Outlive

AUTHOR’S NOTE
Writing about science and medicine for the public requires striking a balance between brevity and nuance, rigor and readability. I’ve done my best to find the sweet spot on that continuum, getting the substance right while keeping this book accessible to the lay reader. You’ll be the judge of whether or not I hit the target.

Here’s to staying young, even as we grow older.

“I think people get old when they stop thinking about the future,” Ric told me. “If you want to find someone’s true age, listen to them. If they talk about the past and they talk about all the things that happened that they did, they’ve gotten old. If they think about their dreams, their aspirations, what they’re still looking forward to—they’re young.”

There’s a quote from Paulo Coelho that I think about often: “Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything,” he writes. “Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.”

I could be a good person. After all, this is the whole point of living. And the whole point of outliving.

Another technique I have grown very fond of is slow, deep breathing: four seconds to inhale, six seconds to exhale. Repeat. As the breath goes, the nervous system follows.

The overarching theme is mindfulness, which gives you the ability to work through the other four: emotional regulation (getting control over our emotions), distress tolerance (our ability to handle emotional stressors), interpersonal effectiveness (how well we make our needs and feelings known to others), and self-management (taking care of ourselves, beginning with basic tasks like getting up in time to go to work or school).

Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.

That person brings peace to his ancestors and spares the children that follow.”
I wanted to be that person.