A longer life is not for you alone.
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 why they would want to live longer, and most of them talk about themselves: more travel, more time, more of what they already enjoy. The best answer I heard in the whole year was about somebody else.
It came from Liz Parrish, who in 2015 became the first person to take an experimental gene therapy aimed at ageing. She did not do it to live forever. Her son had been diagnosed, and she wanted to find out whether it could be done.
In June 2024 she walked us through a forest near her home, and I asked her what she fears most about growing old. Her answer began with a question:
“What is a friendship or a relationship? It’s the holding of one another’s memories.”
Think about what that means. Every day you have lived beside somebody exists twice, once in your head and once in theirs. When one of you goes, the other is left holding half of it, with nobody to check it against. She called that a divorce in the greatest sense of the word.
So the case for a longer, healthier life is not a selfish one. It is the opposite. It is about keeping the people who carry our story, and staying well enough to carry theirs.
She thinks this is also what will change people’s minds about the new therapies. When I asked whether people would ever accept them, when so many turn down what is already on offer, she said:
“When they see their loved ones living healthier longer, they definitely will adopt it.”
Not a study. Not a statistic. Somebody they love, still here, still well.
We do not live longer for ourselves. We live longer for the people who remember our life with us.
That is why my son and I made the journey together, and why it did not end when the year did.
The fuller story, with Liz’s four gene therapies, the forest on Bainbridge Island and the week we spent in her home, is on the Live Beyond Hub under its own title:
The full article on the Live Beyond Hub
Book burning on a massive scale. And it is waiting for all of us.
14-minute read · 6 photographs · 8× longer than this page
Written by Marek Piotrowski. If you would like the Longevity Map that sits behind all of this, it is free — ask for it here.
Get the Map. It is free, and it is the whole field on one page.
The Longevity Map will guide you to a longer, healthier and more fulfilling life. It gives you a helicopter view on all branches of the longevity field.