The Better Life Perspective
You do not need to be perfectly healthy today to take longevity seriously. If your weight has crept up, sleep has become less reliable, stress is running higher than you would like or your fitness has silently declined, the more useful question may be what you can begin improving now. Longevity Escape Velocity is the idea that medical progress could one day extend healthy life faster than ageing takes it away. Nobody knows whether that point will arrive in our lifetime, but the possibility creates a rather practical incentive in the meantime: get healthy enough, for long enough, to give yourself the best chance of benefiting from whatever comes next.
The Better Life Founders Journal
What If Staying Healthy Long Enough Changes What Comes Next?
I don’t have a particular need to be like Highlander, and live forever. I am, however, extremely reluctant to check out just before things get really interesting in the health space.
That distinction has been occupying my thoughts recently because there is an idea within longevity science known as Longevity Escape Velocity, which sounds rather like something Captain Kirk might engage shortly before disappearing into another galaxy but is actually based upon a fascinating possibility.
Imagine that medical progress became capable of extending your remaining healthy lifespan faster than time was reducing it.
You reach 60 and developments in prevention, diagnostics and treatment help give you several more healthy years than would previously have been expected. During those additional years, medicine advances again and buys you more time, which allows you to reach the next generation of treatments, which potentially buys you more again.
Eventually, at least in theory, each passing year could be accompanied by scientific progress capable of adding more than a year of healthy life expectancy.
That is Longevity Escape Velocity.
It is important to insert an enormous scientific asterisk here. We have not achieved it, nobody can tell you whether we ever will and there remains a very large distance between extending lifespan in laboratory organisms and repeatedly reversing human biological ageing.
For me, though, the most interesting part of the idea is not whether human beings eventually live to 120, 150 or considerably longer, it is what the possibility suggests we should all be doing right now.
Your job is not to live forever, it is to get healthy enough, for long enough, to benefit from whatever comes next.
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What Would You Most Like to Fix First?
Better Life starts with the problem that is getting in your way today, then helps you build that healthier future around the life you actually live.
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For most people in their forties and fifties, the immediate challenge is the waistline has expanded, sleep is inconsistent, blood pressure may be moving in the wrong direction, exercise has become sporadic, muscle is gradually disappearing and the demanding life responsible for creating much of this shows very little inclination to become less demanding.
We tend to look at those things individually. Lose some weight, sleep better, exercise more and get the stress under control.
Yet viewed through the longer lens of healthspan, they become part of something considerably bigger. They help determine the condition in which you arrive at your sixties, seventies and beyond.
You Do Not Need to Be 100% Healthy Right Now
This, I think, is one of the most encouraging aspects of the whole longevity conversation because much of it can feel as though it has been designed for people who are already lean, exceptionally fit and perfectly happy spending Sunday afternoon analysing their glucose response to blueberries.
Better Life is much more interested in the person wondering whether they have already left things too late.
Perhaps you are 53 and carrying twenty pounds you would rather not be carrying. Maybe sleep has deteriorated, work has swallowed most of the available bandwidth and you have begun accepting several things as inevitable consequences of getting older.
That does not mean you need to become a longevity obsessive, it means there is value in becoming healthier from where you are.
Lose some visceral fat, rebuild strength, improve cardiovascular fitness, sleep more consistently, eat better most of the time, reduce the amount of chronic stress your body is being asked to absorb and keep moving to maintain the physical capability to keep participating fully in your own life.
None of those things guarantees longevity and none grants immunity from illness, ageing or an unfortunately positioned number 47 bus you didn’t see coming.
They simply improve the hand you are playing into the future.
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You Don’t Need to Fix Everything
Start with the problem that would make the biggest difference to your life now. Coach Max can help you understand what is driving it and build a practical route towards changing it.
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There is another reason I like this way of thinking as it gives all of those individual health goals a purpose beyond the metric itself, what you are really building is optionality.
The ability to travel, work, play, think clearly, remain independent and say yes to things that matter twenty or thirty years from now, while also putting yourself in the strongest reasonable position to benefit from medical advances that none of us can currently predict.
That seems a considerably more compelling longevity strategy than worrying about immortality.
Stay in the Game
Nobody knows what healthcare will look like in twenty years. A person turning 50 today has already lived through the arrival of genomic medicine, increasingly sophisticated imaging, wearable health data, artificial intelligence in healthcare and treatments that would have seemed improbable when they were born.
What happens next is unknowable, which rather removes the pressure to predict it.
For us as individuals, our part is simpler. Stay in the game, or, more accurately for many of our members, get into sufficiently good shape to stay in it.
If the problem today is belly fat, start there, if it is poor sleep, fix the sleep, or if chronic stress is steadily making everything else harder, deal with that.
You do not need to solve longevity, but you do need to solve the next thing standing between you and better health.
That is increasingly how we think about Better Life. Coach Max does not need to turn you into a biohacker or construct an elaborate programme around the theoretical person you ought to become, he needs to understand what is getting in your way now, why previous attempts have not held and what practical changes can move you towards a healthier version of the life you are already living.
When you do that successfully and you are no longer trying to become immortal, you are simply increasing the likelihood that Future You arrives in better condition.
And should Longevity Escape Velocity eventually turn out to be more than an intriguing scientific idea, I would rather we all meet it coming the other way in the best health possible.
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Get Healthy Enough for What Comes Next
Tell Coach Max what you would most like to change today, then start building the health, strength and capability that could give you considerably more tomorrows.
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The Better Life Founders Journal
Written with the reassuring knowledge that immortality remains optional, but getting off the sofa most definitely isn’t.