The Extended Warranty

In the fourteenth century, the kind of money I spend on a head-to-toe physical would have enticed the pope to make me a saint. Imagine that. Instead, I get a health dashboard.

I am seventy-three, and I run a company devoted to helping people live longer, so I take the assignment personally. I think carefully about what I eat, tracking every calorie, macro, and supplement. When I fall off the wagon, I feel the sort of guilt people once reserved for mortal sins. 

Nobody in Southern Illinois, where I grew up, knew their resting heart rate. If a woman wanted to know how she was holding up, she kept it to herself or talked to the parish priest.

I recently caught myself laughing out loud about all this, and here is what I suspect is happening: Many people don't anticipate an afterlife, so they are compelled to extract every drop from this life.

Full disclosure: I am a wayward Catholic. Two-thirds of Americans still believe in heaven, according to a 2023 Gallup poll, down from 83% in 2001. This essay is not a screed against religion or anyone who believes in an afterlife.

At times, the religion of longevity feels like it has elements of my Christian upbringing. People trade prayer books for fasting protocols. The Ten Commandments become strict dietary rules.

Longevity experts are the ministers who sermonize on their podcasts. Confessions get handled by an Oura ring. We drop money in the offering basket of treatments, tests, and supplements.

God promises a heaven forever. Now, many of us are merely negotiating an extension on this life’s warranty, like a car.

You follow the maintenance schedule, save your service records, take your old car in every six months, and then one day read the fine print and discover the policy covers parts and labor, but makes no guarantee about when your body will give out.

The irony is traditional religion might offer better results.

A Harvard-led study following American nurses over two decades found that those who attended weekly religious services had a 26% lower risk of dying than those who never went. 

It doesn't prove divine intervention. Those in the church pews each week have wider circles of friends, maybe less depression, and fewer cocktails without a pack-a-day habit. It does suggest, however, that sitting in a quiet room with people you know, followed by weak coffee in the basement hall, may do more for you than anything in your supplement cabinet.

As every religion seems to need a heretic, longevity’s heretic is Jeanne Calment of Arles, France, who died in 1997 at age 122, the oldest human on record. 

Her diet included roughly two pounds of chocolate a week, a daily glass of port, and a cigarette. A smoker from age twenty-one until 117, she only gave it up when failing eyesight made it hard to light one.

I don’t recommend the Calment regimen (though my own mother ran a milder version with Chablis and Virginia Slims, and she lived to 87). Calment was one person blessed with extraordinary luck and exceptional genetics. Graveyards are full of people who smoked with confidence but died with disease. 

I think of Calmont when I find myself weighing the relative virtues of wild salmon versus farmed... all of this tracking and guilt can turn some of us into worrywarts.

In 2019, researchers at Boston University and Harvard reported that the most optimistic men and women lived 11-15% longer than pessimists. No one knows the precise reason, and optimists may simply exercise more and smoke less.

But it also means a cheerful man eating a glazed doughnut may outlive a worried man wearing a continuous glucose monitor.

Five hundred years ago, the church sold indulgences, payments that promised to shorten your time in purgatory. A German monk named Martin Luther was so angry about the practice that, in 1517, he wrote out 95 complaints and, as the story goes, nailed them to a church door. His protest split the church and gave us Protestantism.

Today's version of the indulgence is a $400 supplement regimen that promises to shorten your time in the nursing home. I run a legitimate longevity media company, but I often check our front door to make sure we are on the right path.

I still believe in the fundamentals—sleep and nutrition, strength, deep friendships, and a competent doctor. The evidence supporting them is more legitimate than some of the routines that longevity experts push.

I sometimes wonder what exactly I am investing in. Some of the discipline comes from gratitude; I like it here, and I would prefer to stick around. I guess it is my way of believing that I can avoid the Grim Reaper knocking on my door.

So I will keep eating well and turn the lights off by nine-thirty most nights. If I somehow reach the pearly gates, I plan to show St. Peter my dashboard.

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