The site is slow so I can't see it. I'm 68, eat well, lost 20 pounds, work out twice a week. Everything is working fine. But I live in a place surrounded by people in walkers, wheelchairs, or using canes. Some of them have had strokes or accidents making improvement hard, but many simply chose to not do anything to avoid the aging. You don't ordinarily wind up with a walker at a single point; it often starts many years or even decades earlier when you failed to keep in decent physical shape. I almost started too late (last couple of years), I can see how easy it is to not notice your physical being slowly going down. But assuming no major injury or disease, you can improve your body at almost any age, a little at a time, and avoid or at least postpone physical aging for quite a while.
I also write code daily, read the same things I read when I worked, thus keep my brain going too. You can't ignore body or mind, you have to keep both in tune.
I am still getting older, but I am in better shape than I was before I retired. The last time I felt as fit was when I was still playing basketball 30+ years ago.
Don't wait, it's easier to do a little for decades than wait until it's almost too late.
I didn't realize this until a couple of years ago (in my 40s) but boy did it alter my perspective on life. And I've heard what you're saying here from a couple other people in their 60s too. When you're young you don't really think about it much, health comes for "free."
But as you age your biology will force a choice upon you, one option is you spend progressively more time maintaining your health, in which case it drops off MUCH less than you'd expect. Or you can neglect that maintenance, in which case your quality of life WILL drop off in a big way due to health problems.
That's what it is, it's a choice, one you don't get to opt out of, but there is a path where you're in remarkably good shape for less effort than you would probably assume... for most people even just 2-3 hours a week of moderate exercise at the gym is probably a game changer.
I'm a little worried about the health of younger people today, because I read the statistics about obesity, blood pressure, ED and so on all going up for them. I'm also occasionally taking 20-30 minute walks with people in their 20s, who want to take a car, they're exhausted at the end of it, and they can't keep up with me. I get it, I was like that a couple years ago before I started hitting the gym, but really, at 25, you can't handle under a half hour of brisk walking? Oof, habits sure have changed.
> When you're young you don't really think about it much, health comes for "free."
I can't stress this enough. So many of my peers have complained about back pain and other physical ailments, as if it was an unavoidable part of turning 30.
No, it didn't just suddenly appear the moment you turned 30, it's the symptom of accumulated damage from a sedentary lifestyle.
For what it's worth, I've managed to get a lot of them into fitness, and they're doing much better now
I am around 30 and at least still I feel same as 20. Although I try to walk at least 30 min per day but the city I live in Asia is really shit for walking so it ends up being through shopping malls or some park.
Also I have been taking metformin (daily) and rapamycin (weekly) since like age 24 not sure they have helped but it's easy to buy here so I am giving it a try. I also use sunscreen if I go out during the midday which I rarely do in the tropics..
Reminds me of a guy I knew when I was growing up. At the time he was in his 80s. Walked miles every day, he was in great shape. Still died before 90, so it did not buy him notable longevity, but he was mentally sharp and physically capable up to very near the end. That sounds way better than slowly turning into a vegetable over the last 20 years of your life.
That's fair. In my family and wider circle of friends, most people live into their 90s, so I have a biased view that expects this to be pretty routine.
This is linked to the superb concept of Senescence [1].
In 'Exercised', the author goes to great lengths to show how, in some societies, people don't turn into 'vegetables' because they're active and engaged. They just… die eventually, without an awful decay into death.
My dad is in his mid-70s now, and still swims 3-5 miles a week in the ocean currents and waves. He’s so active and so healthy, I literally have a hard time imagining what he’ll be like when he’s feeble.
15 years ago, we went for a hike at elevation and he actually kicked my ass despite being around 35 years older than me. Crazy stuff. That alone was enough to kick my ass into gear. Now I do sprints and lifting, and I actually enjoy it now that my goal is just “do something for health” rather than “reach a half-ton total across my big-3” or something like that.
My grandma is 90 and still lives alone, walks around her neighborhood daily, and swims in a community pool outside her back door. She attributes it (I think rightfully) to a lot of walking and activity throughout her life.
Probably some good genes too (her brother is 100, her sister just passed at 104)
Aging is such an interesting topic that I find myself thinking about it almost every day but more of from the scientific point of view, like what is going wrong and why is the rate of aging so different in the animal kingdom. There are mammals that can live super long compared to ones in the same species and even same sizes, like some birds I remember 50+ while other do less than 10 years. Then there's something like naked molerat etc, the greenland whale hundreds of years lifespan..
Even between people, like Queen Elizabeth lived relatively long and her mother I think also, if you look at pictures throughout her life she always looked younger than her age IMO. And when she died it was very quick not like drawn out years that many have to endure, many long lived people actually pass very quickly..
If I wasn't in software dev, I think I would be in this field.
>but many simply chose to not do anything to avoid the aging
Thank you for saying this. A depressingly large proportion of people are seemingly resigned to the fact that once you hit 40-50, you'll inevitably turn into an achy tub of lard and it's rapidly and irreversibly downhill from there.
Barring injuries that are truly irreversible (e.g. severe damage to joints/cartilage), with the correct diet and fitness regime, it's entirely possible to remain lean (≤20% bodyfat) and muscular (≥80th percentile in strength standards [0]) well into what most consider "old age." So many people have no idea just how poorly they eat or how inactive and physically weak they are, and consider the result to just be a normal part of life.
>I also write code daily, read the same things I read when I worked, thus keep my brain going too. You can't ignore body or mind, you have to keep both in tune.
Thanks for saying this too. So much cognitive decline is due to inactivity of the mind. My mom was whip smart until she retired in her mid-60s to a life of idle leisure, and her mental faculties noticeably deteriorated within a few months. Thankfully, she noticed this and deliberately re-engaged with more intense intellectual pursuits (including consulting part-time in the professional field that she loved), and the improvement was night-and-day.
I've noticed that the difference between 30 and 40 isn't the level of performance I have, but how quickly performance drops when I stop exercising. In my 30s, I could just not go to the gym for months, and I'd be fine. Now, if I don't go for a few weeks, stuff starts aching.
This is very true, which is why consistency is so key. I think the reason so many people perceive their health falling off in their 40s is that this is when the cumulative weight of increasing life responsibilities (kids, career advancement, caring for elder relatives, etc.) really hits hard, making it more and more difficult to find time/energy for regular exercise.
True. But you can also be smart about it, and it doesn't have to be something that takes your whole afternoon. 15 minutes of home exercise instead of media scrolling, and at the end of the week, it is 1:45, at the end of the month 7:45 that you've done something.
Or just a simple door frame exercise bar where you do a pushup or two now and then. These small things add up.
Or to go with friends to play football or my friend started to run, they made a Sunday morning running group. To end with what you've begun, regularity is the key.
I've managed to build a significant amount of muscle mass just from doing stretchy-band PT exercises to deal with shoulder pain. 10-15 minutes nearly every day makes a big difference. I've also started developing some serious leg muscles just from walking up and down stairs in my 2-story house (+basement) and around my mildly hilly neighborhood.
I drive as little as possible; I went on a 1200 mile road trip last weekend and I'm still paying for so much sitting.
My grandma is 90 and seems like she hasn't aged at all since I was a child. She is still fit and independent. She eats whatever she wants. She went to the doctor for a checkup and told him that she eats cake and pastries almost every day and asked if that was alright; the doctor looked at her test results and literally told her "Mrs... You can eat as much sugar as you want."
It's kind of funny that she is the longest living of all my grandparents because she was the least neurotic about her health to the point of negligence.
She would constantly bake rich chocolate cakes and thick hot drinking chocolate for herself and grandchildren and when she cooked pasta, she would put ketchup + mayonnaise on top. All the recipes she knows are quick/easy and supposedly unhealthy. She literally doesn't know how to make a salad. I've never seen her eat a salad.
This is a bit like the "my grandad smoked a pack a day and it never hurt him" anecdotes where, yes, they're remarkable because it killed all the others who tried it !
For smoking, it is also important to check what happened to people living under the same roof (or in the same multifamily complex even) due to their likely frequent inhalation of secondhand smoke.
I'm turning 60 later this month - biggest thing I've recently done on the wellbeing front is getting a dog - suddenly I'm walking 10km every day (on average) and talking to a lot more people - I had no idea how sociable dog walking is!
Could it be survivorship bias? You'll only ever inhabit your own body. You don't know what it's like to be someone else. Some people are built different.
In only a very few cases with specific degenerative diseases.
For the other 99.9% of us, the number of studies showing the difference made by exercise, healthy eating, not smoking or drinking alcohol are too numerous to mention.
Ignore the information about exercise at your peril. You can probably use motivated reasoning to convince yourself you are right to remain in your chair and your growing list of ailments have nothing to do with your lack of exercise, and you may even remain convinced until you die. That will not change the opportunity you miss to enjoy decades of better health and life.
To grossly oversimplify it, our bodies literally evolved over billions of years to exercise and rest, eat so we are alternately storing excess energy as fat and removing energy from fat stores, and only eating sugars, alcohols, and inhaling smoke as extremely occasional events. I it stupid to assume switching the routine to sitting most of the time, only storing energy as fat and rarely if ever depleting those stores, and frequently consuming sugar alcohol and smoke would make no difference.
I could regale you with pages of personal experience (fmr intl-class athlete, trained and sedentary for periods of life and observed results) and data, but those are easy enough to find. All I can do is encourage you to change your POV, and start exercising well
You will find the 'built different' is how you build your own body —— weight lifting isn't called "body building" for nothing —— it (along with running and stretching) really does rebuild your body over the course of months.
I run 4 days a week (4km per day), fast for two days (72 hours total) do two gym strength workouts, one sauna session, and two Zumba classes. I also do cold showers daily. Floating once a week, facial ferment therapy once a week.
And still, I feel like hell today (and it is only Friday morning)
I used to run half a marathon every Thursday in a fasted (36 hours) state, but now I can't, I became weak and frail. Aging gets us all!
Yes and: Maintain your balance. Get tested (assessed). Do the exercises. (For anyone who hasn't heard.)
My mom and her bf were hard core. Swimming, biking, running, the works.
They served as one of the hosts for BBC's program Are You Fitter Than a Pensioner? [2010] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tyr5n My mom was 70 at the time. Spoiler: The seniors smoked the youths.
Alas, as with so many: falls -> injury -> idleness -> decline.
Some balance stuff can't be helped. Mom's bf got spells of vertigo; apparently the little balancing sensor bone inside the ear gets loose with age.
Your mom's boyfriend probably already knows this, but just in case: I once suffered from loose crystals in my inner ear (probably due to stress and burnout) and had such bad vertigo that I thought I was going to die. There are exercises that move the crystals back to where they belong, where they get absorbed and metabolized again. It's called Epley maneuver, and while it can be extremely uncomfortable and should preferably be done under supervision (some people throw up when doing it) it solves the issue quickly and pretty much permanently.
I've heard of people who lived months or years even before figuring this out.
To be realistic, lots of times a simulation would have to capture the feeling of having 6x to 7x the fairly mature adult experience compared to the same person at 30 years old.
And the accompanying multiple of confidence and proven ability to go with it.
Plus a much bigger multiple of both, compared to your younger self at under 30.
You really can do most of the same things after 60, and with maturity it's easy to accept how the big difference is that you wont be doing them as many additional decades into the future.
My dad is 85 and this article hits hard about what he fights going on in his body. What sucks is how much of a downward, self reinforcing spiral it all is. It's so hard to see the curbs to walk over or how to get to a thing himself, so he just naturally chooses to do fewer and fewer things. Watching TV is safer and kinder and becomes the default to anything. Which just makes his brain less and less stimulated and active, and you can imagine the drag that adds to keep figuring out life.
But like the empathy found in this article, it's caused me to be incredibly more patient with anyone struggling to walk in front of me on a crowded or narrow sidewalk.
Aging is rough. Thank you to everyone working on accessibility and aging related tech and science.
My parents have similar issues due to hearing loss, it really makes any kind of social interaction a chore which results in a similar spiral. For years I've wanted to try to make, or hope someone else would make, a set of AR glasses that's purely focused on providing accurate real-time subtitles, no other gimmicks or features that might affect the wearability/usability. I think that's the biggest QOL boost most old folks would get from a single product, and it seems much more realistically feasible than other potential QOL solutions like robotics, but I wouldn't know where to start with building it. As a bonus, it would just need an LLM/Google Translate hookup to become an amazing travel tool.
Those look bulky, to support exactly the kind of feature creep I think will always be a problem with this category. I think there are a LOT of people who would simply not consider wearing them until the form factor is close to normal glasses, but it would be hard to convince any product manager not to expand into videos/games/music/AI/etc.
The Xreal front page is people playing racing games and watching movies; I'm imagining something that can be used nonchalantly in public, and I'm assuming every feature beyond a bare minimum speech-to-text display would increase the size.
I've seen R&D demos of universal subtitling and translating, in video conferencing, but it doesn't seem to have taken off or it's hidden behind more paywalls. I did suggest that people use good microphones when giving presentations over MS Teams for the purpose of transcriptions, archiving, searchability and AI summarization, but real time translating would be the other use case.
That said, I don't believe it would work as smoothly if used in AR, as speaking and reading are two different brain things. Plus, if it's aimed at older people, they likely have sight issues too.
To a point this is already possible, just ask people to speak into your phone with e.g. Google Translate or some other text-to-speech engine. But that's awkward, because it's a context switch to a device and the processing time required.
I know my folks already watch movies with subtitles for this reason, and I would think sight issues can be calibrated for if the product is a pair of glasses? But idk how AR tech works with e.g. farsighted people who use reading glasses.
While it is challenging, looked at one a life time scale it is kind of a neat thing. It isn't a purely linear decline and that means while the later years kind of suck, you get a lot of decent time before then.
Yes, we should try and work against this but I am just looking at the silver lining.
There's quite a lot of aging research going, maybe will get something concrete in the next 10-20 years (maybe too late for her) but it's at least something
This! My grandmother adopted a dog late in her life. She walked 10km a day with that dog for nearly 20 years! (That dog was the oldest dog I've ever known). At 92 she was famous in my small village, she was in better shape than some of the 30 year olds!
Then the dog died. Instead of walking 10km per day, she lay on the couch staring at the ceiling. About 3 months later she started getting lost on her way to the supermarket. Fifth time she got lost we decided to put her in a home for demented people. We simply couldn't provide the care she needed any other way. Took a few more months and she stopped recognising us.
I think she outlived her dog by about 18 months, iirc.
She stopped walking, and then age came fast for her.
I'm 63. I make a point of walking 5Km (3 miles), every morning. I'm usually out the door, by 0530, and back in about 50 minutes.
I was running, but kept getting injured, so it switched to walking, several years ago.
I think keeping my mind occupied is just as important. It's entirely possible that the visual stimulus of her walks was as important as the exercise.
For myself, I make a point of constantly working on shipping software, and constantly learning new stuff. LLMs have been a godsend, for the latter. I had pretty much given up on trying to ask questions, because of the awful, sneering responses that I was getting, more and more.
Yeah I think you're right! And it's not just the visual stimulus either! She'd walk through pretty much the entire village, including a few homes that smack in the middle of nowhere. And she'd say hello to everyone she passed! Once in a while she'd stop and have chat...
After the dog died she only talked to people if they came into her home.
I think the social aspect of her walks was very important for her health too. Like you say, it's all about exercising that noggin',as well as the body!
A couple of neighbors adopt older dogs. We never discussed that specifically, yet it seems to be a smaller commitment lifetime-wise (few years instead of 10-15 for a young dog), and you'd have to train and deal with a puppy energy (which is a great thing if you have the time and energy to engage in it) if you adopt younger dogs, while the older ones seem to be well set in their good behavior ways. Long walks, established routine, no drama. Also of course fostering is a gateway drug into getting a dog as well as good way to learn what dog would be a match for you.
There's an overwhelming and abundantly clear reason they are referred to as man's best friend. I guess I was fortunate to always grow up with dogs, but I can never really understand people that don't pine for dogs. Now, I can understand not wanting the added responsibility in some situations, but the amazingness of a dog companion is one of the most mind blowing things about the whole nature of human existence. The presence of dogs through evolution legitimately made humans the way they are today and the reverse for what dogs are. It's really wild. I also don't get people that treat their dogs like humans or kids though. It's a dog, don't bring it in a restaurant.
Also lots of empirical evidence that dog owners live longer.
While the video is very impressive - my main reaction was to think how incredibly cool that type of dog is. So I eventually ended up getting my own Samoyed and it's been a hugely positive impact on my life.
NB I pretty much like all dogs now - but I love Samoyeds.
My grandfather, with whom I was very close, suffered from Parkinson's in his last decade or so. For a long time he was doing OK: Occasional confusion and the slow, shuffling walk that is characteristic of the disease.
One day he had a minor operation that left him needing a wheelchair for what we thought would be just a few weeks. But he never regained his strength and was never to walk again, which led to a steep and sudden decline in his mental condition. It was truly devastating to see one of the sharpest people I knew become an angry and confused simulacrum of the man I so admired.
I wish I had realized two things then: First, as you say, maintaining mobility is the crucial to the well-being of the elderly. Second, immediate physical/occupational therapy after a fall or surgery is essential to people at risk of losing mobility. Sadly it wasn't offered to us and we didn't think to ask.
My dad is going through that shit right now. He fell a few weeks ago and hasn’t walked since.
I live abroad to make more money and feed my ego and I only see him 3–4 times a year. On top of that selfishness, every now and then I catch myself selfishly thinking I don’t want to go through that, which makes me feel like an even worst piece of shit.
Man, be easy on yourself. You already have the world to put you down, no need to add to it. Life is complicated and I’m sure that you trying to have a better life and a career is not just for ego. Love yourself a bit.
I would appreciate if the "norm" was recognized to be not having your body rot away over time.
It really is simple: aging is incredibly harmful and undesirable. It strips away your quality of life until there isn't much left and then you die. It doesn't take any more than that for it to be declared a disease.
Whether it's "natural" or whether "everyone has it" is a distraction. If everyone was born with cancer, that wouldn't make cancer any less of a disease.
Starvation used to be "a normal part of life". So was having half your children die before they hit the age of 10. That was the normal, natural outcome of having a child - if you want to have grandchildren, just make more children! Some of them would live, surely!
This is how it was - until humans decided that this sucks and something should be done about that.
I see no reason not to dispose of aging at the earliest opportunity. And this starts by recognizing: aging sucks for everyone, and should be disposed of.
It's not fightable or optional, so it's less like starvation and more like gravity. Humans have decided that we'd like to "dispose" of aging, but unfortunately reality has this annoying habit of not responding to our categorization and despite thinking of it as a disease we cannot fight it like we can other diseases. Those other things you mentioned are considered outside of the usual because we have been able to make them less common through effort; despite all our effort though, aging isn't something we have that control over. We're all gonna die, of old age or a short-sharp-shock, at least until we figure out some wild medical breakthroughs.
Once we have those breakthroughs, sure folks might start thinking of aging as a disease that's not "normal" or a thing that we can actually avoid, but until then it's a fact of life, same as gravity, the sun, or the tides.
There's way more aging research now than like 10 years ago, I think the field is also starting to understand that playing whack a mole with 50 different diseases on a 80 year old is not really the winning strategy.
It's less "not fightable" and more "no one is seriously trying".
Compare the amount of funding aging research gets with something like Alzheimer's. Which is also a degenerative disease, and worth fighting against - but nowhere near as prevalent.
I don't doubt that it would be incredibly hard to stop aging altogether. But if the effort was there, we might get a way to reduce the severity of aging within a few decades of research. The sheer benefits of being able to reduce the severity of "aging associated" things in a world with aging population would be immense.
If you want to decay and rot and die a miserable death, that's your choice. If your genuine preference is that all of your friends and family and your own children should decay and rot and die a miserable death too, then that's your opinion and you can hold onto it.
But don't you dare force that outcome onto everyone.
In my eyes, "decay and rot and the inevitability of a miserable death is a good thing actually" is a fucking insane viewpoint to hold. The only possible reason I see to hold onto it is that it's the socially accepted cope. If you truly believe that nothing can be done about aging, then "death is good acktually" makes for a good coping mechanism.
I'd rather humans cope less and problem-solve more.
It would be pretty weird if george washington, Thomas Jefferson, etc were here with us today. We’d probably still be debating if slavery is acceptable or not LOL.
People complain about boomers hoarding all the wealth and “never letting go” so younger folks can take the reins. Imagine how much worse it would be if those boomers lived until 200?
Imagine how much more fossil fuel we’d be burning if we all lived until 200?
You know how old people tend to get stubborn? Not all, but most? Now imagine if the U.S. government was comprised of mostly people age 100+. Imagine how they would do keeping up with changes that affect youngsters in 2025?
Imagine how bad the housing crisis would be in 2025.
Imagine how unmotivated people would be in day to day life if they knew they’d live to 200 years?
In summary…if everyone could easily live forever, that is not a good thing. It would drastically change society as we know it, and not 100% for the better. I’d argue it would actually make things worse.
Death is literally a biological process that affects all living organisms on this planet, and in the galaxy. Sorry if that’s hard to accept? I personally find it beautiful how “energy” is recycled once we die, through the soil, and eventually into other things - like a tree, etc.
I find it hard to imagine that an 80 years old politician today spends a lot of time thinking of what would happen 50 or 100 years down the line. And things like fossil fuel use are very much a "50 to 100 years down the line" kind of problem.
Now, if that very politician thought that with the way anti-aging technology is going, he'll probably live to 150, maybe 200 if he's lucky? That might change the equation - for the better.
I don't think that "kill everyone to avoid the risk of the political system getting marginally worse" is an optimal solution. I'd rather deal with aging and the shittiness of politics as two separate problems with a minor overlap.
>I personally find it beautiful how “energy” is recycled once we die, through the soil, and eventually into other things - like a tree, etc.
I think that this is nothing but socially accepted cope. A load of pseudo-profound bullshit that might be easier to accept than the idea that aging and death are really fucking bad and we aren't doing much to stop them. And that even if we did, we and our loved ones may not be the ones to ever benefit from it.
cope? it’s what happens to all the fauna and flora on this planet. Including humans. Bit of a weird take if you ask me. I know my place so to speak…
I do agree with you that if politicians lived longer, they’d (hopefully) think long term. That’s an interesting point I hadn’t considered.
Lastly - nobody is suggesting killing anyone here. Feels like i’m being interviewed by a reporter with my words taken completely out of context. This is what being famous must feel like. :) If someone finds a way for humans to live longer I won’t be upset in the slightest. I’m just saying “be careful what you wish for”. That is all. There would be many unintended consequences. Viewing it as strictly a beneficial thing is naive i think.
Yes, cope. "It’s what happens to all the fauna and flora on this planet" is cope. A literal "it's more okay if I rot to death if everything else does!"
Modern agriculture has enabled the human population to grow rapidly without people starving to death, which had "unknown unintended consequences" too. As well as the well known consequence of food being affordable and available to most people worldwide.
I'd take "unknown unintended consequences" over the well known consequences of the status quo. The current consequences is that everyone dies a miserable death. It's a very easy choice.
You both have good and valid points of view but this site deserves a higher level of decorum.
We have a lot to thank for the passing of power from one generation to the next over the past millennia. We don’t know what we don’t know. I imagine the next enlightenment or the next freedoms to be won will require older generations to “move on.”
If you want the world to be run by a 700 year old Xi jinping, if you want your children to suffer under a thousand year rule of monopolistic Bezos, if you want to see Altered Carbon become a reality, then that’s your opinion and you can hold on to it.
But don’t you dare force that on anyone else.
See how unconvincing these platitudes are?
I literally cannot imagine why you would want infinite life. The short timespan is 99% of the reason life is so valuable. We need to do what we can with the time we’re given.
I never said nothing could be done about aging anyways. I think we’ll reach the point where people only die when they choose to.
That’s also a pure dystopia, because it’s beyond naive to think this would be some commonplace technology afforded to everyone and not just the ruling class.
Imagine if King George were still ruling England. No rules can change ever - he’s the king. Hope you like eternal monarchy.
I sometimes wonder if people are so afraid of death because they never talk about it frankly? My wife and I converse about it regularly.
I kind of agree but on the other hand I think it would also change the calculus a lot, if the dictator was going to live to 700, wouldn't it be more likely for someone to act and try to get him out because now the calculus might be that it's just better to wait it out than try to set anything up?
It's a bit hard to visualize that kind of world because so many other things would also be different, and if the politicians were chronologically like 500, they would biologically be still much younger so maybe the mind would allow for much more plasticisty and that would allow them to be more open to new ideas.
What's worse: having a 700 year old Xi Jinping, or having an extra 600 years of entirely unmitigated aging worldwide - with all the death and suffering that entails?
There is plenty of politicians I truly hate. But I don't hate any of them enough to doom billions to an early grave just to get at them.
If you think that Xi Jinping should die, then I can't help but think that a better solution to that would be to actually kill Xi Jinping. Far less collateral damage involved.
>That’s also a pure dystopia, because it’s beyond naive to think this would be some commonplace technology afforded to everyone and not just the ruling class.
There's this tendency for people nowadays to take this kind of shitty Black Mirror logic, and assume that the inevitable outcome is the one that maximizes the grimdark factor.
In reality, there's no reason to expect that anti-aging treatments would work any different from something like Ozempic or laser eye surgery. Sure, those were hideously expensive to develop - but are now affordable to upper middle class, and fully expected to get more available over time.
You earn more by selling a $1000 smartphone to everyone than you could ever earn by selling a billion dollar megayacht to a dozen billionaires looking to buy one. With anti-aging tech, the economic incentive to reduce the costs and reach a wider audience is immense. The demand is going to be there: a lot of what the cosmetics industry does now is fight the mere appearance of aging, and that's an industry worth hundreds of billions by itself.
Death is part of the necessary cycle of biology, and in no way is it bad. It’s certainly SAD, but in no way is it bad. Rotting isn’t this horrible mark on your body, it’s the beauty of nature recycling things so that the new has a chance.
Not only that, but could you imagine the absolutely incredible strain on Earth’s resources if we had 50 billion people instead of 8 billion? Global warming would’ve happened ages ago, and we’d be far, FAR beyond it now. In this scenario, it should be obvious nobody has a yacht, let alone a smartphone. There simply isn’t enough to go around here on earth.
There simply isn’t any positive to immortality, besides “well I won’t be sad about that one particular thing anymore”, which is… really lame when compared against the untold damage this will do.
I’m a little surprised you’re not taking any time to explain the benefits here, because I’m not actually seeing any besides you not having to cope with nature anymore.
Edit: I should also mention that I’m not looking for shitty black mirror outcomes, I’m just looking at the modern world, which continues to stratify massively, and pretty much has (with few exceptions) since time immemorial. Can you explain why things will suddenly become fair and equitable when nobody dies for some reason?
If you think that the evils of Xi Jinping outweigh the suffering of billions, you should consider killing Xi Jinping. Plenty of people tried killing Hitler, and Xi Jinping is apparently even worse?
>There simply isn’t any positive to immortality, besides
You mean, besides billions of people not rotting to death in their own bodies? Besides that little incredibly unimportant easy-to-overlook thing?
>Can you explain why things will suddenly become fair and equitable when nobody dies for some reason?
Can you explain why amazing technologies like cars and smartphones and air travel became available to the masses, instead of being hoarded by a dozen uber-rich uber-powerful billionaires?
The short answer is "economics". Do you expect anti-aging technology to be exempt from economics somehow?
Yeah, I dunno about you, but I’m not using the same kinds of stuff as billionaires.
It will be the same - because of economics. If you think you’ll be just as healthy as long-lived as them, you’re crazy. It’s literally not the case anywhere else in life. Food, housing, opportunities, healthcare ALREADY, transportation, and kitchen sinks.
> besides billions of people not rotting to death in their own bodies?
Man, when you’re so melodramatic about something as benign as aging, you’re really hard to take seriously.
If you can’t see my point of view by now, and how it’s a hell of a gamble to hope we stop doing the thing we’ve been doing pretty much since the dawn of man, I don’t think I have anything else to add to the conversation.
I also just think it’s mentioning that you are your body, in its entirety. We almost certainly have more than one brain, at the very least.
That's what aging is. Aging is the process of rotting to death in your own body. There's nothing "benign" about it.
Humans learned a lot of ways to sugarcoat it. Many ways to cope. But if I told you that I want to create and unleash something that would make billions suffer, getting worse over decades, and all afflicted people would eventually die?
You'd call me a twisted monster, rightfully so.
And yet, when I propose we do the opposite, you say "no, it's natural, it's benign, rotting to death is fine actually, everyone does it".
I can't see how there wouldn't be a revolution if the rich had all this anti-aging technology and the plebs would sit there and watch.
People like to cope a lot, they are fine with playing whack a mole with 50 different diseases and putting the 90 year old through chemo, but treating aging (the actual root cause)? OH MY GOD MUH NATURE
I wasn't going to respond because this comment is so dense, but I feel like it's valuable to the conversation to point out: wtf do you mean "people"? I've literally never met anyone who shares my view on this.
All living beings have protective mechanism against all the degenerative effects of aging, and this has been true for over a billion years now.
That protective mechanism is reproduction. Your viral infections, bacterial infections, broken bones, bad backs, polluted lungs, corrupted mind, and just general wear and tear, does not get transmitted. It's a clean start in life.
There is epigenetic age reset that happens during the conception that "resets" the cells to their young version like kind of a factory reset that cleans up the aging marks and other offsets that have happened during life so they don't get transmitted to the offspring. Learning to apply this process to the living human is quite big research topic. Obviously nature had to figure some kind of mechanism how to not transmit the cellural damage forward.
It is applied to the living human (or other being), when it is born.
Applying the process to already old people would be the abomination of desolation and turn this planet into a hellish dimension of unimaginable proportions, and it would of course exterminate humanity. You have to remember that when humanity is exterminated, that means forever.
Aging is part of a natural process we are already able to slow down significantly. Calling it a disease just muddies the semantic space of pathology in my opinion.
Everybody understands already that slowing down or stopping the aging process is desirable. I don't see the usefulness in lumping it in with muscle atrophy, clogged arteries, or cancer.
You're saying this as if there were no research going on about aging. We know why aging happens. That doesn't mean we can just stop or reverse the process, or that it is even possible to do so.
There are lots of instances where a soldier being 5-6 times stronger would be really useful.
I don’t think it’ll be a scenario like the starship troopers book, but having one available to a swat team or whatever, could be useful.
Still, I personally think the army would be one of the last applications, because that’s where you need the absolute lowest possible latency. Latency on a suit for an elderly person would be much more acceptable.
Aging is rough. I feel for you. My parents are a bit younger but I'm starting to pick up on things that make me realize they're getting older. Thanks for sharing
Beyond the obvious (medical care, accessibility, etc), I think technology has a huge amount of untapped potential to make the end of our lives a lot more bearable, and a lot less lonely. TV is one thing - and whether it's a net good or not has been discussed to death, so I won't here - but I wonder how video games might be used. They're a lot more engaging - both generally and cognitively - than TV, you can build and achieve things and feel a sense of accomplishment (yeah yeah pride and accomplishment), there are communities around them, you can play with your family, etc. Even online board and card games would be an option. Have you ever considered showing your dad some simple games?
Can’t speak to the cognitive benefits of video games in late life, but my grandma really took to our N64 one summer when my brother and I stayed with her.
She used to stay absorbed in a little battery powered draw poker game that she had, but by the end of the summer she had gone through a large part of our game collection and could put up a real challenge in Mario Kart 64.
Eventually we gifted it to her and she played it for years after that.
From what I recall, there are retirement homes (the examples I'm thinking of are in Asia) that make use of these suits in their onboarding processes, where they need to wear these suits for a few hours to understand some of the challenges their patients experience, and develop empathy when they can't walk as fast or do things that we'd expect in short order.
I would love to see more widespread adoption of these suits in training and employee onboarding in these facilities, mostly because if I'm in that situation or I want to think about a retirement home for my family members, I'd want to see that no one is losing their temper because my mom can't sprint 12km/hr to the elevators for breakfast.
This being said, anecdotally, it seems elder abuse is more the norm, simply because of compassion fatigue, so I suspect that even in however many years time, I'll be punched by a PSW for no good reason.
Doing this is probably a net good but also a bit risky. It creates the impression that there's one experience we all go through as we decline, when in reality it's pretty wildly different. It's helpful to build some empathy, but also a limited understanding.
For instance, these suits might restrict movement but they don't simulate hip or knee pain. They don't simulate shortness of breath, etc. It certainly doesn't induce cognitive impairment or anxiety. A young healthy person might wear one of these and go, "it's not soooooo bad.... I could do it why can't they".
This is starting to look like a BDSM shop, but without the fun.
Compared to the suit, this is next level. Limiting your senses and movement can help you design an environment that the elderly find useable, kind of like screen filters that simulate color blindness. But actually causing pain goes beyond these practical considerations.
I must have missed that? You seem to point out that 1) getting old is different for all of us, and 2) that this doesn't simulate every single facet of old age. I don't see how this takes away from the benefits of establishing at least some understanding of old age.
If you want to see what you will look like when you're older, stand in a spot and jump up and down repeatedly. Take photos (or pause a video recording) right at the moment after the lowest part of your jump. The upward acceleration will make your skin sag the way gravity will as your collagen weakens over decades.
But then again, by the time you're older you might look younger than you do now, e.g. "Ageing changes our genes – epigenetic atlas gives clearest picture yet (nature.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45095532 (from the other day, no comments yet)
One thing you have to experience to really get it, that cannot be simulated with a mechanical suit or transmitted through words, is all the f-ing little aches you get past a certain point. I´m now convinced it is this that makes older people cranky. Some days, my body is just constantly in a low but annoying pain somewhere, and it seems in increasingly weird, obscure places you never even thought about. I dont even remember when or how it started but although I would be considered fit by most people, now I have to watch my running, otherwise ITBS, I have to watch my pull exercises, otherwise shoulder impingement syndrome, I have to watch my dips, otherwise elbows, hell even after just _sleeping_ I have to roll and stretch my neck out because it hurts just from lying apparently. I used to scoff about warmup, now I take it really, really seriously. "Going with the flow" of the moment, instead of sticking to a carefully dosed plan? That´s for young bodies! Thankfully I can still use my full range of motion everywhere but Im acutely aware now how quickly it can all go away and how long any overuse or even minor injury now costs me in recovery.
Getting older has its benefits too but mostly mental, in physical terms I cannot think of a single benefit.
This is one of the big psychological benefits of being physically active. If you're fairly physically active, e.g. doing 60+ min of high heart rate cardio or intense anaerobic exercise a day, you'll always be sore somewhere. Maybe it's your thighs from yesterday's squats. Your lower back from a long run. Your elbow when you tried that dynamic move on a climb you've been projecting. And once you accept and embrace that minor pain you become a lot better at psychologically dealing with the small constant pain that comes with aging.
Also if you ever compete in a physical activity at more than just a "with your friends" level, you'll quickly find that whether you're 15 or 50 warming up makes a huge difference.
A lot of the problems of aging that I suspect folks today are facing are the problems of leading a fairly sedentary lifestyle.
There is a profound psychological difference between:
"My legs are sore from running yesterday but it means the muscles are getting stronger and I'll be healthy."
And:
"There is this weird twinge in my back. Did I sleep weird and it will be fine tomorrow? Or do I have to start doing more stretches and if I keep up with that forever, I can keep this pain at bay? Or does it mean that one of the vertebrae is starting to crack and if I don't go to the doctor soon enough and get surgery I'm going to end up paralyzed for life?"
Pain is easy. It's not knowing what the pain means that's hard.
You can have the same feelings toward pain from physical activity. "Did I strain my shoulder in my workout or did I tear a ligament??" or "Are the ligaments in my foot sore from snowboarding or did I tear my ACL??" I used to be afraid of this kind of thing all the time when I first started being active. My general point is that regular physical activity gives you psychological faith in the resilience of the human body. Having done loads of activities and sports for over a decade now I am much more confident in my body's ability to bounce back from injury than I did when I was more sedentary and every ache and pain filled me with fear.
I think folks are really focusing on the "psychological" part of my comment in isolation and not the "problems of leading a fairly sedentary lifestyle" which is probably my fault because I don't think I structured my post well.
I think a lot of the problems that are associated with aging, such as minor aches and pains, are consequences of leading mostly sedentary lifestyles. Part of being fairly active (meaning well above most state-recommended guidelines) is the psychological resilience to pain that I mentioned. But also part of it is that because you are constantly pushing your physical abilities, the strain that comes from occasional bad movement as part of everyday life (sleeping badly, holding the faucet tap the wrong way, hitting your wrist on the corner of a table, etc) is usually well within the envelope of pushing yourself compared to your actual sport.
My greater point is that leading a sedentary lifestyle is a whole package of things. This includes the physiological consequences of not developing strength, flexibility, and joint elasticity; this also includes the psychological resistance to risk and pain that comes from being sedentary.
I agree with you totally that being physically active is important for being healthy.
And I think there's something to be said for your point that experiencing pain and seeing yourself recover from it can be helpful for processing pain psychologically. You could look at it as sort of exposure therapy for pain.
But I also think that the kinds of pains you get from exercise are quite different from the psychological experience of pain from a serious injury and the former doesn't really prepare you for the latter.
It's hard to explain unless you've been there. Most of the time, pain is a signal from your past telling you about something you did. It's your body's way of saying "don't do that again". But when a severe injury happens, it can also be an omen for your future. Your body saying "no, you don't get to do that anymore".
Processing that is difficult, especially given how uncertain the signal actually is.
That is an interesting idea and it follows some patterns I previously noticed with friends.
The ones who are not or never were physically active are all complaining about aches and pains and acting like they are old men twice their age just doing basic household things. I kind of just chalked that up to them not being in shape, but it never really fully explained the extent of their complaints. However I grew up with a very physical life working on the farm and doing trade work since forever. By every measure I should be the one complaining about aches and pains and old injuries and such, but perhaps because im so accustomed to pains just from work and more intense physical activity the age related stuff just hasn't hit me hard enough to really notice like they do.
> (meaning well above most state-recommended guidelines)
So yeah some people do. High level amateur and pro athletes put in much, much more. I view it as a cheat code to lead a longer, healthier life. While my less active friends are complaining about lower back pain shuffling into their cars, I'm able to carry large boxes up many flights of stairs with minimal issue.
FWIW I used to have awful digestion issues before I started working out regularly and now have gone back to my teenage baseline of guzzling peppers and chili oil.
I don't accept and embrace the minor pain, I treat exercise as a way to fix what I did wrong that led to the pain so I'm more resilient and don't develop it chronically. There are many aches I used to get (elbows while washing hands, hip socket, sleeping with my neck to the side) that are years in the past because I figured them out. I just realized right now that I haven't woken up with sore collarbones this year, which I can probably attribute to incline bench.
Cracks and pops are another case where constant introspection and following tips on TikTok has made many of them go away. The received wisdom is they're not proven harmful, but in my case they at least represent using muscles in wrong patterns that pull things off center.
Yes. I am 42 and feel and am fitter than at any other point in my life (I started taking care of myself in my 30s).
The joint pain is the only thing that makes me feel old right now. And I don't think there's much I can do about it. (although I'll be happy for suggestions.)
I can't argue if it's 'healthy' or not, but anecdotal accounts say that going meat only cures most of these pains in about 30 days.
I've tried it. 65 year old dad tried it. Coworkers and friends. It worked for everyone. No one has remained meat only, but it taught us all to watch what we eat like hawks.
Not sure if "meat only" can be a cure-all but anecdotally, I feel better when I reduce my gluten intake. I've never been diagnosed with a wheat sensitivity but my son has been forced to go gluten free because of one. When he is home on school breaks, we eat gluten free and I do notice a difference in how I feel.
I'm not giving up beer or the once a month pizza anytime soon but I have made conscious decisions to reduce my overall gluten intake.
My point was that for everyone I've seen try it, meat only has been a cure-all.
If that's just because it gets to stop eating all the chemical preservatives, or the adding sugars, or the seed oils, or if it's because a tomato is bad for you I don't know.. but I'm just saying that if someone has mild joint pains in day to day life, I'm basically 90% sure a meat only diet would stop them. Why that is exactly, I'm not sure. How much could they add back and still not have the joint paint... I have decent ideas about that.
Yup, but getting people to try it involve so much effort you only really do it for people you care about.
It's amazing how resistant people are to eating only meat for a month or two, but drinking alcohol is no problem. Chemical preservatives? No problem. Added sugars? No problem. Seed oils washed in solvents? No problem.
I think these kinds of aches start happening to a non-negligible number of people beginning in their early 30s. It isn’t that they can’t still be active, it’s just that they have to be diligent about warming up their joints before certain exercises, whereas before they may not have had to even consider warming up.
I’m 43, and though I seem to get more injuries in the gym since I hit 40 (usually tendon overuse), I’ve noticed that proper nutrition and good sleep make a big difference in how my body feels. I also go to the gym at 5:30am and do an hour of free weight strength training 4 days per week.
If you guys are hurting all the time in your 40s, I would really advise you to do a full assessment of what you’re putting in your body and what kind of message you’re sending your body with your exercise routine. It might also be a good idea to get checked for markers of inflammation as well as testosterone levels. You should not have constant nagging pain at your age.
It's not literally pain all the time. More things like you said - much easier to overdo it in the gym or playing sports, especially if you don't warm up and cool down properly, plus occasional ridiculous injuries, like stretching too hard in the morning and having a muscle in your neck spasm as a result.
People are chiming in about the importance of diet and exercise to avoid (statistically) the decrepitude of old age. Another one I'll add is to use sunscreen and limiting sun exposure via hats and such.
I'm in the southern US and my grandparents came from Ireland. I've never been a beech-goer, or tried to get a tan (not that it would really work anyway). When I was a kid, on the handful of times our family went to a beach for day, my brothers and I would end up with massive water blisters and we would have competitions to see who could pull the longest continuous strip of skin. I'm 61 now and my arms and back neck look like it -- loss of elasticity, spotted, any cuts on my arms produce scabs that take weeks to heal.
But if you look at the skin on my upper arms, shoulders, or torso, which are nearly always covered by a shirt, you wouldn't be able to tell if I was 20 or 60. That skin is soft, pliable, and heals more quickly.
I've had five basal cell carcinoma spots sliced off the back or nape of my neck so far. Use sunscreen.
One of my professors in undergrad pioneered research into the eldery’s interaction with the world. Not just the physiological, but sociological aspects — she got a makeup artist to disguise herself.
Geriatric simulation is interesting, but couldn't this also be applied to pediatric simulation for improved vision, hearing, strength and endurance? I don't see any show stoppers preventing the development of a youth-augmentation exosuit blending AR sensory augmentation, powered exoskeleton support, haptics, and AI adaptive controls.
I think you're missing the point. You use something like this to help in design/testing of accessible spaces. An exosuit can't cut you half to help you make better children's spaces.
Additionally, assuming you're not already geriatric, simulating it is the only way to experience it short of waiting. If you're an adult, you were already a kid at some point.
Floating the idea of a youth simulator (like a VR app with integrated exosuit) could be used to measure physiological and cognitive age gaps. It might be valuable for science and medicine, but also for things like understanding empathy/social knowledge or understanding workflows/applied knowledge.
There is a flip side to these suits. They are meant to engender understanding and empathy. Occassionally, it goes wrong. Experience all the physical limitation and some come to the conclusion that old people should not be allowed to drive or operate anything that moves.
(I once had my foot run over by an elderly person in very heavy electric wheelchair in a grocery store. If not for my steel toes, i would have been limping for months. That person was totally unable to control the machine, but what can you say? Better my boots than a kid in flipflops.)
To my abstract, scifi inclined mind, this is the potential beginning to what I'd coin The Humble Suit: A suit that simulates a vast array of infirmities legitimately experienced by the muted, ignored, but equally entitled minority. In my fictional world, intelligence isn't an exclusive measurement of one's ability to exploit and exhibit usefulness for the system that owns them, but also includes understanding, empathy and awareness of aspects of reality beyond the exclusively immediately financially lucrative.
In an era where reading and compassion is secondary to entertainment and profiteering, one could wear the suit to experience a temporary intermission of not being oneself as the pinnacle of reality.
I do foresee challenges though, particularly with the probable result for many being the opposite of compassion, where one would dismiss the significance or challenges of, eg, being quadriplegic because they spent 20 minutes in the suit and have 'been there, done that'. Controlling for this outcome might require an advanced form of unknown technology. But if that could be wangled, we might have the means of creating additional nodes of compassion within our social machine that could keep the gears a bit more free of wailing meat.
A practical result of this could be laughing less (see conservation of calories for utilitarians) at the guy with Parkinson's that's unloading your shopping cart into your luxury car, shaking in the rain, or something.
There would definitely need to be built-in mitigation to steer the results away from self-righteousness and toward compassion though. Perhaps some time dilation and mushroom supplements could help.
I tried on an obesity simulation suit once. It was designed for caregivers - with the goal of increasing empathy in mind. It was amazing how difficult ordinary tasks were.
Love this reference. I think about this short a lot. Reaching an extreme level of peak physical performance that you break the constraints (code) of the world, causing a severe bug that crashes the program and reveals the reality of all things.
Reminds me of the AGNES [0] (Age Gain Now Empathy System), developed at MIT AgeLab. Saw it in action there back when I worked at the lab in the early 10s - I found the broad range of applications in research quite intriguing.
I guess I'm the only one who thought this was literally a joke. If anyone is interested I have the orange tinted 90's ski goggles, weights for arms and legs, and I'll even throw in some mothballs and baby powder no additional charge.
Do people really need something this extravagant not too mention ridiculous looking in order to just relate to other humans? In order to empathize? Is it so hard to "take someone's word" for how they feel, that we need to feel it too? I've never had a Kidney Stone in my life, and I'm not signing up for one because I don't need to "see it to believe it."
But if it sells I say Kudos to the creator. I'm just shocked there's a niche here.
Because there's a big difference between having empathy for another's pain and actually understanding what it's like, even to a slight degree. For example, I'm severely visually impaired; I would not expect a deaf person to truly understand what that's like, just as I don't understand what a deaf person's life is like; that doesn't stop either of us from having empathy for the other though.
If this helps people empathize who otherwise wouldn't... isn't that good? Can we just not be glad that people can gain some more understanding of what the elderly go through?
Ok, I realize that came out as quite negative/sarcastic, not meant to offend anyone. I stand by the overall comment though. You don't have to have the extent of the experience another person has had to relate/empathize.
While i think we should do more things in that direction, it borders on human experimentation.
Btw, somebody should mention that Putin/Xi's talk about living to 150 years and the 70 being just a children age today (if you have state resources at your disposal).
I think life extension is an age-old topic for every powerful monarch or authoritarian leader. Every one believes they'll at last be the one who has the right resources and people to finally cheat life and live to 150 or become immortal. If they really end up buying into immortality it usually leads to their demise, like what happened to so many Chinese emperors throughout history. New knowledge and new theories about aging always arise but so does new quackery from people who have a lot to gain from convincing powerful people.
Yesterday it was immortality elixirs that lead to mercury poisioning, today it's young blood transfusions and young organ transplants (having multiple major surgeries and living on lifelong immunosuppresants does not bode well for longevity)
Awful idea #1: If you are one of those advanced-age president-dictator of a big super-power, you know, one of those guys that get caught in a hot mic talking about immortality, you could seal your pact with the devil by forcing anybody in your big chunk of the planet who doesn’t ace their STEM topics to wear one of these suits. Who knows, maybe if the youth get properly scared of their old age, they will stop being a subversive thorn and instead focus on fixing the ending of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Awful idea #2: Just listen to your grandmother when you are young. She will tell you how brutal is to be old. Read the science, not just biology but all the connected sciences, specially mathematics. And then listen to the priests (critically!), and read the writers, and peruse the written record of the human civilization, which almost begins with the Epic of Gilgamesh. It will reveal shadows you didn’t know were in your mind. None of it, of course, prevents you from becoming old, but it puts most things into perspective, and it digs out a certain light that we have lost and which we very much need if we are ever going to do anything about the suffering that aging brings.
Awful idea #3: Take a shortcut and paste everything I wrote before this paragraph into an LLM. Any LLM which is reasonably state of the art. Prompt with “what’s the meaning of this?” It will significantly change the intended meaning of what I said in “awful idea #2”. That’s the bias/zeitgeist in our vast cultural recent corpus, that the LLMs swallowed for training, being regurgitated at you in condensed form. And they said that LLMs aren’t useful! Repeat the experiment, but this time use Simplified Chinese to prompt. Observe the very slight cultural drift. Meditate. Now abandon this shortcut and execute awful idea #2. Borrow somebody else’s grandmother if you must.
You joke but given the rate of progress, in a few more years, who knows what they'll come up with. It won't be real. Oh no. But just being fooled for a few minutes is the first flavorful bite.
The pragmatist in me hopes not, I think it'll be the worst drug we invent, even if it's just a pair of goggles, a glove, and a weird sticker for the temples.
The site is slow so I can't see it. I'm 68, eat well, lost 20 pounds, work out twice a week. Everything is working fine. But I live in a place surrounded by people in walkers, wheelchairs, or using canes. Some of them have had strokes or accidents making improvement hard, but many simply chose to not do anything to avoid the aging. You don't ordinarily wind up with a walker at a single point; it often starts many years or even decades earlier when you failed to keep in decent physical shape. I almost started too late (last couple of years), I can see how easy it is to not notice your physical being slowly going down. But assuming no major injury or disease, you can improve your body at almost any age, a little at a time, and avoid or at least postpone physical aging for quite a while.
I also write code daily, read the same things I read when I worked, thus keep my brain going too. You can't ignore body or mind, you have to keep both in tune.
I am still getting older, but I am in better shape than I was before I retired. The last time I felt as fit was when I was still playing basketball 30+ years ago.
Don't wait, it's easier to do a little for decades than wait until it's almost too late.
I didn't realize this until a couple of years ago (in my 40s) but boy did it alter my perspective on life. And I've heard what you're saying here from a couple other people in their 60s too. When you're young you don't really think about it much, health comes for "free."
But as you age your biology will force a choice upon you, one option is you spend progressively more time maintaining your health, in which case it drops off MUCH less than you'd expect. Or you can neglect that maintenance, in which case your quality of life WILL drop off in a big way due to health problems.
That's what it is, it's a choice, one you don't get to opt out of, but there is a path where you're in remarkably good shape for less effort than you would probably assume... for most people even just 2-3 hours a week of moderate exercise at the gym is probably a game changer.
I'm a little worried about the health of younger people today, because I read the statistics about obesity, blood pressure, ED and so on all going up for them. I'm also occasionally taking 20-30 minute walks with people in their 20s, who want to take a car, they're exhausted at the end of it, and they can't keep up with me. I get it, I was like that a couple years ago before I started hitting the gym, but really, at 25, you can't handle under a half hour of brisk walking? Oof, habits sure have changed.
> When you're young you don't really think about it much, health comes for "free."
I can't stress this enough. So many of my peers have complained about back pain and other physical ailments, as if it was an unavoidable part of turning 30.
No, it didn't just suddenly appear the moment you turned 30, it's the symptom of accumulated damage from a sedentary lifestyle.
For what it's worth, I've managed to get a lot of them into fitness, and they're doing much better now
I am around 30 and at least still I feel same as 20. Although I try to walk at least 30 min per day but the city I live in Asia is really shit for walking so it ends up being through shopping malls or some park.
Also I have been taking metformin (daily) and rapamycin (weekly) since like age 24 not sure they have helped but it's easy to buy here so I am giving it a try. I also use sunscreen if I go out during the midday which I rarely do in the tropics..
Reminds me of a guy I knew when I was growing up. At the time he was in his 80s. Walked miles every day, he was in great shape. Still died before 90, so it did not buy him notable longevity, but he was mentally sharp and physically capable up to very near the end. That sounds way better than slowly turning into a vegetable over the last 20 years of your life.
Only 19.7% of men live at least 88 years in the US, let's define notable longevity to be the top 1%, that would imply living at least 99 years.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6_2004.html
That's fair. In my family and wider circle of friends, most people live into their 90s, so I have a biased view that expects this to be pretty routine.
This is linked to the superb concept of Senescence [1].
In 'Exercised', the author goes to great lengths to show how, in some societies, people don't turn into 'vegetables' because they're active and engaged. They just… die eventually, without an awful decay into death.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence
The age you die shouldn't be an accomplishment. The quality of life is.
My dad is in his mid-70s now, and still swims 3-5 miles a week in the ocean currents and waves. He’s so active and so healthy, I literally have a hard time imagining what he’ll be like when he’s feeble.
15 years ago, we went for a hike at elevation and he actually kicked my ass despite being around 35 years older than me. Crazy stuff. That alone was enough to kick my ass into gear. Now I do sprints and lifting, and I actually enjoy it now that my goal is just “do something for health” rather than “reach a half-ton total across my big-3” or something like that.
My grandma is 90 and still lives alone, walks around her neighborhood daily, and swims in a community pool outside her back door. She attributes it (I think rightfully) to a lot of walking and activity throughout her life.
Probably some good genes too (her brother is 100, her sister just passed at 104)
Aging is such an interesting topic that I find myself thinking about it almost every day but more of from the scientific point of view, like what is going wrong and why is the rate of aging so different in the animal kingdom. There are mammals that can live super long compared to ones in the same species and even same sizes, like some birds I remember 50+ while other do less than 10 years. Then there's something like naked molerat etc, the greenland whale hundreds of years lifespan..
Even between people, like Queen Elizabeth lived relatively long and her mother I think also, if you look at pictures throughout her life she always looked younger than her age IMO. And when she died it was very quick not like drawn out years that many have to endure, many long lived people actually pass very quickly..
If I wasn't in software dev, I think I would be in this field.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aixnlVbmzE8
nah it's not probably. it is certainly is a big role
>but many simply chose to not do anything to avoid the aging
Thank you for saying this. A depressingly large proportion of people are seemingly resigned to the fact that once you hit 40-50, you'll inevitably turn into an achy tub of lard and it's rapidly and irreversibly downhill from there.
Barring injuries that are truly irreversible (e.g. severe damage to joints/cartilage), with the correct diet and fitness regime, it's entirely possible to remain lean (≤20% bodyfat) and muscular (≥80th percentile in strength standards [0]) well into what most consider "old age." So many people have no idea just how poorly they eat or how inactive and physically weak they are, and consider the result to just be a normal part of life.
>I also write code daily, read the same things I read when I worked, thus keep my brain going too. You can't ignore body or mind, you have to keep both in tune.
Thanks for saying this too. So much cognitive decline is due to inactivity of the mind. My mom was whip smart until she retired in her mid-60s to a life of idle leisure, and her mental faculties noticeably deteriorated within a few months. Thankfully, she noticed this and deliberately re-engaged with more intense intellectual pursuits (including consulting part-time in the professional field that she loved), and the improvement was night-and-day.
[0] https://strengthlevel.com/strength-standards
I've noticed that the difference between 30 and 40 isn't the level of performance I have, but how quickly performance drops when I stop exercising. In my 30s, I could just not go to the gym for months, and I'd be fine. Now, if I don't go for a few weeks, stuff starts aching.
This is very true, which is why consistency is so key. I think the reason so many people perceive their health falling off in their 40s is that this is when the cumulative weight of increasing life responsibilities (kids, career advancement, caring for elder relatives, etc.) really hits hard, making it more and more difficult to find time/energy for regular exercise.
True. But you can also be smart about it, and it doesn't have to be something that takes your whole afternoon. 15 minutes of home exercise instead of media scrolling, and at the end of the week, it is 1:45, at the end of the month 7:45 that you've done something. Or just a simple door frame exercise bar where you do a pushup or two now and then. These small things add up. Or to go with friends to play football or my friend started to run, they made a Sunday morning running group. To end with what you've begun, regularity is the key.
I've managed to build a significant amount of muscle mass just from doing stretchy-band PT exercises to deal with shoulder pain. 10-15 minutes nearly every day makes a big difference. I've also started developing some serious leg muscles just from walking up and down stairs in my 2-story house (+basement) and around my mildly hilly neighborhood.
I drive as little as possible; I went on a 1200 mile road trip last weekend and I'm still paying for so much sitting.
My grandma is 90 and seems like she hasn't aged at all since I was a child. She is still fit and independent. She eats whatever she wants. She went to the doctor for a checkup and told him that she eats cake and pastries almost every day and asked if that was alright; the doctor looked at her test results and literally told her "Mrs... You can eat as much sugar as you want." It's kind of funny that she is the longest living of all my grandparents because she was the least neurotic about her health to the point of negligence.
She would constantly bake rich chocolate cakes and thick hot drinking chocolate for herself and grandchildren and when she cooked pasta, she would put ketchup + mayonnaise on top. All the recipes she knows are quick/easy and supposedly unhealthy. She literally doesn't know how to make a salad. I've never seen her eat a salad.
This is a bit like the "my grandad smoked a pack a day and it never hurt him" anecdotes where, yes, they're remarkable because it killed all the others who tried it !
For smoking, it is also important to check what happened to people living under the same roof (or in the same multifamily complex even) due to their likely frequent inhalation of secondhand smoke.
I'm turning 60 later this month - biggest thing I've recently done on the wellbeing front is getting a dog - suddenly I'm walking 10km every day (on average) and talking to a lot more people - I had no idea how sociable dog walking is!
Could it be survivorship bias? You'll only ever inhabit your own body. You don't know what it's like to be someone else. Some people are built different.
In only a very few cases with specific degenerative diseases.
For the other 99.9% of us, the number of studies showing the difference made by exercise, healthy eating, not smoking or drinking alcohol are too numerous to mention.
Ignore the information about exercise at your peril. You can probably use motivated reasoning to convince yourself you are right to remain in your chair and your growing list of ailments have nothing to do with your lack of exercise, and you may even remain convinced until you die. That will not change the opportunity you miss to enjoy decades of better health and life.
To grossly oversimplify it, our bodies literally evolved over billions of years to exercise and rest, eat so we are alternately storing excess energy as fat and removing energy from fat stores, and only eating sugars, alcohols, and inhaling smoke as extremely occasional events. I it stupid to assume switching the routine to sitting most of the time, only storing energy as fat and rarely if ever depleting those stores, and frequently consuming sugar alcohol and smoke would make no difference.
I could regale you with pages of personal experience (fmr intl-class athlete, trained and sedentary for periods of life and observed results) and data, but those are easy enough to find. All I can do is encourage you to change your POV, and start exercising well
You will find the 'built different' is how you build your own body —— weight lifting isn't called "body building" for nothing —— it (along with running and stretching) really does rebuild your body over the course of months.
Good luck and I wish you well on your journey.
I run 4 days a week (4km per day), fast for two days (72 hours total) do two gym strength workouts, one sauna session, and two Zumba classes. I also do cold showers daily. Floating once a week, facial ferment therapy once a week.
And still, I feel like hell today (and it is only Friday morning)
I used to run half a marathon every Thursday in a fasted (36 hours) state, but now I can't, I became weak and frail. Aging gets us all!
Yes and: Maintain your balance. Get tested (assessed). Do the exercises. (For anyone who hasn't heard.)
My mom and her bf were hard core. Swimming, biking, running, the works.
They served as one of the hosts for BBC's program Are You Fitter Than a Pensioner? [2010] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tyr5n My mom was 70 at the time. Spoiler: The seniors smoked the youths.
Alas, as with so many: falls -> injury -> idleness -> decline.
Some balance stuff can't be helped. Mom's bf got spells of vertigo; apparently the little balancing sensor bone inside the ear gets loose with age.
Your mom's boyfriend probably already knows this, but just in case: I once suffered from loose crystals in my inner ear (probably due to stress and burnout) and had such bad vertigo that I thought I was going to die. There are exercises that move the crystals back to where they belong, where they get absorbed and metabolized again. It's called Epley maneuver, and while it can be extremely uncomfortable and should preferably be done under supervision (some people throw up when doing it) it solves the issue quickly and pretty much permanently.
I've heard of people who lived months or years even before figuring this out.
There's some hoping that some maladies of aging such as vertigo are more treatable in the coming decades, for those fortunate to be alive by then.
I'm glad this is the #1 post. I love hearing this. Thanks for sharing!
To be realistic, lots of times a simulation would have to capture the feeling of having 6x to 7x the fairly mature adult experience compared to the same person at 30 years old.
And the accompanying multiple of confidence and proven ability to go with it.
Plus a much bigger multiple of both, compared to your younger self at under 30.
You really can do most of the same things after 60, and with maturity it's easy to accept how the big difference is that you wont be doing them as many additional decades into the future.
My dad is 85 and this article hits hard about what he fights going on in his body. What sucks is how much of a downward, self reinforcing spiral it all is. It's so hard to see the curbs to walk over or how to get to a thing himself, so he just naturally chooses to do fewer and fewer things. Watching TV is safer and kinder and becomes the default to anything. Which just makes his brain less and less stimulated and active, and you can imagine the drag that adds to keep figuring out life.
But like the empathy found in this article, it's caused me to be incredibly more patient with anyone struggling to walk in front of me on a crowded or narrow sidewalk.
Aging is rough. Thank you to everyone working on accessibility and aging related tech and science.
My parents have similar issues due to hearing loss, it really makes any kind of social interaction a chore which results in a similar spiral. For years I've wanted to try to make, or hope someone else would make, a set of AR glasses that's purely focused on providing accurate real-time subtitles, no other gimmicks or features that might affect the wearability/usability. I think that's the biggest QOL boost most old folks would get from a single product, and it seems much more realistically feasible than other potential QOL solutions like robotics, but I wouldn't know where to start with building it. As a bonus, it would just need an LLM/Google Translate hookup to become an amazing travel tool.
Spending R&D in something like this is much more important that building fancier hearing aids. Universal subtitles would be a life changer.
Couldn't you do this with $500 in some Xreal Airs and a mobile phone running Parakeet right now?
Those look bulky, to support exactly the kind of feature creep I think will always be a problem with this category. I think there are a LOT of people who would simply not consider wearing them until the form factor is close to normal glasses, but it would be hard to convince any product manager not to expand into videos/games/music/AI/etc.
What's the feature creep you see them support?
The Xreal front page is people playing racing games and watching movies; I'm imagining something that can be used nonchalantly in public, and I'm assuming every feature beyond a bare minimum speech-to-text display would increase the size.
I've seen R&D demos of universal subtitling and translating, in video conferencing, but it doesn't seem to have taken off or it's hidden behind more paywalls. I did suggest that people use good microphones when giving presentations over MS Teams for the purpose of transcriptions, archiving, searchability and AI summarization, but real time translating would be the other use case.
That said, I don't believe it would work as smoothly if used in AR, as speaking and reading are two different brain things. Plus, if it's aimed at older people, they likely have sight issues too.
To a point this is already possible, just ask people to speak into your phone with e.g. Google Translate or some other text-to-speech engine. But that's awkward, because it's a context switch to a device and the processing time required.
I know my folks already watch movies with subtitles for this reason, and I would think sight issues can be calibrated for if the product is a pair of glasses? But idk how AR tech works with e.g. farsighted people who use reading glasses.
I've never thought of this usecase and I think it's fantastic.
My grandma is 83 and I could’ve written this exact same post.
I know it comes for everyone, but the pace of said spiral is frightening.
Wish we were in a timeframe with more alternatives for rapid loss of mobility and muscle.
While it is challenging, looked at one a life time scale it is kind of a neat thing. It isn't a purely linear decline and that means while the later years kind of suck, you get a lot of decent time before then.
Yes, we should try and work against this but I am just looking at the silver lining.
There's quite a lot of aging research going, maybe will get something concrete in the next 10-20 years (maybe too late for her) but it's at least something
When you stop walking, that's the beginning of the end.
This! My grandmother adopted a dog late in her life. She walked 10km a day with that dog for nearly 20 years! (That dog was the oldest dog I've ever known). At 92 she was famous in my small village, she was in better shape than some of the 30 year olds!
Then the dog died. Instead of walking 10km per day, she lay on the couch staring at the ceiling. About 3 months later she started getting lost on her way to the supermarket. Fifth time she got lost we decided to put her in a home for demented people. We simply couldn't provide the care she needed any other way. Took a few more months and she stopped recognising us.
I think she outlived her dog by about 18 months, iirc.
She stopped walking, and then age came fast for her.
I'm 63. I make a point of walking 5Km (3 miles), every morning. I'm usually out the door, by 0530, and back in about 50 minutes.
I was running, but kept getting injured, so it switched to walking, several years ago.
I think keeping my mind occupied is just as important. It's entirely possible that the visual stimulus of her walks was as important as the exercise.
For myself, I make a point of constantly working on shipping software, and constantly learning new stuff. LLMs have been a godsend, for the latter. I had pretty much given up on trying to ask questions, because of the awful, sneering responses that I was getting, more and more.
Yeah I think you're right! And it's not just the visual stimulus either! She'd walk through pretty much the entire village, including a few homes that smack in the middle of nowhere. And she'd say hello to everyone she passed! Once in a while she'd stop and have chat...
After the dog died she only talked to people if they came into her home.
I think the social aspect of her walks was very important for her health too. Like you say, it's all about exercising that noggin',as well as the body!
I hear you with the running thing. I disliked walking, so I moved somewhere nice and got a dog and that helps tremendously.
I have never been a dog person. Now I want a dog.
A couple of neighbors adopt older dogs. We never discussed that specifically, yet it seems to be a smaller commitment lifetime-wise (few years instead of 10-15 for a young dog), and you'd have to train and deal with a puppy energy (which is a great thing if you have the time and energy to engage in it) if you adopt younger dogs, while the older ones seem to be well set in their good behavior ways. Long walks, established routine, no drama. Also of course fostering is a gateway drug into getting a dog as well as good way to learn what dog would be a match for you.
There's an overwhelming and abundantly clear reason they are referred to as man's best friend. I guess I was fortunate to always grow up with dogs, but I can never really understand people that don't pine for dogs. Now, I can understand not wanting the added responsibility in some situations, but the amazingness of a dog companion is one of the most mind blowing things about the whole nature of human existence. The presence of dogs through evolution legitimately made humans the way they are today and the reverse for what dogs are. It's really wild. I also don't get people that treat their dogs like humans or kids though. It's a dog, don't bring it in a restaurant.
Also lots of empirical evidence that dog owners live longer.
This YouTube video is directly responsible for me getting a dog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocV7Hpj9keM
While the video is very impressive - my main reaction was to think how incredibly cool that type of dog is. So I eventually ended up getting my own Samoyed and it's been a hugely positive impact on my life.
NB I pretty much like all dogs now - but I love Samoyeds.
My grandfather, with whom I was very close, suffered from Parkinson's in his last decade or so. For a long time he was doing OK: Occasional confusion and the slow, shuffling walk that is characteristic of the disease.
One day he had a minor operation that left him needing a wheelchair for what we thought would be just a few weeks. But he never regained his strength and was never to walk again, which led to a steep and sudden decline in his mental condition. It was truly devastating to see one of the sharpest people I knew become an angry and confused simulacrum of the man I so admired.
I wish I had realized two things then: First, as you say, maintaining mobility is the crucial to the well-being of the elderly. Second, immediate physical/occupational therapy after a fall or surgery is essential to people at risk of losing mobility. Sadly it wasn't offered to us and we didn't think to ask.
My dad is going through that shit right now. He fell a few weeks ago and hasn’t walked since.
I live abroad to make more money and feed my ego and I only see him 3–4 times a year. On top of that selfishness, every now and then I catch myself selfishly thinking I don’t want to go through that, which makes me feel like an even worst piece of shit.
Life sucks.
Man, be easy on yourself. You already have the world to put you down, no need to add to it. Life is complicated and I’m sure that you trying to have a better life and a career is not just for ego. Love yourself a bit.
I mean if you are saying you make a lot of money, hire someone to go and get him moving, if he would accept it anyway.
When it comes to physical exercise, this is the key fundamental one. Yes, others things help but it is the foundation on which everything else rests.
Alas, it can be taken away without choice, hopefully not.
Aging should be recognized as a disease already. It's long overdue.
Disease is abnormal to some "norm". When everyone has it, it's not a disease.
I would appreciate if the "norm" was recognized to be not having your body rot away over time.
It really is simple: aging is incredibly harmful and undesirable. It strips away your quality of life until there isn't much left and then you die. It doesn't take any more than that for it to be declared a disease.
Whether it's "natural" or whether "everyone has it" is a distraction. If everyone was born with cancer, that wouldn't make cancer any less of a disease.
> It really is simple: aging is incredibly harmful and undesirable.
Doesn't make it a disease. Dying is a normal part of life as well as the decline before that.
> If everyone was born with cancer, that wouldn't make cancer any less of a disease.
No, then the people not having cancer would have the disease.
> I would appreciate if the "norm" was recognized
That's not how a norm works. You get that by doing trials and statistics, not by wanting it to be different.
Starvation used to be "a normal part of life". So was having half your children die before they hit the age of 10. That was the normal, natural outcome of having a child - if you want to have grandchildren, just make more children! Some of them would live, surely!
This is how it was - until humans decided that this sucks and something should be done about that.
I see no reason not to dispose of aging at the earliest opportunity. And this starts by recognizing: aging sucks for everyone, and should be disposed of.
It's not fightable or optional, so it's less like starvation and more like gravity. Humans have decided that we'd like to "dispose" of aging, but unfortunately reality has this annoying habit of not responding to our categorization and despite thinking of it as a disease we cannot fight it like we can other diseases. Those other things you mentioned are considered outside of the usual because we have been able to make them less common through effort; despite all our effort though, aging isn't something we have that control over. We're all gonna die, of old age or a short-sharp-shock, at least until we figure out some wild medical breakthroughs.
Once we have those breakthroughs, sure folks might start thinking of aging as a disease that's not "normal" or a thing that we can actually avoid, but until then it's a fact of life, same as gravity, the sun, or the tides.
I’d argue we won’t get those anti aging breakthroughs unless we take it seriously as a disease.
It’s just biology. It can be fixed with enough research. There’s nothing magical or spiritual about aging it’s just another thing for humans to beat.
Lots of people get viscerally up feelings about it though for some reason. Not sure why. I’ve had people spitting purple angry when I say the above.
There's way more aging research now than like 10 years ago, I think the field is also starting to understand that playing whack a mole with 50 different diseases on a 80 year old is not really the winning strategy.
It's less "not fightable" and more "no one is seriously trying".
Compare the amount of funding aging research gets with something like Alzheimer's. Which is also a degenerative disease, and worth fighting against - but nowhere near as prevalent.
I don't doubt that it would be incredibly hard to stop aging altogether. But if the effort was there, we might get a way to reduce the severity of aging within a few decades of research. The sheer benefits of being able to reduce the severity of "aging associated" things in a world with aging population would be immense.
I wouldn’t call one of the most essential parts of the life process (moving towards the end of your life involuntarily) a disease.
It’s actually very disturbing how people seem not to be worried about the growing potential for immortality. THAT is a disease, if anything.
If you want to decay and rot and die a miserable death, that's your choice. If your genuine preference is that all of your friends and family and your own children should decay and rot and die a miserable death too, then that's your opinion and you can hold onto it.
But don't you dare force that outcome onto everyone.
In my eyes, "decay and rot and the inevitability of a miserable death is a good thing actually" is a fucking insane viewpoint to hold. The only possible reason I see to hold onto it is that it's the socially accepted cope. If you truly believe that nothing can be done about aging, then "death is good acktually" makes for a good coping mechanism.
I'd rather humans cope less and problem-solve more.
i’ll leave you with this to ponder.
It would be pretty weird if george washington, Thomas Jefferson, etc were here with us today. We’d probably still be debating if slavery is acceptable or not LOL.
People complain about boomers hoarding all the wealth and “never letting go” so younger folks can take the reins. Imagine how much worse it would be if those boomers lived until 200?
Imagine how much more fossil fuel we’d be burning if we all lived until 200?
You know how old people tend to get stubborn? Not all, but most? Now imagine if the U.S. government was comprised of mostly people age 100+. Imagine how they would do keeping up with changes that affect youngsters in 2025?
Imagine how bad the housing crisis would be in 2025.
Imagine how unmotivated people would be in day to day life if they knew they’d live to 200 years?
In summary…if everyone could easily live forever, that is not a good thing. It would drastically change society as we know it, and not 100% for the better. I’d argue it would actually make things worse.
Death is literally a biological process that affects all living organisms on this planet, and in the galaxy. Sorry if that’s hard to accept? I personally find it beautiful how “energy” is recycled once we die, through the soil, and eventually into other things - like a tree, etc.
I find it hard to imagine that an 80 years old politician today spends a lot of time thinking of what would happen 50 or 100 years down the line. And things like fossil fuel use are very much a "50 to 100 years down the line" kind of problem.
Now, if that very politician thought that with the way anti-aging technology is going, he'll probably live to 150, maybe 200 if he's lucky? That might change the equation - for the better.
I don't think that "kill everyone to avoid the risk of the political system getting marginally worse" is an optimal solution. I'd rather deal with aging and the shittiness of politics as two separate problems with a minor overlap.
>I personally find it beautiful how “energy” is recycled once we die, through the soil, and eventually into other things - like a tree, etc.
I think that this is nothing but socially accepted cope. A load of pseudo-profound bullshit that might be easier to accept than the idea that aging and death are really fucking bad and we aren't doing much to stop them. And that even if we did, we and our loved ones may not be the ones to ever benefit from it.
cope? it’s what happens to all the fauna and flora on this planet. Including humans. Bit of a weird take if you ask me. I know my place so to speak…
I do agree with you that if politicians lived longer, they’d (hopefully) think long term. That’s an interesting point I hadn’t considered.
Lastly - nobody is suggesting killing anyone here. Feels like i’m being interviewed by a reporter with my words taken completely out of context. This is what being famous must feel like. :) If someone finds a way for humans to live longer I won’t be upset in the slightest. I’m just saying “be careful what you wish for”. That is all. There would be many unintended consequences. Viewing it as strictly a beneficial thing is naive i think.
Yes, cope. "It’s what happens to all the fauna and flora on this planet" is cope. A literal "it's more okay if I rot to death if everything else does!"
Modern agriculture has enabled the human population to grow rapidly without people starving to death, which had "unknown unintended consequences" too. As well as the well known consequence of food being affordable and available to most people worldwide.
I'd take "unknown unintended consequences" over the well known consequences of the status quo. The current consequences is that everyone dies a miserable death. It's a very easy choice.
My takeaway from this chat is that one of us is content, and the other is petrified of death. :-)
Anyways thanks for humoring me. Enjoy the rest of your day!
Holy cope.
You both have good and valid points of view but this site deserves a higher level of decorum.
We have a lot to thank for the passing of power from one generation to the next over the past millennia. We don’t know what we don’t know. I imagine the next enlightenment or the next freedoms to be won will require older generations to “move on.”
If you want the world to be run by a 700 year old Xi jinping, if you want your children to suffer under a thousand year rule of monopolistic Bezos, if you want to see Altered Carbon become a reality, then that’s your opinion and you can hold on to it.
But don’t you dare force that on anyone else.
See how unconvincing these platitudes are?
I literally cannot imagine why you would want infinite life. The short timespan is 99% of the reason life is so valuable. We need to do what we can with the time we’re given.
I never said nothing could be done about aging anyways. I think we’ll reach the point where people only die when they choose to.
That’s also a pure dystopia, because it’s beyond naive to think this would be some commonplace technology afforded to everyone and not just the ruling class.
Imagine if King George were still ruling England. No rules can change ever - he’s the king. Hope you like eternal monarchy.
I sometimes wonder if people are so afraid of death because they never talk about it frankly? My wife and I converse about it regularly.
I kind of agree but on the other hand I think it would also change the calculus a lot, if the dictator was going to live to 700, wouldn't it be more likely for someone to act and try to get him out because now the calculus might be that it's just better to wait it out than try to set anything up?
It's a bit hard to visualize that kind of world because so many other things would also be different, and if the politicians were chronologically like 500, they would biologically be still much younger so maybe the mind would allow for much more plasticisty and that would allow them to be more open to new ideas.
Now this is some of that top-shelf cope I've heard about.
Less than the cope in this thread though. MUH NATURE, MUH WISDOM, MUH 8000 YEAR OLD PUTIN. Have you thought about the 5000 year old Kim Jong Un yet?
Conscious senescence makes up less than 0.01% of my self-aware life.
What's worse: having a 700 year old Xi Jinping, or having an extra 600 years of entirely unmitigated aging worldwide - with all the death and suffering that entails?
There is plenty of politicians I truly hate. But I don't hate any of them enough to doom billions to an early grave just to get at them.
If you think that Xi Jinping should die, then I can't help but think that a better solution to that would be to actually kill Xi Jinping. Far less collateral damage involved.
>That’s also a pure dystopia, because it’s beyond naive to think this would be some commonplace technology afforded to everyone and not just the ruling class.
There's this tendency for people nowadays to take this kind of shitty Black Mirror logic, and assume that the inevitable outcome is the one that maximizes the grimdark factor.
In reality, there's no reason to expect that anti-aging treatments would work any different from something like Ozempic or laser eye surgery. Sure, those were hideously expensive to develop - but are now affordable to upper middle class, and fully expected to get more available over time.
You earn more by selling a $1000 smartphone to everyone than you could ever earn by selling a billion dollar megayacht to a dozen billionaires looking to buy one. With anti-aging tech, the economic incentive to reduce the costs and reach a wider audience is immense. The demand is going to be there: a lot of what the cosmetics industry does now is fight the mere appearance of aging, and that's an industry worth hundreds of billions by itself.
Xi Jinping is worse, by orders of magnitude.
Death is part of the necessary cycle of biology, and in no way is it bad. It’s certainly SAD, but in no way is it bad. Rotting isn’t this horrible mark on your body, it’s the beauty of nature recycling things so that the new has a chance.
Not only that, but could you imagine the absolutely incredible strain on Earth’s resources if we had 50 billion people instead of 8 billion? Global warming would’ve happened ages ago, and we’d be far, FAR beyond it now. In this scenario, it should be obvious nobody has a yacht, let alone a smartphone. There simply isn’t enough to go around here on earth.
There simply isn’t any positive to immortality, besides “well I won’t be sad about that one particular thing anymore”, which is… really lame when compared against the untold damage this will do.
I’m a little surprised you’re not taking any time to explain the benefits here, because I’m not actually seeing any besides you not having to cope with nature anymore.
Edit: I should also mention that I’m not looking for shitty black mirror outcomes, I’m just looking at the modern world, which continues to stratify massively, and pretty much has (with few exceptions) since time immemorial. Can you explain why things will suddenly become fair and equitable when nobody dies for some reason?
If you think that the evils of Xi Jinping outweigh the suffering of billions, you should consider killing Xi Jinping. Plenty of people tried killing Hitler, and Xi Jinping is apparently even worse?
>There simply isn’t any positive to immortality, besides
You mean, besides billions of people not rotting to death in their own bodies? Besides that little incredibly unimportant easy-to-overlook thing?
>Can you explain why things will suddenly become fair and equitable when nobody dies for some reason?
Can you explain why amazing technologies like cars and smartphones and air travel became available to the masses, instead of being hoarded by a dozen uber-rich uber-powerful billionaires?
The short answer is "economics". Do you expect anti-aging technology to be exempt from economics somehow?
Yeah, I dunno about you, but I’m not using the same kinds of stuff as billionaires.
It will be the same - because of economics. If you think you’ll be just as healthy as long-lived as them, you’re crazy. It’s literally not the case anywhere else in life. Food, housing, opportunities, healthcare ALREADY, transportation, and kitchen sinks.
> besides billions of people not rotting to death in their own bodies?
Man, when you’re so melodramatic about something as benign as aging, you’re really hard to take seriously.
If you can’t see my point of view by now, and how it’s a hell of a gamble to hope we stop doing the thing we’ve been doing pretty much since the dawn of man, I don’t think I have anything else to add to the conversation.
I also just think it’s mentioning that you are your body, in its entirety. We almost certainly have more than one brain, at the very least.
That's what aging is. Aging is the process of rotting to death in your own body. There's nothing "benign" about it.
Humans learned a lot of ways to sugarcoat it. Many ways to cope. But if I told you that I want to create and unleash something that would make billions suffer, getting worse over decades, and all afflicted people would eventually die?
You'd call me a twisted monster, rightfully so.
And yet, when I propose we do the opposite, you say "no, it's natural, it's benign, rotting to death is fine actually, everyone does it".
I can't see how there wouldn't be a revolution if the rich had all this anti-aging technology and the plebs would sit there and watch.
People like to cope a lot, they are fine with playing whack a mole with 50 different diseases and putting the 90 year old through chemo, but treating aging (the actual root cause)? OH MY GOD MUH NATURE
I wasn't going to respond because this comment is so dense, but I feel like it's valuable to the conversation to point out: wtf do you mean "people"? I've literally never met anyone who shares my view on this.
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All living beings have protective mechanism against all the degenerative effects of aging, and this has been true for over a billion years now.
That protective mechanism is reproduction. Your viral infections, bacterial infections, broken bones, bad backs, polluted lungs, corrupted mind, and just general wear and tear, does not get transmitted. It's a clean start in life.
There is epigenetic age reset that happens during the conception that "resets" the cells to their young version like kind of a factory reset that cleans up the aging marks and other offsets that have happened during life so they don't get transmitted to the offspring. Learning to apply this process to the living human is quite big research topic. Obviously nature had to figure some kind of mechanism how to not transmit the cellural damage forward.
It is applied to the living human (or other being), when it is born.
Applying the process to already old people would be the abomination of desolation and turn this planet into a hellish dimension of unimaginable proportions, and it would of course exterminate humanity. You have to remember that when humanity is exterminated, that means forever.
And the "protective mechanism" humans have against dementia is that they eventually stop being capable of feeding themselves and die.
Which does get rid of dementia alright. But I fail to see that as an acceptable solution.
Aging is part of a natural process we are already able to slow down significantly. Calling it a disease just muddies the semantic space of pathology in my opinion.
Everybody understands already that slowing down or stopping the aging process is desirable. I don't see the usefulness in lumping it in with muscle atrophy, clogged arteries, or cancer.
I don't know, muscle atrophy, cancer etc. are all mostly caused by aging. The current paradigm is kind of whack a mole which won't take us very far.
We need to understand the aging better still like what is actually going on and what are the main drivers (even here is dispute among scientists)
You're saying this as if there were no research going on about aging. We know why aging happens. That doesn't mean we can just stop or reverse the process, or that it is even possible to do so.
One of the technologies I look forward to is exoskeleton. Yes I know it will be used by the army. But the potential to improve elders' lives is huge.
Agreed. But the pessimist in me fears that some people might fall back to that much too soon instead of adopting healthier lifestyles.
Why would it be used by the army? Seems like you don’t need the squishy meat filling for that use case.
There are lots of instances where a soldier being 5-6 times stronger would be really useful.
I don’t think it’ll be a scenario like the starship troopers book, but having one available to a swat team or whatever, could be useful.
Still, I personally think the army would be one of the last applications, because that’s where you need the absolute lowest possible latency. Latency on a suit for an elderly person would be much more acceptable.
Or maybe the scenario where they lift a truck that is stuck in the sand.
An exhaust air bag jack and a plank or five squaddies can already do that job.
Aging is rough. I feel for you. My parents are a bit younger but I'm starting to pick up on things that make me realize they're getting older. Thanks for sharing
Beyond the obvious (medical care, accessibility, etc), I think technology has a huge amount of untapped potential to make the end of our lives a lot more bearable, and a lot less lonely. TV is one thing - and whether it's a net good or not has been discussed to death, so I won't here - but I wonder how video games might be used. They're a lot more engaging - both generally and cognitively - than TV, you can build and achieve things and feel a sense of accomplishment (yeah yeah pride and accomplishment), there are communities around them, you can play with your family, etc. Even online board and card games would be an option. Have you ever considered showing your dad some simple games?
Can’t speak to the cognitive benefits of video games in late life, but my grandma really took to our N64 one summer when my brother and I stayed with her.
She used to stay absorbed in a little battery powered draw poker game that she had, but by the end of the summer she had gone through a large part of our game collection and could put up a real challenge in Mario Kart 64.
Eventually we gifted it to her and she played it for years after that.
From what I recall, there are retirement homes (the examples I'm thinking of are in Asia) that make use of these suits in their onboarding processes, where they need to wear these suits for a few hours to understand some of the challenges their patients experience, and develop empathy when they can't walk as fast or do things that we'd expect in short order.
I would love to see more widespread adoption of these suits in training and employee onboarding in these facilities, mostly because if I'm in that situation or I want to think about a retirement home for my family members, I'd want to see that no one is losing their temper because my mom can't sprint 12km/hr to the elevators for breakfast.
This being said, anecdotally, it seems elder abuse is more the norm, simply because of compassion fatigue, so I suspect that even in however many years time, I'll be punched by a PSW for no good reason.
Doing this is probably a net good but also a bit risky. It creates the impression that there's one experience we all go through as we decline, when in reality it's pretty wildly different. It's helpful to build some empathy, but also a limited understanding.
For instance, these suits might restrict movement but they don't simulate hip or knee pain. They don't simulate shortness of breath, etc. It certainly doesn't induce cognitive impairment or anxiety. A young healthy person might wear one of these and go, "it's not soooooo bad.... I could do it why can't they".
Ha, you haven't seen the add-on upgrade list:
Knee pain simulator simulating knee problems (1 pair of knee wraps with build-in stimulus elements, incl. bag) 200,00
Kyphosis simulator simulating a hunchback (1 hip belt, 1 neck strap and 1 walking stick, incl. bag) 190,00
COPD simulator simulating shortness of breath (1 rib bandage and 1 adjustable nose clip, incl. cleaning set and bag) 170,00
Tremor simulator simulating trembling hands (2 pairs of gloves in 2 sizes and 1 control unit, incl. bag) 160,00
Tinnitus simulator simulating ringing in the ears (8 tinnitus sounds as MP3 files, free download as part of an order) 0,00
Simulation glasses simulating 6 eye diseases (6 different pairs of glasses in a box) 230,00
Hemiparesis simulator simulating a unilateral paralysis (set of 7 matched components, incl. bag) 390,00
Back pain simulator simulating back problems (set of 2 simulators in 2 sizes, incl. bag) 490,00
And my brain hurts just reading this at no extra cost. I'm going out for a walk now, take a deep breath, soak it all in and enjoy it while it lasts...
https://www.age-simulation-suit.com/download/Price_list.pdf
This is starting to look like a BDSM shop, but without the fun.
Compared to the suit, this is next level. Limiting your senses and movement can help you design an environment that the elderly find useable, kind of like screen filters that simulate color blindness. But actually causing pain goes beyond these practical considerations.
Limited understanding is far better than no understanding.
The post I made laid out several reasons why that might not be the case or at least is not axiomatic.
I must have missed that? You seem to point out that 1) getting old is different for all of us, and 2) that this doesn't simulate every single facet of old age. I don't see how this takes away from the benefits of establishing at least some understanding of old age.
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If you want to see what you will look like when you're older, stand in a spot and jump up and down repeatedly. Take photos (or pause a video recording) right at the moment after the lowest part of your jump. The upward acceleration will make your skin sag the way gravity will as your collagen weakens over decades.
But then again, by the time you're older you might look younger than you do now, e.g. "Ageing changes our genes – epigenetic atlas gives clearest picture yet (nature.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45095532 (from the other day, no comments yet)
Or watch someone pull G forces in a plane (sim here but I had another vid in mind this one is better)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/m3wljWlAVss
One thing you have to experience to really get it, that cannot be simulated with a mechanical suit or transmitted through words, is all the f-ing little aches you get past a certain point. I´m now convinced it is this that makes older people cranky. Some days, my body is just constantly in a low but annoying pain somewhere, and it seems in increasingly weird, obscure places you never even thought about. I dont even remember when or how it started but although I would be considered fit by most people, now I have to watch my running, otherwise ITBS, I have to watch my pull exercises, otherwise shoulder impingement syndrome, I have to watch my dips, otherwise elbows, hell even after just _sleeping_ I have to roll and stretch my neck out because it hurts just from lying apparently. I used to scoff about warmup, now I take it really, really seriously. "Going with the flow" of the moment, instead of sticking to a carefully dosed plan? That´s for young bodies! Thankfully I can still use my full range of motion everywhere but Im acutely aware now how quickly it can all go away and how long any overuse or even minor injury now costs me in recovery.
Getting older has its benefits too but mostly mental, in physical terms I cannot think of a single benefit.
This is one of the big psychological benefits of being physically active. If you're fairly physically active, e.g. doing 60+ min of high heart rate cardio or intense anaerobic exercise a day, you'll always be sore somewhere. Maybe it's your thighs from yesterday's squats. Your lower back from a long run. Your elbow when you tried that dynamic move on a climb you've been projecting. And once you accept and embrace that minor pain you become a lot better at psychologically dealing with the small constant pain that comes with aging.
Also if you ever compete in a physical activity at more than just a "with your friends" level, you'll quickly find that whether you're 15 or 50 warming up makes a huge difference.
A lot of the problems of aging that I suspect folks today are facing are the problems of leading a fairly sedentary lifestyle.
There is a profound psychological difference between:
"My legs are sore from running yesterday but it means the muscles are getting stronger and I'll be healthy."
And:
"There is this weird twinge in my back. Did I sleep weird and it will be fine tomorrow? Or do I have to start doing more stretches and if I keep up with that forever, I can keep this pain at bay? Or does it mean that one of the vertebrae is starting to crack and if I don't go to the doctor soon enough and get surgery I'm going to end up paralyzed for life?"
Pain is easy. It's not knowing what the pain means that's hard.
You can have the same feelings toward pain from physical activity. "Did I strain my shoulder in my workout or did I tear a ligament??" or "Are the ligaments in my foot sore from snowboarding or did I tear my ACL??" I used to be afraid of this kind of thing all the time when I first started being active. My general point is that regular physical activity gives you psychological faith in the resilience of the human body. Having done loads of activities and sports for over a decade now I am much more confident in my body's ability to bounce back from injury than I did when I was more sedentary and every ache and pain filled me with fear.
I think folks are really focusing on the "psychological" part of my comment in isolation and not the "problems of leading a fairly sedentary lifestyle" which is probably my fault because I don't think I structured my post well.
I think a lot of the problems that are associated with aging, such as minor aches and pains, are consequences of leading mostly sedentary lifestyles. Part of being fairly active (meaning well above most state-recommended guidelines) is the psychological resilience to pain that I mentioned. But also part of it is that because you are constantly pushing your physical abilities, the strain that comes from occasional bad movement as part of everyday life (sleeping badly, holding the faucet tap the wrong way, hitting your wrist on the corner of a table, etc) is usually well within the envelope of pushing yourself compared to your actual sport.
My greater point is that leading a sedentary lifestyle is a whole package of things. This includes the physiological consequences of not developing strength, flexibility, and joint elasticity; this also includes the psychological resistance to risk and pain that comes from being sedentary.
I agree with you totally that being physically active is important for being healthy.
And I think there's something to be said for your point that experiencing pain and seeing yourself recover from it can be helpful for processing pain psychologically. You could look at it as sort of exposure therapy for pain.
But I also think that the kinds of pains you get from exercise are quite different from the psychological experience of pain from a serious injury and the former doesn't really prepare you for the latter.
It's hard to explain unless you've been there. Most of the time, pain is a signal from your past telling you about something you did. It's your body's way of saying "don't do that again". But when a severe injury happens, it can also be an omen for your future. Your body saying "no, you don't get to do that anymore".
Processing that is difficult, especially given how uncertain the signal actually is.
That is an interesting idea and it follows some patterns I previously noticed with friends. The ones who are not or never were physically active are all complaining about aches and pains and acting like they are old men twice their age just doing basic household things. I kind of just chalked that up to them not being in shape, but it never really fully explained the extent of their complaints. However I grew up with a very physical life working on the farm and doing trade work since forever. By every measure I should be the one complaining about aches and pains and old injuries and such, but perhaps because im so accustomed to pains just from work and more intense physical activity the age related stuff just hasn't hit me hard enough to really notice like they do.
If you do it regularly, you won't be sore.
Soreness only comes initially once you are getting into the routine, or if you push yourself way beyond limits.
> doing 60+ min of high heart rate cardio or intense anaerobic exercise a day,
Per day?? Does anyone really do that? I aim for a bit more than 60 minutes a week.
> If you're fairly physically active
> (meaning well above most state-recommended guidelines)
So yeah some people do. High level amateur and pro athletes put in much, much more. I view it as a cheat code to lead a longer, healthier life. While my less active friends are complaining about lower back pain shuffling into their cars, I'm able to carry large boxes up many flights of stairs with minimal issue.
FWIW I used to have awful digestion issues before I started working out regularly and now have gone back to my teenage baseline of guzzling peppers and chili oil.
I don't accept and embrace the minor pain, I treat exercise as a way to fix what I did wrong that led to the pain so I'm more resilient and don't develop it chronically. There are many aches I used to get (elbows while washing hands, hip socket, sleeping with my neck to the side) that are years in the past because I figured them out. I just realized right now that I haven't woken up with sore collarbones this year, which I can probably attribute to incline bench.
Cracks and pops are another case where constant introspection and following tips on TikTok has made many of them go away. The received wisdom is they're not proven harmful, but in my case they at least represent using muscles in wrong patterns that pull things off center.
Not OP but it started happening to me a few years ago. I'm 37 now and it is slowly getting worse.
The only thing that keeps it at bay is regular exercise, both strength and mobility. I'm careful about running.
Yes. I am 42 and feel and am fitter than at any other point in my life (I started taking care of myself in my 30s).
The joint pain is the only thing that makes me feel old right now. And I don't think there's much I can do about it. (although I'll be happy for suggestions.)
I can't argue if it's 'healthy' or not, but anecdotal accounts say that going meat only cures most of these pains in about 30 days. I've tried it. 65 year old dad tried it. Coworkers and friends. It worked for everyone. No one has remained meat only, but it taught us all to watch what we eat like hawks.
Not sure if "meat only" can be a cure-all but anecdotally, I feel better when I reduce my gluten intake. I've never been diagnosed with a wheat sensitivity but my son has been forced to go gluten free because of one. When he is home on school breaks, we eat gluten free and I do notice a difference in how I feel.
I'm not giving up beer or the once a month pizza anytime soon but I have made conscious decisions to reduce my overall gluten intake.
My point was that for everyone I've seen try it, meat only has been a cure-all. If that's just because it gets to stop eating all the chemical preservatives, or the adding sugars, or the seed oils, or if it's because a tomato is bad for you I don't know.. but I'm just saying that if someone has mild joint pains in day to day life, I'm basically 90% sure a meat only diet would stop them. Why that is exactly, I'm not sure. How much could they add back and still not have the joint paint... I have decent ideas about that.
I mean, it is a hard line elimination diet. If you watch what happens with reintroduction, you can provably figure out where the issues are.
Yup, but getting people to try it involve so much effort you only really do it for people you care about. It's amazing how resistant people are to eating only meat for a month or two, but drinking alcohol is no problem. Chemical preservatives? No problem. Added sugars? No problem. Seed oils washed in solvents? No problem.
How old are you?
I think these kinds of aches start happening to a non-negligible number of people beginning in their early 30s. It isn’t that they can’t still be active, it’s just that they have to be diligent about warming up their joints before certain exercises, whereas before they may not have had to even consider warming up.
I'm not the parent, but could've written all the same (44).
I’m 43, and though I seem to get more injuries in the gym since I hit 40 (usually tendon overuse), I’ve noticed that proper nutrition and good sleep make a big difference in how my body feels. I also go to the gym at 5:30am and do an hour of free weight strength training 4 days per week.
If you guys are hurting all the time in your 40s, I would really advise you to do a full assessment of what you’re putting in your body and what kind of message you’re sending your body with your exercise routine. It might also be a good idea to get checked for markers of inflammation as well as testosterone levels. You should not have constant nagging pain at your age.
It's not literally pain all the time. More things like you said - much easier to overdo it in the gym or playing sports, especially if you don't warm up and cool down properly, plus occasional ridiculous injuries, like stretching too hard in the morning and having a muscle in your neck spasm as a result.
And how much caffeine do you drink?
People are chiming in about the importance of diet and exercise to avoid (statistically) the decrepitude of old age. Another one I'll add is to use sunscreen and limiting sun exposure via hats and such.
I'm in the southern US and my grandparents came from Ireland. I've never been a beech-goer, or tried to get a tan (not that it would really work anyway). When I was a kid, on the handful of times our family went to a beach for day, my brothers and I would end up with massive water blisters and we would have competitions to see who could pull the longest continuous strip of skin. I'm 61 now and my arms and back neck look like it -- loss of elasticity, spotted, any cuts on my arms produce scabs that take weeks to heal.
But if you look at the skin on my upper arms, shoulders, or torso, which are nearly always covered by a shirt, you wouldn't be able to tell if I was 20 or 60. That skin is soft, pliable, and heals more quickly.
I've had five basal cell carcinoma spots sliced off the back or nape of my neck so far. Use sunscreen.
Kurt Vonnegut, on the topics of youth, aging, and sunscreen:
https://people.uncw.edu/schmidt/Index_files/Vonnegut/KVspeec...
One of my professors in undergrad pioneered research into the eldery’s interaction with the world. Not just the physiological, but sociological aspects — she got a makeup artist to disguise herself.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Moore
Geriatric simulation is interesting, but couldn't this also be applied to pediatric simulation for improved vision, hearing, strength and endurance? I don't see any show stoppers preventing the development of a youth-augmentation exosuit blending AR sensory augmentation, powered exoskeleton support, haptics, and AI adaptive controls.
Just spitballing:
- Powered exoskeletons aren't quite "there"
- If moving at all is painful, having an exoskeleton move you will also be painful
- Haptics and AR aren't quite there either
- Batteries, it's always batteries
I think you're missing the point. You use something like this to help in design/testing of accessible spaces. An exosuit can't cut you half to help you make better children's spaces.
Additionally, assuming you're not already geriatric, simulating it is the only way to experience it short of waiting. If you're an adult, you were already a kid at some point.
Floating the idea of a youth simulator (like a VR app with integrated exosuit) could be used to measure physiological and cognitive age gaps. It might be valuable for science and medicine, but also for things like understanding empathy/social knowledge or understanding workflows/applied knowledge.
> An exosuit can't cut you half
But you can build a room twice as big. We are straying away from the exosuit idea though.
There is a flip side to these suits. They are meant to engender understanding and empathy. Occassionally, it goes wrong. Experience all the physical limitation and some come to the conclusion that old people should not be allowed to drive or operate anything that moves.
(I once had my foot run over by an elderly person in very heavy electric wheelchair in a grocery store. If not for my steel toes, i would have been limping for months. That person was totally unable to control the machine, but what can you say? Better my boots than a kid in flipflops.)
To my abstract, scifi inclined mind, this is the potential beginning to what I'd coin The Humble Suit: A suit that simulates a vast array of infirmities legitimately experienced by the muted, ignored, but equally entitled minority. In my fictional world, intelligence isn't an exclusive measurement of one's ability to exploit and exhibit usefulness for the system that owns them, but also includes understanding, empathy and awareness of aspects of reality beyond the exclusively immediately financially lucrative.
In an era where reading and compassion is secondary to entertainment and profiteering, one could wear the suit to experience a temporary intermission of not being oneself as the pinnacle of reality.
I do foresee challenges though, particularly with the probable result for many being the opposite of compassion, where one would dismiss the significance or challenges of, eg, being quadriplegic because they spent 20 minutes in the suit and have 'been there, done that'. Controlling for this outcome might require an advanced form of unknown technology. But if that could be wangled, we might have the means of creating additional nodes of compassion within our social machine that could keep the gears a bit more free of wailing meat.
A practical result of this could be laughing less (see conservation of calories for utilitarians) at the guy with Parkinson's that's unloading your shopping cart into your luxury car, shaking in the rain, or something.
There would definitely need to be built-in mitigation to steer the results away from self-righteousness and toward compassion though. Perhaps some time dilation and mushroom supplements could help.
I tried on an obesity simulation suit once. It was designed for caregivers - with the goal of increasing empathy in mind. It was amazing how difficult ordinary tasks were.
yeah that is because the weight was sudden and you were not acclimated to it.
I'd be more interested in the other way around
Use it to make yourself stronger, break free like the running man in Animatrix
Love this reference. I think about this short a lot. Reaching an extreme level of peak physical performance that you break the constraints (code) of the world, causing a severe bug that crashes the program and reveals the reality of all things.
Or Harrison Bergeron...
Yeah, clickbait title for some of us. Should be "Advanced Age Simulation Suit".
My initial thoughts too.
losing weight is one way
Amen.
Reminds me of the AGNES [0] (Age Gain Now Empathy System), developed at MIT AgeLab. Saw it in action there back when I worked at the lab in the early 10s - I found the broad range of applications in research quite intriguing.
[0]: https://agelab.mit.edu/methods/agnes-age-gain-now-empathy-sy...
Also simulates the loss of physical attractiveness.
Can I get a suit that simulates being 20 years old again?
The harder kinds of stimulants maybe?
> For many years our age simulation suit GERT has been by far the most popular product worldwide.
GERT: Bigger than the iPhone.
Looks like Harrison Bergeron's gear, which means it's probably well suited to purpose.
I guess I'm the only one who thought this was literally a joke. If anyone is interested I have the orange tinted 90's ski goggles, weights for arms and legs, and I'll even throw in some mothballs and baby powder no additional charge.
Do people really need something this extravagant not too mention ridiculous looking in order to just relate to other humans? In order to empathize? Is it so hard to "take someone's word" for how they feel, that we need to feel it too? I've never had a Kidney Stone in my life, and I'm not signing up for one because I don't need to "see it to believe it."
But if it sells I say Kudos to the creator. I'm just shocked there's a niche here.
Because there's a big difference between having empathy for another's pain and actually understanding what it's like, even to a slight degree. For example, I'm severely visually impaired; I would not expect a deaf person to truly understand what that's like, just as I don't understand what a deaf person's life is like; that doesn't stop either of us from having empathy for the other though.
If this helps people empathize who otherwise wouldn't... isn't that good? Can we just not be glad that people can gain some more understanding of what the elderly go through?
Ok, I realize that came out as quite negative/sarcastic, not meant to offend anyone. I stand by the overall comment though. You don't have to have the extent of the experience another person has had to relate/empathize.
Alternatively, one might ask someone with those disabilities to provide feedback.
While i think we should do more things in that direction, it borders on human experimentation.
Btw, somebody should mention that Putin/Xi's talk about living to 150 years and the 70 being just a children age today (if you have state resources at your disposal).
I think life extension is an age-old topic for every powerful monarch or authoritarian leader. Every one believes they'll at last be the one who has the right resources and people to finally cheat life and live to 150 or become immortal. If they really end up buying into immortality it usually leads to their demise, like what happened to so many Chinese emperors throughout history. New knowledge and new theories about aging always arise but so does new quackery from people who have a lot to gain from convincing powerful people.
Yesterday it was immortality elixirs that lead to mercury poisioning, today it's young blood transfusions and young organ transplants (having multiple major surgeries and living on lifelong immunosuppresants does not bode well for longevity)
Awful idea #1: If you are one of those advanced-age president-dictator of a big super-power, you know, one of those guys that get caught in a hot mic talking about immortality, you could seal your pact with the devil by forcing anybody in your big chunk of the planet who doesn’t ace their STEM topics to wear one of these suits. Who knows, maybe if the youth get properly scared of their old age, they will stop being a subversive thorn and instead focus on fixing the ending of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Awful idea #2: Just listen to your grandmother when you are young. She will tell you how brutal is to be old. Read the science, not just biology but all the connected sciences, specially mathematics. And then listen to the priests (critically!), and read the writers, and peruse the written record of the human civilization, which almost begins with the Epic of Gilgamesh. It will reveal shadows you didn’t know were in your mind. None of it, of course, prevents you from becoming old, but it puts most things into perspective, and it digs out a certain light that we have lost and which we very much need if we are ever going to do anything about the suffering that aging brings.
Awful idea #3: Take a shortcut and paste everything I wrote before this paragraph into an LLM. Any LLM which is reasonably state of the art. Prompt with “what’s the meaning of this?” It will significantly change the intended meaning of what I said in “awful idea #2”. That’s the bias/zeitgeist in our vast cultural recent corpus, that the LLMs swallowed for training, being regurgitated at you in condensed form. And they said that LLMs aren’t useful! Repeat the experiment, but this time use Simplified Chinese to prompt. Observe the very slight cultural drift. Meditate. Now abandon this shortcut and execute awful idea #2. Borrow somebody else’s grandmother if you must.
I could have used this about 40 years ago.
Finally I can be Karl Havoc
Most German thing ever (for post-WWII version of "German").
As a German, that's exactly what I was thinking lololol
The opposite would be more useful for me.
If you preorder I can get you the same thing for half the price. It just sometimes takes a few years for delivery.
too bad it can't make my 60 year old body simulate a 20 year old.
You joke but given the rate of progress, in a few more years, who knows what they'll come up with. It won't be real. Oh no. But just being fooled for a few minutes is the first flavorful bite.
The pragmatist in me hopes not, I think it'll be the worst drug we invent, even if it's just a pair of goggles, a glove, and a weird sticker for the temples.
But I expect it. Silver lining?
Well I dont think I need all that equipment to experience the effect. So I can save myself the money, yay!
I'm still waiting for the youth simulation suit.
Underrated comment!
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Does it also simulate out living your friends and spouse and being alone?
I think if you walk around in one of those, your friends and spouse will abandon you pretty quickly.
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