Time & Longevity Investment?
Why everyone with spare money doesn’t invest into health-span and life-span research? Isn’t it a little paradoxical?
Ask anyone with a bit of extra cash in the account and they would agree that the most valuable thing we all have in life is time.
Because you can always make more money, tools, or even friends, but you can’t make any time.
Buy why we are not actively working on creating more time for ourselves?
Whatever your major existential goal is: maximizing joy or experience, the extra time is the only axis where you can realize the universal gain.
If you are not investing or donating part of your capital or attention into longevity field you are missing out on multiple angles. Lets look at them in more details below.
Reducing chances of breakthrough in our lifetime.
Any longevity expert will tell you that we are still in the dark ages. Not just lacking any working life extension treatments, but even not having any good measuring instruments. There is a huge amount of basic science to be done… when the field gets enough funds. The only lab in USA doing meaningful life extension experiments on genetically divergent mice is surviving on just a couple of millions a year.
(the whole field of biology of aging is receiving ~0.007% of budget, 0.3B of 4200B in 2021)
Staying informed and translating that into personal health.
Whatever you invest yourself into defines your mindset, routines and hobbies. Educated people live longer because they make educated life choices. It’s quite simple: when you invest into longevity you educate yourself about it. When you educate yourself about longevity you change your mindset towards it. When you align the mindset towards longevity you start making healthy choices regardless of the scientific research. When you make healthy choices you not only extend the lifespan but the health span as well.
What % of your access would you give to extend your active life by 10-20 years?
Participating in the most impactful thing for humanity, posterity and progeny.
Preventing cancer might not be as flashy as curing, but much more valuable and meaningful. Treating of all of these diseases is missing the major risk factor: the aging.
So supporting the war on cancer is a good thing, but supporting the eradication of the root cause might be even better.
What Gives?
So, what gives and what can we do about it? Is it fear or learned helplessness?
On the emotional level we all believe that we are going to live forever until it’s too late.
Whatever one can say about rational choices, it’s the emotions which make us do, or don’t do things.
Can we change the emotional landscape of the 40+ years old generation? Probably not anyone in this age or older group truly believes in personal chances to live over 100 (not even talking about more radical life extension). So it’s really an uphill battle.
In many fields of science the progress is happening from funeral to funeral, when dogmas change and new ideas have a chance to sprout. But in longevity research even that doesn’t work. Old people decide where money go and where research is happening. It’s much harder to justify something that you don’t believe you’ll live to see the results of. Of course nobody will tell you so and there is no conspiracy, but that’s what happens.
Focusing on the 20-30 years old or younger demographic might be a better path towards cultural change. To eradicate the ingrained fear of death we have to start as early as we can. And work from ground up involving all major modern creators from all platforms. It’s either that or been staying paralyzed by fear until it’s too late.
There are no quick solutions here and it is a lifelong game, literally, for everyone involved (which is in this case IS everyone) The silver lining is: if you are actively playing the game, you can avoid above mentioned misfalls.
And who knows, maybe you can even win and collect in the best available currency: more meaningful time here on Earth.