Lifespan
Why We Age―and Why We Don't Have To
Number of pages: 432
Publisher: Atria Books
BBB Library: Psychology and Strengths
ISBN: 978-1501191978
Editorial Review
Growing old may seem a distant event, but every one of us will experience the end of life. After many years, all of the education, wisdom, and memories that we cherished, and all of our future potential will be erased. The universality of death makes the children come to understand the tragedy of death surprisingly early in their lives. By the age of 4 or 5, they know that death occurs; it is shocking thought for them. This concept makes you seize the day, and try to have extraordinary lives through doing your part to make humanity be the best it can be. Don’t waste a moment, embrace your youth; hold on to it for as long as you can, fight for it. But instead of fighting for youth, we fight for life or we fight against death. As a species, we are living much longer than ever. Over the past century we have gained additional years, but not additional life-not life worth living any way. What if we could be younger longer? What if we could play as children do, deeper into our lives, without worrying about moving on to the things adults have to do so soon? What if, in our 60s, we weren’t afraid from leaving a legacy but beginning one?
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Wisdom to Share
As it turns out, exposing your body to less-than-comfortable temperatures is another very effective way to turn on your longevity genes.
Why would we choose to focus on problems that impact small groups of people if we could address the problem that impacts everyone—especially if, in doing so, we could significantly impact all those other, smaller problems?
I believe that aging is a disease. I believe it is treatable. I believe we can treat it within our lifetimes. And in doing so, I believe, everything we know about human health will be fundamentally changed.
It does not matter if we can extend lifespans if we cannot extend healthspans to an equal extent. And so if we’re going to do the former, we have an absolute moral obligation to do the latter.
As a species, we are living much longer than ever. But not much better. Not at all. Over the past century we have gained additional years, but not additional life—not life worth living anyway.
Youth → broken DNA → genome instability → disruption of DNA packaging and gene regulation (the epigenome) → loss of cell identity → cellular senescence → disease → death.
We know more about the health of our cars than we know about our own health. That’s farcical. And it’s about to change.
Separating aging from disease obfuscates a truth about how we reach the ends of our lives: though it’s certainly important to know why someone fell from a cliff, it’s equally important to know what brought that person to the precipice in the first place.
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