Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

by Peter Attia

“I need to be great,” he said, “in order to feel like I’m not worthless.”

I had long subscribed to a kind of Silicon Valley approach to longevity and health, believing that it is possible to hack our biology, and hack it, and hack it, until we become these perfect little humanoids who can live to be 120 years old. I used to be all about that, constantly tinkering and experimenting with new fasting protocols or sleep gadgets to maximize my own longevity. Everything in my life needed to be optimized. And longevity was basically an engineering problem. Or so I thought.

longevity is meaningless if your life sucks. Or if your relationships suck.

the most important ingredient in the whole longevity equation is the why. Why do we want to live longer? For what? For whom?

My obsession with longevity was really about my fear of dying.

Many human behaviors are avoidance of this

“I think people get old when they stop thinking about the future,” Ric told me. “If you want to find someone’s true age, listen to them. If they talk about the past and they talk about all the things that happened that they did, they’ve gotten old. If they think about their dreams, their aspirations, what they’re still looking forward to—they’re young.”