So this year, I and many of my friends are turning 30. And don’t think people aren’t noticing. This month and next month alone, three close friends will mark the birthday. And this has brought on the inevitable anxiety about aging, getting older, leaving youthful days behind, and various other manifestations of ageist bullshit that, thankfully, is being driven further and further out of our culture with each new development in antiaging medicine, and each fresh take on what it means to mark birthdays in a transhuman era.
I joke that if 40 is the new 20, as some have argued, then 30 is the new 10. Obviously, this isn’t quite true. After all, I had no pubic hair at 10. But I do truly believe that our chronological age increasingly doesn’t reflect our biological age when compared with previous generations. While the notion of your “real age,” as opposed to your chronological age, has become commercialized, this doesn’t undermine its truth. Because even with our limited interventions today—which mostly consist of the right exercise, diet (including caloric restriction), supplementation, sun avoidance and modestly effective drugs (such as Lipitor, perhaps the most successful antiaging drug to date, as it fights various age-related cardiovascular ailments and possibly Alzheimer’s)—we’re able to make a huge impact on our biology.
And this is just the beginning. With each year you add to your life with today’s interventions, as Aubrey de Grey has noted, you add one more year in which to benefit from future interventions. So, say today’s interventions give you an extra 10 years. That means 10 more years of antiaging research from which you can benefit. If those interventions give you another 10 years, you have 10 more years in which to benefit from new interventions. And since the pace of scientific and technological advancement appears to be speeding up, there’s a good chance that within those 10 years you’ll see more progress than in the previous 10. Eventually, the development of new interventions outpaces your aging—you start to see 15 years added for every 10 years of aging, then 20 years added for every five years of aging, and so on—and we reach escape velocity into an indefinite lifespan.
If you don’t believe this is possible, or happening, take a good look around. Several companies, such as Elixir Pharmaceuticals, are already developing life-extending drugs. And de Grey’s Methuselah Foundation is already funding research into SENS, de Grey’s engineering program for slowing and reversing aging, as well as organizing the Methuselah Mouse Prize
for antiaging research. And we’re not talking small operations; the Methuselah Foundation has received high-profile support and now has more than eight million dollars to play with, a number increasing rapidly as the organization’s profile and success grows.
So as people around me start turning 30, and my birthday approaches, it’s become strikingly apparent that beliefs and attitudes about age and aging will take longer to change than aging itself. Rather than resign themselves to a defeatist and depressing position, and hasten bodily decline through unhealthy behaviors born of negativity, people need to adopt ageless thinking and do everything they can with existing interventions in order to see the next round of interventions and, ultimately, a day when chronological age means less to your self- and societal- perception than the color of your hair.
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t value the experience and wisdom that comes with age. Nor that we shouldn’t realize differences in maturity between those who are 20 and those who are 40. But in such case, we’re not associating chronology with biology. We’re associating it with psychology. What I’m talking about is the increasing error in judging our own and others’ biological functioning based on a number that appears on their driver’s license.
So let’s change the culture, beginning with ourselves. For my 30th birthday, I’ll strive to give myself the gift of ageless thinking, and do what I can to encourage a similar attitude amongst my friends.
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