'Longevity' Is Killing Our Vision of Living Better

Mention ‘longevity’ at a dinner party and watch the room divide: half the guests roll their eyes while the other half check their continuous glucose monitors. It conjures images of Silicon Valley bros treating Metformin like breath mints—another optimization fetish for the privileged and paranoid.

A few weeks ago, a mentor of mine—an impressively healthy 78-year-old physician—asked me a question that stuck:

His message was thought-provoking because it wasn't cynical. It was surrender wrapped in wisdom.

When the choice seems to be between checking out early or watching yourself slowly fade—losing your hearing, your sight, your friends, your self—ten more years sounds less like a gift and more like a sentence.

It's a valid perspective. But we're having the wrong conversation.

We're stuck arguing about the length of life while missing the whole point about its depth.

Perhaps that's because we're using the wrong word: longevity.

It’s a deceptive word that conjures images of anti-aging zealots clutching NAD+ supplements like rosary beads, praying to the Gods of eternal youth from inside their hyperbaric oxygen chambers.

The word has become shorthand for an impossible quest: the pursuit of immortality.

"Oh, you're one of those people trying to live forever," they say; the dismissal wrapped in a knowing smirk. As if they've caught you joining some Silicon Valley immortality cult. But this eye-rolling dismissal reveals more about our broken thinking than any real insight.

Here's what's missing from this common narrative: longevity isn’t about living forever or denying death. It’s about one of humanity's most fundamental desires: to remain the protagonist of our own lives, rather than a fading shadow of who we once were. It's about staying fully, vibrantly you until the very end.

But we’re stuck with this clinical-sounding word because "still-climbing-stairs-at-70-ology" doesn't roll off the tongue.

When we talk about ‘longevity,’ we're actually talking about two distinct things — lifespan and healthspan. Think of your life like a book:

• Lifespan: The total number of pages in the book. In real terms, this is how many years you will live.

• Healthspan: The quality of each page i.e. how well you can read and engage with the story. This means how many of those years you spend healthy, active, and capable of doing what matters to you.

What most people care about is healthspan. The real fight isn't for more time — it's for more life within that time. But we're stuck using ‘longevity,’ a sterile word that reduces life's symphony to a countdown.

When Simple Stories Fail Us

‘Quality of life’ has also become one of those phrases that floats in the ether of wellness blogs and doctor's offices.

But, what does it mean?

For me, it's about presence and capability:

• It's waking up without your joints performing their daily symphony of creaks and pops, your mind sharp enough to not just make morning coffee, but remember where you put it down.

• It's your body responding without hesitation when a toddler breaks into a sprint toward danger.

• It's striding into your 60s and 70s with the same confidence that carried you through your 40s—maybe a bit slower, but no less purposeful.

We love clean divisions; simple stories that split life into neat little boxes. Quality or quantity. Short and sweet versus long and miserable. It makes aging easier to talk about by turning life's messiest questions into multiple choice.

Every few weeks, someone tells me they'd rather live short and well than long and miserable, as if aging were a multiple-choice test with only two answers.

Here's the reality that demolishes this false dichotomy: the same actions that keep you vital—building strength, maintaining mobility, nourishing your body—are also your best shot at a longer life.

Quantity and quality of life often compete in the final years, but that’s not the stage of life we’re focused on here. For most of life, they’re not opposing forces—they’re the same damn arrow shot from different bows.

Yes, there are edge cases where these arrows can diverge. But these rare exceptions don't change the fundamental truth: in the real world of living better and longer, you rarely have to choose between the two.

It's like asking if you want your engine to run smooth or run long, as if these weren't two measurements of the same well-oiled machine.

Aging doesn't have to be a slow surrender, trading away pieces of yourself year after year.

So when people scoff at longevity as some pipe dream, I want to grab them by the shoulders (gently, with my well-maintained grip strength) and say: "You're missing the point entirely. This isn't about rejecting mortality. It's about embracing vitality."

Authoring What's Next

My mentor's message carries weight: some parts of aging inevitably arrive like uninvited guests, ignoring our "do not disturb" signs.

The slow dimming of vision, the gradual fade of hearing — these aren't always negotiable terms of our biological contract, and no amount of kale smoothies will magically restore your retina.

But we're standing at the edge of something unprecedented: a biotechnology revolution that's redefining what we consider "inevitable." Just as room-sized computers now dance on our wrists, today's "impossible" aging challenges might become tomorrow's routine tune-ups.

There's a crucial caveat: these coming breakthroughs will favour the prepared. The choices you make in your 30s-50s aren't just about today. They're your admission ticket to tomorrow's innovations. You're either building the foundation to benefit from what's coming, or constructing barriers that will lock you out.

Hearing loss is one battle. Hearing loss while trapped in a body that's forgotten how to climb stairs is a war on multiple fronts.

We're fighting for the right to face time's challenges standing up.

I'm not chasing immortality. I'm chasing tomorrow's sunrise with today's strength. I'm fighting for the right to keep playing the game, not watching from the bench as my body forgets the rules.

We're claiming the right to define life on our terms, gripping the pen that writes our story before time becomes our unwanted ghostwriter.

Is this worth caring about?

Only if you believe you should remain the author of your own story.

The question isn't: "How long do you want to live?"

It's: "How long do you want to remain yourself?"