why Archives - #agingisadisease

Extending lifespan on a budget.

For the first time in human history we have a chance to significantly increase both our lifespan and health span.

But it’s not enough to just wish it to happen. We need practical steps, if we hope to see the results during our life time.

Assumptions

Why should You care?

Have you ever cared for an old family member? It’s not pretty.

But unlike him or her, you have a chance to significantly improve both your health and lifespan.. Don’t waste it!

Remember you become what you think about. If you spend some energy thinking about life extension, that’s what you’ll get!

Why should We care?

Longevity (aging biology) research and advocacy is the most valuable activity for a modern western society. By its nature it is more powerful than any other single disease prevention (cancer, heart, dementia etc) .
It can significantly decrease health-care burden. It stands to improve workforce participation. And improve the health and happiness of society in general.

Any pursuit of longevity as a public goal should have at least these 5 things in mind

– public education
– branding, culture shift
– driving more money in through donations or investments
– curating and sponsoring research
– lobbying “aging is a disease” and other relevant lifespan extension causes

The steps above are arranged in the order of complexity. The budget below takes this into account and goes from simple one man part time “hustle” to the full scale multi person organization.

The goals of the organization is to shape the public opinion, distribute funds and facilitate research.

The hope is that with the direction and budget outlined, it should be somewhat easier to move along the path of longevity.

Budget Tiers (yearly)

0-$1K:

– Basic website, mail-chimp mail list collection, Tiktok, YouTube and LinkedIn educational channels,
as much cross channel coverage as possible
– Occasional blog posts here: https://smart-monkey.org/blog
– Woocommerce T-shirt store, affiliates through Amazon or what’s relevant

$1K-$10K:

– Move the website to a robust hosting. Better lighting, camera and sound. Green screen.
– Less cross, more platform specific content.
– Boosting important posts.

$10K -$50K:

– Professional web design. Contracting animators and voice overs from fiver and such to boost the production value.
– Paid plugins, search and speed optimization. A & B adds. Collaborations with relevant channels based on followers count
– Form non profit or for purpose org.

$50K – $100K:

– One full time person to run the operations 24/7.
– Full swing collaborations, guest speakers, attending online events and conferences.
– Pushing agenda everywhere possible.

$100K-$500K:

– Advisory board
– Semi permanent subs to generate blog content and video post-production
– Branding ads and billboards

$500K-$1M

– Explore investments, supporting small scale basic research
– On staff software developer to create unifying distributed platform for citizen crowdfunding,
collaboration and data exchange between researchers and public

$1M-5M

– Extend platform development for better data exchange and export; helping with AI analysis.
– Gamifying regular user participation.
– Support basic and target research.

$5M+

– 5-10 person team.
– Own citizen science platform is fully operational, which also doubles as a health-prevention oriented social network.
– Revenue is generated from % of direct citizens to research donations, direct to org donations & relevant ads placement.
Spent on team salaries, selected non crowdfunded research and possibly addressing some topics through official political channels.

Time & Longevity Investment?

By Alex

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.

meaning of life is integral of experience and happiness over life time — It’s a time integral, folks!

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.

http://www.richmillerlab.com/

(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.

an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure — Start today, before time runs out

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.

Marketing Promise

By Alex

Source: https://cancercontrol.cancer.gov

Call to Action:

Life expectancy in USA is falling while prediabetes (50%), cancer (38%), autoimmune and mental conditions are rising.

You might say: it’s not about me, I’m too young to be affected, too old to change or don’t have enough time.
But all you need is to adjust priorities and do a half step in the right direction. Motivation comes after action.
And there is plenty of time.

If you want to do better than average and don’t become a part of the negative statistics – start today. Your future self will be glad that you did. And so the people around you.

There is a reason why educated people live 10 longer then average. They are making right choices and , well, educated guesses. We live in a great time, when money are no longer a barrier (or excuse). If you are reading this, it means that you have internet. It means that you can educate yourself and the sky is the limit.

Join Smart Monkey community to get an extra boost from the like minded people, who have decided to take charge of their own lives. Of course you can do it yourself, but it’s much easier with friends. Bring them in too and let’s work on it together.

Marketing Promise: (Seth Godin Style)

a. My content is for people who believe:
– That they are or want to be in charge of their life and who don’t want to be normal.
b. I’ll focus on people who want:
– Live and enjoy an extra decade or more
c. I promise that engaging with what I do will help you get:
– Best actionable, science supported and easy to understand ways to move the needle towards wining the #centenarianolympics

If you think it’s not a bargain, then please don’t subscribe, it’s not for you.

But if you think it’s a good deal, don’t forget to:

Join Us!

Why Am I here?

By Alex

I have it all in my close family: a 104 yrs old grandma still kicking ass on one side and diabetes, cancer & dementia on another.

So I have been always interested in what I can personally do to get more of the former and less of the later.
Not enough to get a medical degree, but enough to follow and dig through the latest health research. What’s became clear to me that in most cases it’s not about the genes you’ve got. It’s about how you treat them and what epigenetic environment you put them through.

Now, why I do it all, why this blog, why smart-monkey channel and group?
Through the years I have found that it’s much easier to do the next research, then actually apply it to the personal life. But when I create content it forces me to practice what I preach to not feel an impostor. And provides an emotional boost on top, when somebody reacts.
That’s what I call a win-win.

Affecting a million people in a positive way is the new way of been a millionaire.
But I’m ok with a 1000 or even 10. (I’d like to write 1, but, alas, I’m not a saint)