David Shields - The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

If you want to live longer, you should—in addition to the obvious: eating less and losing weight—move to the country, not take work home, do what you enjoy and feel good about yourself, get a pet, learn to relax, live in the moment, laugh, listen to music, sleep 6 to 7 hours a night; be blessed with long-lived parents and grandparents (35 percent of your longevity is due to genetic factors); be married, hug, hold hands, have sex regularly, have a lot of children, get along with your mother, accept your children, nurture your grandchildren; be well-educated, stimulate your brain, learn new things; be optimistic, channel your anger in a positive way, not always have to be right; not smoke; use less salt, have chocolate occasionally, eat a Mediterranean diet of fruits, vegetables, olive oil, fish, and poultry, drink green tea and moderate amounts of red wine; exercise; have goals, take risks; confide in a friend, not be afraid to seek psychological counseling; be a volunteer, have a role in the community; attend church, find God. (My dad’s scorecard: 38 of 42.)

Researchers studied a group of people, ages 66 to 101, who had outlived their siblings by an average of 7 years. One personality characteristic stood out: the longer-lived sibling had a “better sense of humor.” My father can, or at least used to be able to (over the last few years, he’s almost entirely lost his sense of humor), put hilarious spin on language, hold a room rapt with a story, and tell jokes better than anybody; in the ’40s and ’50s, he supposedly got invited to the most exclusive Industry parties in Beverly Hills for the solitary purpose of telling Yiddish jokes. On average, married people outlive single people (here’s a shocker: the benefit for married men is greater); older siblings outlive younger ones; mothers outlive childless women (by a slight margin); people with higher education live 6 years longer than high school dropouts; Oscar winners outlive unsuccessful nominees by 4 years; CEOs outlive corporate vice presidents; religious people outlive atheists; tall people (men over 6'; women over 5'7") outlive short people by 3 years; nonsmokers live 10 years longer than smokers; thin people live 7 years longer than obese people; American immigrants live 3 years longer than natives; Japanese have the longest life expectancy (82) and Zambians have the briefest (33). Centenarians tend to be assertive, suspicious, and practical. Natalie’s former day-care teacher, now a manager for the outpatient clinic of a cancer-care center, says, “It’s the assholes who always get better.” My father isn’t an asshole, but he is mightily self-involved (more self-involved than anyone else?—maybe he simply masks it less well), which seems to have had no ill effects whatsoever on his health or longevity.

Gavin Polone, a 44-year-old television and movie producer/agent, works 6-day weeks and 18-hour days and has rejected marriage and children as antiquated nuisances. Polone views kids as unpredictable clutter that lead to “personal drama.” His girlfriend, Elizabeth Oreck, who’s 43, says, “People often have children to fulfill some kind of twisted, egocentric reflection of themselves. The truth is, we both prefer animals to people.” Polone and Oreck have three dogs and five cats, all rescued from animal shelters or the neighborhood (the mean streets of Beverly Hills). Polone arises at 4:45 A.M., has a waking pulse of 48, eats 8 ounces of dry cereal and drinks 32 ounces of cold green tea for breakfast, and subsists on 1,800 calories a day, primarily protein powder and egg whites. He’s 6'1" and weighs 160 pounds. One of his clients, Conan O’Brien, says, “When I met Gavin, he was an assistant to an agent. In time, he became an agent, then a manager. Now he’s a producer/bodybuilder/race-car driver. In nine weeks I think he’ll be in the space program. I really do. He’s evolving into some kind of superbeing. Or a great Bond villain. Whenever I talk to him, I picture him making demands on a big video screen to the United Nations.” By consuming less food, Polone hopes to reduce the physical stress that causes aging, extending his life indefinitely. Another client, the director Jon Turteltaub, says about Polone, “He believes that by being really skinny he’ll live long enough for stem-cell research to catch up and create new organs for him, and then he can live for eternity.”

The Gerontology Research Group—a loose organization of demographers, gerontologists, and epidemiologists who study very old age—believes there’s an invisible barrier at age 115. There are only 12 undisputed cases of people ever reaching 115. Very few people who reach age 114 reach 115; since 2001, a dozen 114-year-olds have died before turning 115. Right now there are, according to the GRG, 55 women and 6 men over age 110 worldwide. The oldest age ever reached was 122, in 1997, by a French woman. No matter how little you eat, how much you exercise, and how healthily you live, you apparently can’t live longer than 125 years. In 5,000 years of recorded history, there’s been no change in the maximum life span. Lucretius, who died in 55 B.C., wrote:

There are now thousands of people worldwide in the “longevity movement” who believe it’s possible to live for hundreds of years, perhaps forever. Very nearly everyone in the longevity movement is male (my father often has some of their literature lying around). Because they give birth, women seem to feel far less craving for personal immortality.

Ray Kurzweil, who has won a National Medal of Technology award, been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, is the author of Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, and has been working on the problem of artificial intelligence since he was a teenager in the ’60s, believes that human immortality is no more than 20 years away. (Even my father acknowledges he’s probably not going to be around for that event.) To make sure he lives long enough in order to be around, first, for the biotech revolution, when we’ll be able to control how our genes express themselves and ultimately change the genes; and, second, for nanotechnology and the artificial-intelligence revolution, Kurzweil takes 250 supplements a day, drinks 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea a day, and periodically tracks 40 to 50 fitness indicators, including “tactile sensitivity.” Kurzweil makes my dad seem like—as he would say—“a piker.”

Millions of robots—“nanobots” the size of blood cells—will keep people forever young by swarming through the body, repairing bones, muscles, arteries, and brain cells. These nanobots will work like repaving crews in our bloodstreams and brains, destroying diseases, rebuilding organs, and obliterating known limits on the human intellect. Improvements to genetic coding will be downloaded from the internet. You won’t need a heart.

Kurzweil says, “No more than a hundred genes are involved in the aging process. By manipulating these genes, radical life extension has already been achieved in simpler animals. We are not another animal, subject to nature’s whim. Biological evolution passed the baton of progress to human cultural and technological development.” He also says that all 30,000 of our genes “are little software programs.” We’ll be able to block disease-causing genes and introduce new ones that would slow or stop the aging process.

“Life is chemistry,” says Brian Wowk, a physicist with 21st Century Medicine. “When the chemistry of life is preserved, so is life.”