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Lately, I have become rather preoccupied with living longer.
Over the past year, I have dramatically changed the rhythms of my life, attempting to apply to myself some of the principles of habit formation I use in my work. The result is a remarkably regimented existence. I regularly get seven or eight hours of sleep, and I track it all. I pay considerably more attention to protein than I ever imagined I would. I have become faintly obsessive about exceeding 10,000 steps a day. And I exercise -- a lot.
This last development surprises me most. As a child, I regarded PE as something to be endured (and avoided if possible). Lately, I will happily do two or three classes in a row at Barry’s or SoulCycle. Somewhere along the way, exercise crossed the border from obligation to pleasure and, occasionally, obsession.
I feel better. I am stronger. And, apparently, Instagram has noticed.
My IG feed now serves me a steady diet of longevity content. David Sinclair appears with remarkable regularity. There are podcasts, protocols, biological-age tests, supplements and biohacking advice. I seem to have wandered into the anti-aging movement without quite realizing I had asked to join. Increasingly, I hear about frontier AI models being turned toward human biology in an effort to decipher the mechanisms of aging. The fountain of youth, it seems, has acquired a tech stack.
And I confess: I am susceptible to its promise. I want to live longer -- a lot longer, if possible. But there are conditions attached. I want a clear mind, an antifragile body, independence and a sense of purpose.
Then the researcher in me began observing the research subject: myself. Why am I doing all of this? What exactly are we asking for when we say we want longevity? Why have I willingly traded a measure of spontaneity today, embracing a Spartan existence, for the possibility of more tomorrows? And, more broadly, why has this ancient human desire suddenly acquired such contemporary urgency?
There is nothing remotely new about wanting to escape the boundaries of a human lifespan. Gilgamesh went searching for immortality. Greek mythology warned of the hazards of eternal life without eternal youth. Medieval alchemists pursued the elixir of life. Religions have spent millennia grappling with mortality and the possibility of existence beyond it. Even one of my all-time favorite films, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, sent Indy in pursuit of the Holy Grail and its promise of eternal life.
We have been telling versions of this story for as long as we have been telling stories.
Death may be our oldest antagonist. What has changed is not the desire to evade it, but the perceived plausibility of doing so.
The 20th century provided an extraordinary demonstration that lifespan was not immutable. Public health, nutrition, sanitation, vaccines, antibiotics and better treatment of chronic disease added decades to average life expectancy. Yet those gains have slowed. The next frontier is considerably more audacious: instead of treating the diseases associated with aging one by one, researchers are increasingly asking whether aspects of the biology of aging itself can be modified.
The emerging field of geroscience is studying cellular senescence, mitochondrial function and the cellular machinery responsible for clearing damaged proteins. Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, for example, are exploring whether restoring age-impaired cellular cleanup mechanisms might eventually prevent or delay several diseases of aging.
The dream, then, is ancient. What is new is the growing suspicion that it may no longer belong entirely to the realm of myth. Strip away some of the inevitable hype, and something consequential appears to be happening. No, the fountain of youth has not been found. But for the first time, serious scientists are beginning to ask questions that would have sounded faintly alchemical a generation ago.
And once the impossible begins to look merely improbable, we start behaving differently.
This creates a curious new bargain with time. Peter Diamandis and others in the longevity movement talk about what is sometimes called “longevity escape velocity.” The proposition, put simply, is that if the trajectory of discovery continues, staying healthy for the next decade or so might allow us to “intercept” technologies capable of extending healthy life much further. The task today is therefore not necessarily to defeat aging. It is to remain healthy enough to be around when tomorrow’s science arrives.
I find this idea enormously seductive.
It also helps explain my growing fascination with biohacking. I find myself pondering the mismatch between the animal genes we inherited from evolution and the environment we have constructed around ourselves. I am a creature forged for scarcity, yet living amid abundance: calories available without hunting, movement rendered optional, food engineered to be irresistible, light available at midnight...comfort almost everywhere.
How should such a creature live? Increasingly, my daily habits feel like an attempt to negotiate between those two worlds. Sleep. Carry heavy things. Move. Eat sensibly. Often choose discomfort. The irony is that what began as a project to secure some hypothetical future has made the present considerably more enjoyable. I exercise because I want to live longer, perhaps; but I have also discovered that I simply love exercising.
Longevity, it turns out, can change your life long before it lengthens it.
Here psychology complicates the story. Researchers Frieder Lang and Fiona Rupprecht have studied what they call our “motivation for longevity.” Their work suggests that people are surprisingly ambivalent about accumulating birthdays. Our desire for additional years is heavily contingent upon what we imagine those years will contain.
One finding is particularly revealing. Asked how long they would like to live, 65% of respondents in one study chose 85. But introduce a rather Faustian hypothetical -- imagine remaining physically and mentally as you were in your twenties -- and suddenly 80% wanted to live to at least 120. More than half chose an unlimited lifespan.
Perhaps we do not simply want more life. We want more of ourselves. We want cognition, mobility, autonomy and identity. We want to recognize the person in the mirror and, more importantly, the person behind it.
Lang and Rupprecht describe three overlapping mindsets. The essentialist seeks to overcome biological aging itself: the aspiration of infinite life. The medicalist wants longer life conditional upon health and functioning. The stoicist places greater value on dignity and meaning, accepting that vulnerability is part of the human condition.
I suspect there is a good deal of the medicalist in me. Give me 100, certainly. Perhaps 120. But please let me bring my mind and body along.
There is, however, a fascinating flaw in much of the contemporary longevity conversation. We frequently talk as though successful aging means remaining young for as long as possible. I realize that I have internalized this idea myself. Someone at Barry’s tells me I look ten years younger than I am, and I am absurdly pleased. Somewhere in my mental accounting, looking younger has become evidence that the whole enterprise is working.
But then I ask: what if that's the wrong scorecard?
Psychologist Laura Carstensen’s work at Stanford suggests something subtler. As people age and perceive their remaining time differently, their motivations change. When the horizon seems limitless, we explore, accumulate knowledge and prepare for an uncertain future. As the horizon contracts, emotional meaning assumes greater importance. We become more selective about how, and with whom, we spend our time.
And contrary to our cultural mythology of youth, emotional life does not necessarily deteriorate with age. Carstensen’s research suggests that emotional balance often improves. There is something deliciously paradoxical here. The longevity movement wants to spare us from aging at precisely the moment psychology is discovering things that may be worth preserving about aging.
Perhaps the ambition should not be perpetual youth. Perhaps it should be preserving the physical and cognitive capacity to enjoy the person we become.
Then there is the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed lives for generations. Amid all the excitement about biomarkers, new molecules, wearables and biological clocks, its conclusions seem almost embarrassingly analogue: relationships really matter.
Close relationships were associated with happier, healthier lives and slower physical and mental decline. Satisfaction with relationships at age 50 proved a better predictor of later physical health in the study than cholesterol levels. The study’s former director, George Vaillant, eventually distilled decades of observation into a wonderfully unscientific-sounding prescription: the key to healthy aging is “relationships, relationships, relationships.”
There is an appealing irony here. So much of the modern longevity movement is an intensely individual enterprise. I measure my sleep, count my steps, monitor my diet and contemplate my biological age. The language itself is one of personal optimization, as though longevity were an engineering problem and each of us a machine requiring increasingly precise calibration. Yet one of the longest-running studies of adult life keeps directing our attention away from ourselves and toward other people.
This also aligns beautifully with Carstensen’s psychology. As our sense of remaining time contracts, we increasingly value emotionally meaningful relationships. And those very relationships appear to be associated with healthier aging. Perhaps this is not coincidence but part of the deeper architecture of a good long life: as time becomes more precious, we become better at recognizing what makes it precious.
Perhaps some of the most potent longevity interventions will never fit inside a pill bottle. They may be sitting across the dinner table. Or, in my case, on the adjacent SoulCycle bike.
For those of us working in and around the pharmaceutical industry, longevity represents an extraordinary scientific and commercial frontier. We will naturally think in terms of MoAs, targets, biomarkers, indications and medical interventions. Indeed, because aging itself is not currently treated as a specific indication, emerging gerotherapeutics must still find their way to patients through particular illnesses -- like cardiovascular disease.
But the boundary between longevity science and conventional drug development is already beginning to blur. Take Insilico Medicine for example. Its AI-enabled platform identified a novel biological target and helped design Rentosertib, a drug for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, an age-related disease. After encouraging Phase IIa results, the drug entered Phase III development in 2026. Insilico has since established a Longevity Board to explore AI-enabled aging research and has begun developing foundation models specifically for longevity science.
All of that strikes me as enormously consequential. We spend a great deal of time discussing what AI will eventually do to drug discovery. With Insilico, however, is a glimpse of something more immediate: AI being used to interrogate aging biology, identify targets and design molecules that are actually making their way through human clinical trials. The distance between the computer model and the medicine cabinet remains considerable, of course. But it is getting more truncated.
And this brings us back to the human being at the other end of all this remarkable science. As marketing researchers, we should be asking another set of questions. When someone tells us they want to live longer, what are they actually asking for?
And perhaps we should ask something more uncomfortable: What are they afraid of losing?
These aren't semantic distinctions. They describe fundamentally different human needs; and potentially very different therapeutic value propositions. A medicine that promises additional years is psychologically different from one that promises cognition, mobility, independence or the ability to remain recognizably oneself. The biology may ultimately converge around common mechanisms of aging; the meaning patients attach to the benefits almost certainly will not.
“Longevity” may eventually become a therapeutic category. Psychologically, I doubt it will ever be a single one. The market may look monolithic from a distance, while underneath sit profoundly different human needs: agency, identity, cognition, connection, curiosity, purpose and our ancient reluctance to accept the closing of the door.
I will still go to the gym tomorrow. I will count my steps, eat the protein, and try to get eight hours of sleep. I will keep reading about biohacking and wondering whether this creature built for scarcity can learn to flourish in abundance. And yes, I still want more years -- a lot more, if I can get them. I would very much like to be around to intercept whatever science has coming next.
But I began this exploration wondering how we might add more years to our lives. I find myself ending with a different question.
What kind of life do we want to add to those years?
The longevity revolution may give us greater control over how long we live. Psychology may determine what we do with the time.
