Aging Overview #

Why is Aging Important? #

It indirectly kills the vast majority of people, and will most likely kill you. It kills by slowly disabling the body and the mind over many years, leading to a massive amount of unnecessary physical and emotional suffering.

People die with a lot of valuable experience/training/education. How would the world be different if people who faught in the civil war we’re still alive? Or people from the feudal age?

Defeating Aging #

The human body, like the global economy, is a complex system of many moving parts: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-022-00252-6. Therefore, it reacts in unpredictable, non-linear ways when exposed to changes. This makes it resilient, but also counter-intuitive to “fix”. As an example, ~90% of clinical drug trials fail, despite (presumably) all of them starting out with a good story for why they should succeed. This is important to keep in mind when considering ways to defeat aging - reasonable sounding theories will most likely be wrong and need to be tested before trusting them.

See Theories of Aging for some specific ideas for why aging might occur.

Lifestyle Optimization #

Exercising, sleeping well, eating intentionally, reducing cronic stress, among other things all can delay the effects of aging. Regular fxercise, for one, probably has the potential to add 1-7 years to your life.

However, these kinds of optimizations have not been seen to dramatically extend lifespan beyond 80-90 years.

“Unnatural” Interventions #

Categories: Aging, Health And Longevity

Backlinks: Chronic Stress, Exercise, Food, Sleep, Theories Of Aging, What To Believe,