I’d like to live a long time. I’d love to see my kids become not just parents but grandparents. I’d love to write my last book in my 90s. (Whether or not anyone would care to read it remains to be seen!)
Based on the longevity in my family history, I’ve got a good shot, but the Lord is the One who numbers our days and plans our paths. Whether he grants me few or many years, I trust his good providence.
Peter Attia’s ‘Outlive’
Last year, several friends recommended Peter Attia’s best-selling book Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, and I picked it up, intrigued by the emphasis on not merely extending life but also pursuing health in the latter years usually marked by physical decline.
For most of human history, people didn’t live long enough to experience all the ailments and decline that come with old age. Now, life expectancy has increased, but not necessarily good health in those additional years often called “the marginal decade” at the end of our lives, when we’re still alive but incapable of performing certain tasks.
Attia believes we need to shift our thinking. In ancient times, Medicine 1.0 was a premodern system of diagnosis and treatment based on observation and guesswork. In the last century, Medicine 2.0 focused on testing and, by leaning on technology, produced effective drugs and successful operations. What we need now is Medicine 3.0, an approach that goes beyond passively waiting for problems to appear. We should be proactive in maximizing health and warding off illness and injury.
Outlive focuses primarily on health, offering tips and advice for maintaining muscle mass and cardiovascular fitness. Attia writes about diet (lots of protein, shocker!) but as part of a holistic prescription that includes exercise, lifting weights, relational investment, and medicinal intervention. He performs risk assessments for his patients, based on dozens of tests, screenings, consideration of lifestyle and exercise habits, and the likelihood of diseases that show up later in life.
Dying in Good Health
In a profile of Attia in the New Yorker, “How to Die in Good Health,” Dhruv Khullar explains how the 51-year-old medical guru regained an interest in medicine as he sought “complete physical optimization.” This pursuit of perfect physical fitness has, at times, come at the expense of relational well-being.
Attia recounts a painful episode when he was “a really, really broken person,” and his wife called him while he was on a business trip, terrified, because their month-old son had stopped breathing and had no pulse. She saved his life with CPR and the baby was taken to the ICU. Attia waited 10 days before returning home.
In his 40s, Attia exercised 28 hours a week and was so strict with his diet that he wouldn’t eat cookies his kids baked for him. “I was doing everything to live longer, despite being completely miserable emotionally,” he writes. In another interview, Attia said he recently thought about an event at his son’s kindergarten and weighed the downsides—it’d cut into his time for squats and deadlifts—before finally deciding to make the tradeoff.
Unhealthy Pursuit of Health
Outlive is a fascinating book on how the body works; what the aging process is like; and how a mix of good relationships, healthy eating habits, and regular exercise and muscle-building can benefit your health. But the more I hear from Attia, the more it becomes clear there’s something unhealthy, even sick, in this obsessive pursuit of health. We aren’t machines. G. K. Chesterton warned of this obsession in Orthodoxy:
The mere pursuit of health always leads to something unhealthy. Physical nature must not be made the direct object of obedience; it must be enjoyed, not worshipped.
Longevity can become an idol. “While I’m here, I want to know that I gave it my all,” Attia says. “We have this one shot. Wouldn’t it be a shame if we didn’t make the most of it?” Well, yes and no.
If this life is all there is, then the pressure to optimize your body and extend your life as long as possible makes sense. But if there’s more to life than this existence and more to “making the most” of life than physical prowess, then the pursuit of longevity and health can sabotage itself. The obsessive attempt to avoid a physical decline that is, at some point, inevitable in old age will likely produce anxiety and distraction from what makes for a happy and fulfilled life right now. Making the most of your life doesn’t mean devoting most of your life to extending it.
Idol of Longevity
A century ago, “experts” were already saying doctors should stop treating people just because they’re ill and instead become health advisers for the community. While there’s something to be said for facilitating good health, Chesterton pushed back on the idea that focusing on prevention is necessarily better than treating the sick. That approach leads us to treat the healthy as if they’re sick already:
Prevention is not better than cure. Cutting off a man’s head is not better than curing his headache; it is not even better than failing to cure it. . . . Prevention is not only not better than cure; prevention is even worse than disease. Prevention means being an invalid for life, with the extra exasperation of being quite well.
No one looks to Chesterton as a shining portrait of good health. He’s the anti–Peter Attia. Had he cared a little more about the deleterious effects of his eating and drinking (on top of what was likely a glandular disorder), he might have lived longer and written more. But would that have made for a better life?
Yes, our knowledge of what brings good health, what causes disease, and the interplay between preventative care and medicinal remedies—our knowledge has grown exponentially. But what we need most is growth in wisdom, a proper perspective on life and health in light of eternity. What is health for? Why pursue good health in the first place? A healthy body in itself makes for a bad goal. The right reason to pursue good health is because we want to live a life of love and service to God and neighbor.
Outlive makes a good case for certain practices that can extend your life and health, but to what end? A good life isn’t always long. And a long life isn’t always good.
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