How to Live a Long Life
We used to be told that, if we wished to live a long life, the following will be enough. Stop smoking altogether, cut down on that alcohol thing, don’t do drugs beyond a random slip, and you’ll be fine.
Consider The Rolling Stones and how badly it turned out for them. A thriving combination of all three vices, buoyantly indulged over fifty five consistently wild years, and evenly dispersed amongst all four band members. Today, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are 77, Ronnie Wood is 73, and Charlie Watts is 79. Together they have lived upwards of 310 years and are secretly vying for eternity. I am not kidding, none of them looks like they have the slightest intention of ever dying and somehow never will.
And who wants to end up like them. Be so spookily sprightly, so juvenilely thin, so full of unhealthily achieved vitality -- at their age? Not me.
If longevity is to be attained, the proper way is to do it the right way. And the right way is pointed to us by the latest research in neuroscience, from which I have gleaned the following fine truth or two.
It is no longer enough to merely forgo the pursuit of a few guilty pleasures we have left. (Who even smokes these days anymore?) The current demand on longevity has gone so high, we have to go well beyond the renouncement of pleasures, or even our unaddicted ambivalence towards them. To live a long life, we’ve got to indulge our suffering. Fully and unabashedly plunge into it.
Follow me on this one, it’s as old as the hills. For nimble old age, humbly walk along the edge of life, toy with extremities, willingly self-annihilate.
Fasting is proven good (try biding your days in the agonies of autophagic starvation) and exposure to cold (the subject can decide between the soul crushing cruelty of a cold shower or its evil contender, ice bath immersion). High intensity workouts are excellent (mellowness in exercise is for deciduous, ephemeral softies; a real contender for spry seniority will apply himself to cycling, or boxing, say, in brief spurts of a sincerely irrational, frenetic abandon). Coached meditation is strongly advisable. (I tried it for a month and a half and thought I was rewiring my brain into new levels of neurological dumbness. That’s how good I turned out to be in not thinking about anything at all.)
Which makes me think the modest following. I do not know if any or all of these methods will get you any closer to achieving a vigorous long life. But they are likely to stop you from desiring one. And so be it, who cares, one has got a life to live.
