I want to live 500 years. My son won’t name a number.
For a year my son Aleksander and I sat with the people working on how long and how well we live: 39 countries and states, more than a hundred scientists, doctors and experts.
Ask people how long they would like to live, and most of them name a number close to the one they expect: eighty, ninety, a hundred if they feel brave. My answer: at least 500 years, and more if I can. I am sure that at 500, and healthy, I will have more dreams than I have right now. When I say this to young people, many of them tell me that eighty is enough.
My son Alek spent that year with me, behind the camera for most of it, and he has heard every argument I know. So when Peter Diamandis, who founded XPRIZE, put the same question to him in Santa Monica, I was curious. He didn’t give a number:
“I’m sure I will be able to give you a better estimate of how many years I would like to live further in the future, but at this time, I can just say as many healthy years as possible.”
I used to hear caution in that answer. Now I hear something I needed to learn. I look far ahead, to the science that might carry us past 120 and further. Alek looks around him: at his friends, at the planet, at the kind of world in which all those extra years would be lived.
On our walk along the ocean, he put it in his own words:
“I want myself, my family, and my friends, people around me to live as many healthy years as they can and be optimistic about the future. … Maybe I’m not as optimistic as you yet, but that’s what I want.”
Notice the “yet”. When Peter told him there is no limit to his potential, to what he can do or to how long he might live, Alek laughed:
“I wanna believe that.”
So who is right, the father with a number or the son without one? I think we agree on what matters more. When Alek asked Peter what people of his age should do to get ready for lives that could run to 120 or 150 years, not one pill came up:
“I think it’s mindset. … I think mindset is the single most important tool that you have.”
A long life isn’t a number you choose once. It is a mindset you practise every day.
Our year on the road, with its hard days in shared hotel rooms and what my son taught me about letting go, is the story of our film. ZEITmagazin puts the two of us on the cover of its issue of 29 October.
And you? Would you pick a number, or simply ask for as many healthy years as possible?
How it all began on a napkin in a Warsaw café, the father-and-daughter helicopter pilots in New Zealand who looked just like us, and the evening one of Alek’s friends came round with questions: it is all in the full story on the Live Beyond Hub:
The full article on the Live Beyond Hub
2 generations, 1 hotel room, 100+ longevity minds: our year around the world
12-minute read · 16 photographs · 5× longer than this page
Written by Marek Piotrowski. If you would like the Longevity Map that sits behind all of this, it is yours, with its Guide — ask for it here.
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