Trying to live longer is a big problem in the medical establishment. Many therapies focus on how can we make this person live longer? What meds can we give to prolonge the state of this or that patient? Not much care is given to how that person is actually living. It becomes a game of who lives the longest. Quality of life doesn’t seem that important. As long as I reduce your risk factors by giving you these pills, I have done my job and I can think highly of myself because I’ve just theoretically increased your lifespan by two, five or ten more years. I can be proud of myself.

Do you really want to prolong the life of someone who is chronically in a really bad state? Do you really want to give someone pills for some possible future increase in lifespan?

Is more bad what they need?

I’m not talking about emergency situations where treatment is what is needed. I’m talking about chronic diseases and preventive medication.

If life is to be quantified as the experiences you have, their intensity times their quality, then whether you live longer or not doesn’t really matter does it? Living longer would only allow you to accumulate more of these experiences.

So living longer would be useful assuming you already maximised the quality and intensity of your experiences.

Maximising the time you spend doing shitty experiences only makes your life shitty for longer. Are you sure you want that?

Stop focusing on how long you get to do things. Maximise the things you do get to do.

I suspect longevity would be an unintended consequence of living better. If you really lived your life to the highest quality you could and with the highest intensity you could muster then you would probably live longer as a byproduct.

But if you make longevity a goal in and of itself then you completely bypass the living part. You become focused on a number, on something you are going to loose, instead of focusing on your life. You keep giving yourself an excuse to postpone and procrastinate.

Remember you are going to die.

If longevity is your goal then you will die every day to attain something you can’t have.

If you focus on having more time, you have less time because instead of using the time you have, you’re using it to think about how to have more time and what you would do with it. How ironic.

Focusing on longevity and having time is paradoxically the wrong way to approach the problem. It is only when you stop caring about living long or having time that you actually end up having more.

Think of Snoopy’s wisdom, we live every day. Maximize that.