Fight Aging!

Ordinary people don't pay much attention to the science of aging. Ordinary people don't keep an eye on the longevity industry or read scientific papers or donate funds to non-profits supporting important research. Ordinary people don't carefully and rationally self-experiment with plausible age-slowing interventions while measuring outcomes. Ordinary people are not signed up for cryopreservation. Ordinary people are not trying to gain access to new medical therapies a decade in advance of approval by regulators, or after approval but well before widespread availability. One could say much the same for ordinary high net worth individuals, by the way. Wealth is no escape from the median.

Which is all fine. Life is what you make of it, an instant of time that is all yours, come and gone in a flash before the yawning abyss of a billion years of a future empty of your present self. There is no meaning to this life beyond the meaning that you ascribe to this life. It is a narrow and winding path, a balancing act between nihilism on the one side and solipsism on the other. Every ordinary person that you pass in the street is their own snowflake of personal choices in ways that you cannot see, whether you judge them for it or not.

Like gravity at the cliff edge, the biology of aging is a force of nature that cares nothing for our opinions on these matters. It runs as it will, and there will come a time when you, and I, and every present adult that you know well will be faced with the consequences of past choices. Given the present state of aging research, and paucity of viable interventions that may slow or reverse aspects of aging, we will all have the one important choice. Every one of us will either have chosen to be extraordinary, to have learned about aging research, supported progress, and sought out therapies well in advance of widespread adoption, or chosen to be dead, accepting the mortality that attends untreated aging.

The processes of degenerative aging and consequent mortality will not wait on indecision. They will not wait for the regulators to slowly approve, or the scientists to slowly innovate, or the entrepreneurs to slowly meander their way towards practical therapies. The hammer will fall, and bodies will fail and die absent the means to treat aging.

In the matter of treating aging as a medical condition, to be extraordinary is to support research that will bear fruit in twenty to thirty years, whether as a patient advocate, funder of academic projects, or by starting a company to shepherd projects to the clinic. To be extraordinary is to read around the subject and try out the most plausible (and plausibly safe) approaches. To be extraordinary is to go to conferences, meet people, learn that the Intervene Immune trials for thymus regrowth are running, and arrange participation. Or the same for tests of Khavinson peptides, or learning how to source and use senolytics, or any number of other approaches that seem more rather than less likely to pay off. To be extraordinary is to have an agreement with a cryonics provider and a plan to ensure that the arrangement works out. To be extraordinary is to take better care of your health in the simple, effective ways that most people omit in this day and age. So few individuals are undertaking these initiatives in any rigorous way, and yet it doesn't take more time or will or effort than any significant hobby.

Be extraordinary or be dead. That choice lies ahead.