Longevity is not just about living longer. It is about how we live, what we build, and what we leave behind. And of course for longevity to exist, one needs health. But we’ve been asking the wrong question: not ‘How do we treat disease?’ but ‘How do we create health?’
Health is something you build proactively, intentionally, and continuously. Historically, it has meant the absence of illness – a passive state, measured once a year at your medical checkup. But longevity science shows us that this definition is incomplete and outdated.
Health is dynamic. It is the body’s ability to function, recover and adapt over time. It is not just how long we live, but how well.
At its core, health is our ability to adapt to life. We age not simply because time passes, but because we gradually lose adaptive capacity. In youth, the body is flexible and responsive.
Over time it becomes more rigid, slower to recover, less resilient. The goal of longevity is not perfection but preserving this adaptability – across metabolism, immunity, cognition, and emotional response.
One of the challenges I see is that we have all become obsessed with data. We measure everything – biological age, epigenetics, biomarkers, inflammatory load – and we’re looking for perfection. This just creates anxiety. I don’t believe we should be ‘datadriven.’ Our focus should be on being ‘data informed.’ We don’t need to track our lives 24/7. You know if you slept well from the amount of energy you have.
Health is not a number or a score, it’s a skill. Many aspects of aging are modifiable; things like strength, mindset, resilience are trainable. But there are other problems. First of all, we have no idea how to measure healthy life. What’s normal, and what’s pathological?
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We still struggle to define what a healthy life truly is. Many conditions develop silently over decades and only appear when they cross a clinical threshold. So, were we healthy before that point – or simply undiagnosed? It’s possible to live with a condition and still experience energy, joy, and purpose. And equally, it’s possible to be disease-free and feel unwell.
When we’re younger we need to build strength – capacity – in our systems: physical, mental, and emotional. The greater this reserve, the more resilient we are later on. The journey evolves across life stages – from building foundational capacity to adapting to biological transitions to protecting independence and preserving function in later years. Ultimately, the aim is not simply to extend life, but to reach later decades with enough capacity and flexibility to remain fully engaged.
Energy is a real currency. We live always-on lives with little time for recovery, which, without support, creates chronic stress, poor sleep, and emotional overload. So maybe health is the process of stress and recovery.
We have to remember that health is not about controlling life, it’s about building strength to meet life. In clinical practice, this becomes visible again and again: when recovery is restored and adaptive systems are supported, the body has an extraordinary ability to recalibrate itself.
I think of a healthy life in five stages. I call the age up to 25 the Pathfinder. You’re growing, trying to find your path. You need to strengthen all your systems to build a reserve, both mentally and physiologically, so your body is capable of doing more.
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Then, until the age of 40, you’re a Founder, building your foundation for life. This is where you have responsibilities away from home; you’re independent.
We know we have two major drops in biological age at the ages of 40-45 and 60-65. So during this time, 45-65, you become an Optimizer. You understand the change, you accept it and embrace it – and you adapt.
From 65, you’re a Defender. Maybe you start feeling the years but you’re protecting your functionality. When you’re 85, you’re a Master, because if you have full capacity and flexibility in the system, you’ll be able to do all kinds of things. You’re full of wisdom and have mastered life. That’s something to aim for, isn’t it?
If you’re in that period from your 40s to your 60s, one of the key things is to live with joy. We measure life and health in terms of biomarkers, cholesterol, and glucose etc. But we have no measures for joy, purpose, or meaning. We have no markers for happiness. And yet isn’t this what life is all about: joy, resilience, and capacity?
What we need is for politicians, academics, educators, financiers, and health-system providers to sit around a table and talk about longevity. Because if you have people living to 120 years old, we’re going to have five generations residing in the same city.
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So how do you design a city with all those people living together? How do you ensure that technology works for all those generations, and not just the younger ones?
We know from evolution that our genes and biological systems take huge periods of time to adapt, because 20,000 years ago we had exactly the same genetic profile as we do now. But technology is advancing at a hugely fast rate, and society cannot cope with it. We’re creating disease ourselves.
Our modern environment is increasingly misaligned with our biology. We no longer move enough, for example. We do all our work from home, or we drive to our office and drive home again. When we are hungry, we open the fridge. But genetically speaking, what we should be doing is exercising, because we evolved to hunt food. And everything changes in your metabolism when you do that. But we open the fridge, we take out the food, and then we don’t move afterwards. So our digestion, our emotions, and appetite are affected.
Creating health is not about avoiding disease, it is about pursuing a life of meaning, engagement, and fulfillment. Longevity is not simply about adding years to life, but about building the capacity to live those years with energy and resilience.
