra time will be spent being old. Whether you're 70 or 100, you will be frail, dim-witted[1], and unattractive. If you doubt this, consider that practically any old person would be willing to give up all of their material possessions to inhabit the body of a 20 year-old.
The real solution is not to extend natural human life by a fraction. The real solution is to make frailty and death voluntary. If this achievement seems ridiculous, remember how many technologies were once placed in the same category of improbability. To someone from a couple centuries ago, antibiotics would be witchcraft.
While I recognize that such disruptions would cause chaos and unrest, I also recognize that the current "solution" is far worse. In fact, it is reprehensible. On average, over 100,000 people die of aging every day. Whatever benefits aging may create, the costs are far worse. To put it concretely: imagine a Boxing Day tsunami happening every two days. That is what aging does to humanity right now. Imagine the sun flickering once a second. A human being dies more often than that. To accept this is obscene. It is is immoral. It is insane. And yet, most people do. Shame on us.
1. If you doubt that cognition declines as one ages, please read When does age-related cognitive decline begin? (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683339/pdf/nihm...). If you aren't willing to read the paper, at least view the figures on pages 11 & 12.
Edit: I am amused by the replies speculating about my age. Even if I was young, how does that refute my arguments? At the risk of revealing my identity: I'm halfway through a typical human life. My values have shifted since I was young, but my disapproval of aging hasn't changed. Ever since I realized that people died through no fault of their own, I've been against it.
> but to be honest, it's ineffectual life. This extra time will be spent being old. Whether you're 70 or 100, you will be frail, dim-witted[1], and unattractive.
I have seldom read such an amazing load of (sorry, to say it this way) bullshit and disdain of the old/being old.
I am in my thirties and I really am in awe the live, the doings, the stories of a lot of elders around me.
Sorry, but how young are you?
Getting older and eventually dying is imho, what defines our humanity. Granted, we have learned to extend live by a reasonably amount and have also, in a lot of cases, learned to lengthen it in a way, that gives people a lot of life-quality during their elder years.
In former times, being 40 to 50 meant you were frail, old, broken by hard work, and so on. Now, in most cases, that happens probably in your 70ies.
Anecdotal: Looking at my stepfather, who is helping us renovate our home and being 78, I wonder, how I will ever be able to do that much, when I am his age. Or my slightly younger stepmother.
By the way, he rides his bicycle for 4.500 miles every year, just for fun...
> If you doubt this, consider that practically any old person would be willing to give up all of their material possessions to inhabit the body of a 20 year-old.
Oh yeah, I really doubt this - I know a lot of older people and most of them would not want this trade in.
You are arguing from a very dangerous standpoint, as you argue, that cognitive decline makes live unworthy (and with that every old person). Thinking your argument through you arrive very fast at a point, where we have to get rid of older people, as their lives are "ineffectual life", I really feel only contempt for this race for efficiency, when it is used to divide people into categories like worthy/unworthy or lives in effectual/ineffectual.
Sorry, but I have to take a stand here, as your inhuman comment is the most upvoted here, standing on top. For me, that stains the whole of this community.
> Getting older and eventually dying is imho, what defines our humanity.
Maybe, but is that a good thing?
To simply "expire out of existence" is a big issue for "humanity". It's the main reason why there's no proper answer to "what's the meaning of life" - whatever you do during your 50/70/120/.. years of life you'll eventually end up just as dead as the guy right next to you. Congratulations!
Being immortal would allow us to get rid of crutches like religion and allow us to implement proper moral systems, since there would be tangible rewards to being "good" simply for "goodness' sake", since being good and being selfish would be identical - if you'll (eventually but reiably) suffer overpoputlation, pollution and even unemployment just as much as the next guy, you'll (eventually but, again, reiably) think twice about elbow tactics.
> Oh yeah, I really doubt this - I know a lot of older people and most of them would not want this trade in.
20? Maybe. but How about being in the body of a 30- or 40-year old again? I can't imagine any 70-year olds not wanting to have a more "hassle-free" body, all other things being equal.
> makes live unworthy
Talking about live being "unworthy" is a slippery slope, but there nevertheless is an argument to be made about quality vs quantity of life .
I don't have the reference (and the exact numbers) at hand, but in "Happiness Hypothesis" (the Book) the author mentions a survey where people got to express their preference between "living x years of life and then dying to some tragic accident" and "x+y years of life, but y years spent in a wheelchair, because of some tragic accident". The results were rather mixed with the shorter life being more popular choice.
And, by the end of the day, a chance at higher-quality life in exchange for possibly less total life is also why things like armed robberies exist (even if not every robber things of it like that beforehand). I'd also argue the same is true of people opting for high-risk jobs, but there's also a sense-of-duty aspect to them, so it's not quite as clear-cut there.
>20? Maybe. but How about being in the body of a 30- or 40-year old again? I can't imagine any 70-year olds not wanting to have a more "hassle-free" body, all other things being equal.
Nobody is going to pay for your pension forever. Do you really want to spend your entire life working?
Not a lot of people get pensions where I live anymore (or at least, not enough of one to live on comfortably). If you don't want to spend your entire life working, you could save for retirement, same as you (hopefully) do now. A lot of people plan their retirement so that they can live off the returns of their investments without touching the principal. If you do this, there's not much difference between retiring for 20 years versus 200.
I live in germany but I tried to use common sense.
In this scenario our society would be split into two groups if we pay pensions for eternity:
Those who lived long enough to receive their pension. Their body turns 30 again thanks to breakthroughs in science.
And those who never age beyond 30 and so they never get their pension.
The first group effectively gets "basic income" and they probably own houses/apartments so their living costs are quite low. You can either let everyone have pensions or get rid of pensions.
Spot on. Just writing to add that a hypothesis that may explain part of why you get "lower levels of cognitive performance" as you age, is that you've quite a few more data points in mind to draw on (consciously or not) when processing new information.
Exactly, slightly slower processor, better abstractions. In other words : wisdom (not a mandatory property of being old though). That's why I'm so so sad about management replacing 40+ people by young idi*ts fresh out of school.
People accept it because it is how nature works. How many animals are slaughtered every second to support our lifestyles ? How many resources are extracted from the last corners of the earth to enable the lifes we have? Why isn't that immoral or insane ?
You sound like a 25 year old who thinks he is too important to die and that we should fix nature to enable endless life. Isn't that immoral or insane ? It will eventually happen and i would probably take the chance as well, but i am also aware that it is a very narcissistic thing to wish for.
Sustainable lifestyle is something we need to achieve anyway. Even with people dieing as they do now.
Death, and worse, the frailty that currently comes with old age, should never be acceptable. Old age is a disease and we should use a lot of resources to try and find a cure.
"A human being dies more often than that. To accept this is obscene. It is is immoral. It is insane. And yet, most people do. Shame on us."
Currently death is inevitable and a law of nature. Perhaps technology will change this in the future. As it is, it's one of the those things one must accept and come to terms with.
Perhaps you are a bit too depressed about aging. There are documented cases of peoples in their 70:s being quite keen and healthy.
I think one the keys here is exercise. People who do daily walks are much more healthy than people who don't. If one is in their 70:s and has been sedentary for most of his life and the other one has kept even a routine of daily walks, the other one has decades of exercise behind him.
There has been studies that moderate exercise helps to revert supposedly age related cognitive discrepancies. Sorry, can't find the reference right now.
My belief (anecdotal and completely unfound) is that people who live healthy lives are much more healthier when old. Thus part of the incapacity attached to old age is not biological predestination but also affected through the current and past lifestyle of the old person.
Sure, one CAN be in a really bad shape in their 70:s. Just sit decades on a sofa watching TV. Or perform work that is physically exhausting.
I think you are overthinking and fearing too much a thing you do not know thoroughly. That you refer to a scientific paper is an indication of trying to rationally cope with this. However, there is one problem - Most bleeding edge scientific studies are flawed and incorrect. I would not consult a single paper to form an opinion on anything. I would consult a gerontologist. And even his opinion might be formed from studying partial population - the sick and in need of care - in stead of the whole population.
My 5th grade teacher (a sort of benign philosopher) once related to me that when he was young he strove to take advice, and that meant spending time thinking about the beauty of youth, as his mentors urged him. He seemed to realize how much better it was to be young, and that he could not, would not bear old age. He explained to me that he and his friends would all commit suicide once they turned 40. Since he was in his 50's at the time, I asked, "What changed?" He replied, "I turned 40."
You have an extremely negative outlook on improving life expectancy ("So what?"? Really? Does life not matter at all to you?) in absence of pure immortality (a distinction I'm not even sure we'd be able to make in the ideal case), in such a way that I think any normal person would safely call bullshit on those being your preferences when it matters.
>This extra time will be spent being old. Whether you're 70 or 100, you will be frail, dim-witted[1], and unattractive
I refute this and so does the article. One of the striking things about this community was not only how many old people there were but how active they were. It mentioned 85 year olds who were still making honey and teaching dance. These people lived so much longer because they lived better and stayed active. Sure they will be less active, aware and attractive than when they were younger but these people are still in far better shape than most 'old' (60-70s) people in our society and many young people.
> The real solution is to make frailty and death voluntary.
> If this achievement seems ridiculous, remember how many
> technologies were once placed in the same category of improbability.
I agree. This is a solvable problem. More serious effort needs to be made to slow and reverse aging, rather than this resigned march to death that your downvoters exhibit. The human potential that is lost to aging is staggering.
It is fashionable to show how sophisticated and intelligent you are, to discount or even deride people who have the goal of extending human lifespan. That's too bad.
Being "happy" can be achieved with anti-depressants and being "alive" can be achieved by essentially turning you into a vegetable.
You're happy and alive, yet I highly doubt this is what you had in mind when you wrote that line. You clearly want more than just being happy and alive. You also want to be free and an individual and have an impact on the world and all those other things humans want .. but sadly often times you can only have less and less of those as you grow old.
My reply was semi sarcastic, and targeted at the assumption that being old equals having a useless life.
TFA states that most of the elderly still enjoy being part of a community and contributing to it, sharing their time and the food they grow. So in addition to being healthy and active, they have some kind of beneficial peer pressure to take part in the community. I doubt you'd get the same feeling of happiness and belonging by taking a daily dose of anti-depressants, but I have no experience with those. As for being alive, there's more to it than merely being not-dead :-)
I must admit I reacted mainly to the "ineffectual life" part of the comment which, to me, sounded like "they're not building a startup or trying to send people to Mars so it's useless", but there's a good chance I misinterpreted that part of the comment.
Even if there is a "solution" to aging there will be none to accidents. People not leaving their house to avoid dying in the streets sounds like human culture coming to a standstill.
Great article. This importance of pervasive cultural factors was the key insight for me. I follow an unusual diet that happens to consist of 100% unprocessed foods. I allow myself to sleep when I'm tired. I live somewhere I can enjoy long walks and other fun exercise. I'm never late because I don't set schedules.
> In the United States, you can’t go to a movie, walk through the airport or buy cough medicine without being routed through a gantlet of candy bars, salty snacks and sugar-sweetened beverages. The processed-food industry spends more than $4 billion a year tempting us to eat. How do you combat that? Discipline is a good thing, but discipline is a muscle that fatigues. Sooner or later, most people cave in to relentless temptation.
This is the trouble with following a different lifestyle; almost every aspect of it conflicts with modern culture. Buying vegetables at a store, there's tasty frozen pizza across the isle. Going out with friends, for variety and a normal social atmosphere, modern-influenced food is the only option. Walk into a gas station and there's the chips. Look at cat pics on the internet and there's pictures of beer and bacon. Everyone wants to set a schedule, out of habit if not the belief that stress increases productivity. People call to talk late at night.
Even after forming good habits, every instance of conflict with the culture requires some willpower, and socially, each requires an explanation. The only way I've succeeded is when living a more isolated lifestyle, somewhere remote. That leaves out cultural enjoyment and reinforcement.