I wonder how many people think about longevity...for me that is less so about living to 100+ but more about doing as much as I can now to make sure old age is not filled with chronic illness. I’m a “millennial” and already very mindful of lifestyle choices that I hope help maximize my longevity i.e. fasting, low carb, exercise, no drugs, no smoking, less alcohol.
I've entered my 50's and I have lots of friends in their 60's and 70's. As in all things, there is penny wise, pound foolish. For me, here are the "pound" issues:
- Saving enough money
- Lack of stress
- Avoidance of injury
- Regular exercise
The rest seems to be tweaking. If you get the above right, then you will probably be fine. I would especially like to warn about taking on too much stress in order to get the money. There is a balance there and it's important to find out where it is for you. Don't go into stress debt! (Note: different people react to stress differently -- listen to your body)
Avoidance of injury is massive. If you get a chronic issue (like pain from joint or bad back or whatever), it can cause you to abandon exercise and when you get older it's a particularly rapid downhill journey from there. When you are younger, it seems like everything will heal. It won't. Be careful. Things come back to haunt you in the end.
Finally, no matter how unpleasant you find exercise, or how difficult it seems to be to do it -- it will be 10x or even 100x worse when you are older. Start as young as possible (i.e. today). If you have quit, then today is the day to start again. You can start again as many times as you want. If you start again every day, then you can never quit ;-) If you maintain regular exercise through your whole life, then when you get older it won't be so hard to continue. If you don't, that rapid slide into decline is almost inevitable. Especially, once you have trouble walking, it's pretty close to the end of the story as far as I can tell.
Not far behind you. An uncle had a major bypass heart operation in his 60s, after which he started daily 4-mile walks and he's still doing pretty well 15 years later. Inspired me to start daily walks earlier in life (usually about a mile) and a few sessions of exercycle and karate every week.
The other ingredient which I have only been recently aware of (thanks in large part to reading "Why we sleep") is getting a full night's sleep. That's hard for me, because I am naturally a "night owl" and light sleeper with kids who need to get up early, but I am aware of the need and try to get 7 or 8 hours as best I can.
I'm 37 and lost parents when they were in their 50's. It's a source of anxiety that keeps me from at least not falling into the same problems they had (skin cancer, alcoholism). 20 years seems like it really could go by quickly.
But then again, you can't break your Appointment at Samara.
Careful. Don’t optimize for longevity at the expense of not living your life. There’s a balance of course, but we often forget that it’s not about the years in your life but the life in your years.
> Early to rise early to bed makes a man healthy wealthy and dead.
> James Thurber
You are correct that it would be bad to do so to an extreme, but what the poster describes doing doesn't seem like much of an impediment to living a full life other than maybe the fasting if they're being extreme about it.
+1 for this. We don't want 480 year old men /women walking around. Hopefully they live to 80-90-100 but live a full life, not a life spent in hospital after hospital.
I may be in that demographic, but I prefer to be around young people (I volunteer a lot with youth). Being around nothing but old people all day would make me old and depressed. I prefer to be around the future not the past.
I would think most peoples ideal is to live in healthy natural commmunities with a diverse age range to get wisdom and tradition from the old and energy and new ideas from the young.
For wisdom, there is books. Old people does not equal wisdom. Quite the opposite sometime. I feel like we give too much credit to old people and what they have to say.
The tricky part is distinguishing between things that are successful and things that just haven't obviously failed. Tradition might not always be the best of all possible guides here, as it tends to be a collection of things whose primary commendation is that they didn't immediately cause a society to fail.
> [tradition] tends to be a collection of things whose primary commendation is that they didn't immediately cause a society to fail.
Not at all. Traditions become traditions over long periods of time. Thus, they tend to be collections of things that haven't caused a societal failure in the last several hundred years, which is a much better record than not causing immediate failure.
I have a friend who rarely uses crosswalks. He tends to walk into traffic while shouting "Plot armor!". He has yet to be run over, so this has an excellent track record. Yet I suspect it just might be other than the greatest of all possible ideas, despite the lack of demonstrated failures.
(Yes, this is absurd. Yes, I've told him this is clearly a bad idea. Yes, it's actually true.)
Which is to say one should be cautious of survivorship biases and the role of context. Judging traditions as successful based on a limited context where they haven't obviously failed both ignores the situation upon which they may depend and other scenarios where precisely those might have failed. Like the other people who have tried what my friend has and been rendered into chunky salsa for it.
Traditions provide community cohesion. They're an expression of shared values that create emotional bonds so your neighbours don't cheat you and vice versa. They are highly adaptive, because if they weren't, they wouldn't appear in literally every human civilisation, ever.
So yes, traditions are typically worthwhile, just not necessarily for their apparent or stated purposes.
The community cohesion aspect is very well described in this article of Nicholas Taleb "How to be Rational about Rationality", especially with regards to the Jewish communities:
... Jews have close to five hundred different dietary interdicts. They may seem irrational
to an observer who sees purpose in things and defines rationality in terms of what he can
explain. ...
But it remains that whatever the purpose, the Kashrut survived approximately three millennia not
because of its “rationality” but because the populations that followed it survived. It
most certainly brought cohesion: people who eat together hang together. Simply it aided
those that survived because it is a convex heuristic. Such group cohesion might be also
responsible for trust in commercial transactions with remote members of the community.
Volunteering with young people doesn't mean you have to live next door to them (and listen to their music, carousing, etc).
Anyway, these places look like a riot! It's like college life without the hassle of exams. And yes they probably even have a "hookup" culture.
These could be specialized for all types of interests. Imagine something like a "hacker house" but on a community level...spend your days coding, debating, woodworking...all with people who love it too.
55 seems too young to get into something like this, but I could definitely see 60-75. After 75, seems like you want serious peace and quiet so these places probably aren't a good fit.
The confusion in this thread about the old PTO vs new unlimited PTO makes me wonder if the next generation will even know what was lost. For anyone still confused, the old PTO is basically extra pay with strict conditions on how it can be used. For example, under the old PTO, if an employer gave 4 weeks vacation, then if the employee quits after one year, they get the 4 weeks in cash value, it's like another month of salary. In the new unlimited PTO system, the employee gets nothing. Unlimited PTO is a downgrade for employees. The theoretical benefit of unlimited vacation often ends up with less vacation taken than before because there's no strong policy an employee can use to argue for taking vacation. Previously, since there's often a cap on vacation days, an employee could easily argue they need to take vacation or they are losing money. Now they have to beg management and they have no strong position. It's issues like this and others such as non-competes that really shows the need for either a union or association like lawyers and doctors have.
No, I'm waiting for the day I can avoid the world of work, which has become progressively shittier since I graduated college in the early 90s.
When I started as a developer, it was NORMAL for an employer to:
- 1:1 match 401k fully, some even offered pensions
- offer PAID vacation time, not this bullshit scam "unlimited PTO" which is really just unpaid vacation.
- offer full zero-deductible/zero-contribution health insurance
- offer real equity to rank-and-file employees
- realize you came in to work at 9 and left around 5 and weekends were yours.
Practically everything about the working world has become progressively worse and I cannot wait to be done with it. I really feel sorry for people entering the industry now, they will probably see health insurance benefits worsen or disappear, and may even see themselves paid by the hour.
I just entered the industry, and the benefits you listed were included in every offer I considered. My current job includes all of them except equity and, based on conversations with my peers, that's the exception rather than the rule.
I'm happy for you but increasingly your experience is the exception.
Even tier-one companies offering me positions with "top of market" pay have offered me health insurance that requires a monthly contribution...with a family these contributions are often meaningful. These are a stealth pay cut. If you are being paid $200k but have to contribute $1k a month for your health insurance contribution...
Paid vacation is becoming as rare as a white rhino. Even big companies are moving to the "unlimited PTO" model because they know full well no one actually exploits the "unlimited" time off; if they do, they put their jobs at risk. Companies are increasingly out of the business of accounting for your vacation time. Amazingly, there are some rubes out there that think "unlimited PTO" is a perk. if you don't see vacation days accrued on your paystub, the IRS says you are getting none.
Once again, when I entered the industry, you didn't even have to ask about these benefits, they were assumed. Indeed, lots of companies did 2:1 matching of 401k. Try finding that now.
In each of the teir 1 companies minus Amazon and Facebook you’ll get that and more. Most large t2 companies give all those benefits as well, just with less RSUs and free stock bonuses.
Unlimited PTO policies are paid time off, but not contractual accrued leave. As descendant posts say, you do not need to account for unlimited PTO whereas you need to account for annual leaves. This only matters at the time of quitting the institution.
Responder "flerchin" below, please tell me what employer offers "unlimited PAID vacation"....do you even know what "paid" vacation is?
Here is what it is. If you accrue four weeks of vacation and leave the company, they give you a check for four weeks of pay.
When I left a job in 2009, I had six weeks accrued. I walked out with a check big enough to buy a car. They HAVE to give you the money when they are accounting for PAID time off. This is also why employers that offer PAID vacation will cap it or require that you use a certain number of days per year...they need to actually account for these as days they are obliged to pay you for - its TAX LAW. In the public sector, there have been a lucky few that have negotiated away this cap. When my father retired from the fire dept he had THREE YEARS of sick time accrued...they had to pay him for it! It wasn't 100% pay, but it was still a huge check.
"unlimited PTO" is NOT PAID vacation. It just isn't. Unlimited PTO is the company telling you it will look the other way if you decide not to come into work on a certain day if you have followed company guidelines for scheduling the day off. By accounting rules, they are actually giving you ZERO actual paid vacation days. Yes, zero. Ask your accountant. Amazingly they convinced a generation of workers that the new model was a perk.
If you do not see vacation day accrual on your paystub, you are not getting paid vacation. So says the IRS, so I don't really care if you downvote me.
In most, if not all, places with unlimited PTO, the P stands for paid. The rub is that it's not unlimited, by convention. What you have described is a sabbatical policy.
They're not describing a sabbatical policy, sabbaticals are generally unpaid.
PTO is accrued, is part of the compensation package, and when unused results in a check for those hours of unused PTO at the salary rate in effect when employment terminated.
The "unlimited personal time off" scam is a compensation regression from the previously standard accrued/earned PTO package.
For employees with leverage, the "unlimited time off" can turn out fine if they take advantage of it without harming their role in the company.
But, for such employees, the previous system of accrued/earned PTO is typically advantageous anyways because they will often be able to take time off or "work from home/remotely" while effectively taking time off without depleting their PTO balance, leaving it for payment when employment terminates.
In any case, for the majority of employees, "unlimited time off" is really just a loss of compensation as they don't usually have the leverage and/or diligence to take sufficient time off before termination.
<anecdata>
At a past startup, in an attempt to get better terms in an upcoming funding round, the executives got the brilliant idea of switching from a standard PTO policy to "unlimited". They sold it to the employees at an all-hands meeting as a compensation upgrade.
The sales and operations folks celebrated, while us engineers, who had largely taken zero vacation under continuous crunch since starting immediately asked what would happen to our respective unused PTO balances.
Their response? The unused PTO would be zeroed "now that it was unnecessary, since you could take unlimited vacation anyways."
It was a sleazy attempt to erase the unused PTO balance commitments to all employees from the books before raising the next round. At everyone's expense.
We engineers called the executives out on it, and threatened to quit immediately which would force them to cut PTO checks to all of us - and said we'd be in tomorrow to interview and renegotiate our positions if desired.
That forced them to instead freeze our unused PTO balances. We were unable to prevent them from pivoting to the "unlimited time off" plan however, everyone was effectively demoted that week. I did however receive my substantial unused PTO check when I eventually left that sinking ship.
</anecdata>
Hopefully that (true story) helps illustrate the difference...
Furthermore, in companies that offer actual paid vacation, you are typically obligated to use some each year, which means when you book your time off, it is almost unheard of for a manager to claim you are actually needed in the office due to "crunch time" etc....which could very well screw up the company's tax accounting.
Meanwhile, in the scam world of "unlimited PTO", I have found it is common for managers to ask that employees delay or reschedule vacation.
Anyway this whole subthread illustrates that many HN readers lack basic financial literacy...they don't even understand their own compensation
Unlimited PTO is just one more way the Suits outsmarted the nerds
If a even a small fraction of the effort spent on trying and failing to cope with the realities of degenerative aging was spent on the current crop of plausible approaches to build medical biotechnologies that can reverse degenerative aging, then the world would be a much better place.
Aging has an monstrously high economic cost, and is probably the only area of medicine in which the ratio of that cost to the amount spent on R&D to try to reduce that cost is vanishingly small.
To be fair, some of the accepted "realities of degenerative aging" basically boil down to lifestyle diseases related to poor diet and lack of exercise throughout life. This certainly seems to be the case here in the west, at least.
Perhaps people should take more responsibility for their own wellbeing instead of gambling on there being some massive medical breakthrough.
Death is inevitable, senescence is not. There is not reason to believe that humans can't live in the bodies of healthy twenty year olds until they're killed in an accident or the universe runs out of usable negentropy.
Another thing we should try is learning to not be afraid of death. If we aren't afraid of death, then getting old is not such a big deal.
Atheists have no reason to fear death, because then there is nothing.
Religious people only have to fear death if they are living in a way they know is wrong.
So, best bet is to live consistent with the majority of lasting world religions, and either there is nothing or there is blissful afterlife. Plus, the present life will be better, too. Win, win!
Once you are dead you won't be aware life is no longer continuing. The only sticking point is the time leading up to death when one's fear of death makes them miserable. If the person can do away with the fear then they'll maximize their happy moments in the short time we have in this world.
Since death is inevitable due to the eventual heat death of the universe, then from an operations research perspective it makes much more sense to focus effort on getting rid of the fear of death than trying to end death itself.
> Since death is inevitable due to the eventual heat death of the universe, then from an operations research perspective it makes much more sense to focus effort on getting rid of the fear of death than trying to end death itself.
I don’t think that’s true from a global optimization perspective. If you’re trying to maximize contented moments, it makes sense to spend time thinking about how to extend life (assuming you’re talking about the number of happy moments for people who are currently alive), even if those moments still must eventually cease. Because trillions of years of happy moments is a lot more than 80-100 years of happy moments. Only if you’re trying to minimize unhappy moments does removing fear of death become a better goal.
However, from a local optimization perspective, since there is little anyone can individually do about their medium term probability of death, I agree that figuring out how to cope with and minimize that fear is probably the best strategy.
Right, I mean from the individual's perspective, since why should the individual care about optimizing an aggregate the individual will never experience?
This is effectively a restatement of Pascal's Wager and therefore suffers from the same problems as the original formulation. The promise of a blissful afterlife is an insufficient basis for a morally authentic life, and the individual adopting theistic morals on that premise is acting in bad faith.
That only matters if the deity in question cares for the cause of your morals. Which surely a class of theoretical deities would, but not all imaginable ones.
If you believed that a omniscient omnipresent being is judging your every move inoder to determine whether to put you in a state of heavenly bliss or eternal damnation after death, you might be a little scared.
> Atheists have no reason to fear death, because then there is nothing.
This is somewhat trite, IMHO.
I don't fear the state of being dead, I fear getting there (death is unlikely to be fun) and I deeply fear not existing any more, and my time coming to an end. I like being.
I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of senescence. Being old really sucks. Everything hurts, your brain rots, eventually you're nothing but a burden on other people.
That also seems a matter of perspective. It is unfortunate in our culture that the elderly are looked down upon, instead of as an excellent source of wisdom about how not to die early and live a happy life.
It seems effort is more efficiently spent in changing perspective in ourselves and those around us, rather than trying to fight off inevitable old age and death.
Having taken care of someone who succumbed to dementia, I can say with some authority that it's not a matter of perspective. The last years of life are an absolute horror show for a depressingly large fraction of the population.
Dementia is a terrible thing, I've seen it first-hand more than once - and I'm currently in the middle of two cases.
But then again I've also seen the opposite several times, people living to a very old age (95+, and, in a couple of cases, 100+) with all their faculties fully functioning and no health issues to complain about until it was suddenly and quietly over.
It's not a given that we all (and our caretakers) will suffer in the end.
It still is a matter of perspective. Should a person who is unhappy and a burden for others be discarded by society, or should society do their best to make the person feel welcome? If society can do the latter then everyone is in a better place.
You can make people with dementia as welcome as you like, you still have to change their diapers, wake up to their screaming at night and keep a constant eye on them so that they don't hurt themselves or wander off. It's like having to take care of a 80kg baby that doesn't grow up and only gets worse. Add to this the psychological burden of having known this person before their illness.
Do you think that if we develop the psychological strength to help people with dementia it will also make us better and happier people?
By happy I do not mean the transitory kind of happiness we get from eating ice cream or watching a good movie, though that sort of happiness is important. What I mean is the stronger and longer lasting happiness we get from the confidence of being able to work through difficult circumstances instead of casting off the difficult circumstances.
This is because difficulty is inevitable in life, and we will feel happier looking toward the future if we know we can deal with difficulty instead of needing to avoid difficulty. So, knowing we can help people dealing with a difficult affliction like dementia means we can form relationships with less concern whether it will all turn out badly. Otherwise, we will instead tend to insulate ourselves from the perceived hardship, which will cut down our ability to form strong relationships, and strong relationships appear to be essential for human happiness.
I think if you can mostly get over your fear of death that’s greAt, but I’m not sure it is feasible. Fear of death is evolutionarily adaptive like almost nothing else is, so it’s wired in at a pretty deep level.
(You wouldn’t want to entirely escape it —- a little fear is good to keep you from doing stupid thing.)
Is good to be learn avoiding a disease, but humans immortality is bad. Lets my body is then later the energy, food, scientific experiment, whatever, rather than being locked in one room all the time. Human is not an endangered species.
