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  • Showing only topics with the tag "aging". Back to normal view
    1. Getting older and nostalgia - what do you miss?

      I recently turned 36 and found a sense of nostalgia sending me down a rabbit hole, mostly around the "old internet" of my childhood. I know "old" is subjective, but for me, it was the time period...

      I recently turned 36 and found a sense of nostalgia sending me down a rabbit hole, mostly around the "old internet" of my childhood. I know "old" is subjective, but for me, it was the time period of like 1998 to 2005 - my middle and high school years.

      AOL had just really brought the internet to the masses. I remember the mad rush of trying to log in to the Nickelodeon chatrooms and messaging my friends on AIM. Up until AIM shutdown a few years ago, I would log on every once in a while to my old account and just look at the usernames - recognizing friends, and trying to place others.

      I had a group called "Pokemon" on my account, which sent me searching to find anything on an old Pokemon Battler bot for AIM that was by a developer, "CoolKid". I got to the point where I was beginning to think it was something I made up, before finally turning up "SuperPokemon! by CoolKid" on archive.org. I wonder whatever happened to the developer, as nothing about them remains on the internet, but I wish I could thank them for all the fun times I had with my friends.

      Which then led me down to thinking of some of the online friends from my past. In retrospect, I wasn't as careful as I should have been online, but I never had any bad experiences - everyone was super nice and helpful in the little communities I found myself in. I've only been here a few days, but tildes reminds me of that time in my life.

      Curious to hear from others: What random hits of nostalgia do you have you had lately? Is there some random, highly specific thing from your past that you miss, like my AIM Pokemon battler?

      56 votes
    2. Inside the very strange, very expensive race to “de-age”

      Whizy Kim The Rejuvenation Olympics, an online leaderboard launched by tech millionaire Bryan Johnson earlier this year, takes the rivalry of the rich to the next level. The game? “Reversing” your...

      Whizy Kim


      The Rejuvenation Olympics, an online leaderboard launched by tech millionaire Bryan Johnson earlier this year, takes the rivalry of the rich to the next level. The game? “Reversing” your age

      Link to the article


      Participants compete not on physical abilities but on how quickly and by how much they can slow their “biological age.”

      Competitors do this mostly by adjusting their diets (like which macronutrients and supplements they consume), being physically active, and retesting their “age” regularly. They’re not actually reverting to a more youthful version of themselves — that’s not biologically possible. Rather, these competitors are racing to see who can age the slowest; as the Rejuvenation Olympics website quips, “You win by never crossing the finish line.”

      Some participants

      Steve Aoki, the DJ and heir to the Benihana restaurant chain, appears toward the bottom of the site’s “absolute” ranking, which reflects the 25 competitors with the lowest rate of aging.

      The biohacker Ben Greenfield makes the list, too, as does millionaire and longevity science advocate Peter Diamandis. Most of the top 25 names, however, don’t spark immediate recognition, and some are anonymous.

      Right now, tech millionaire Bryan Johnson, who is 46 years old, is leading. But 46 is just what competitors describe as Johnson’s “chronological age,” which means, simply, the years that have passed since his birth date.

      He has claimed that he eats 70 pounds of vegetables per month, most of it pureed. He receives blood transfusions from his 17-year-old son. He wears a red-light cap that’s supposed to stimulate hair growth. His body fat once fell to a dangerous 3 percent (though it has since bumped up a few percentage points).

      Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is renowned for his eccentric wellness habits; he eats one meal a day, meditates for at least two hours daily, and has a penchant for ice baths. For a while, Steve Jobs was a “fruitarian” — as in, only ate fruit.

      Lifestyles of ultrarich

      Such extremes are common among the ultrarich, and particularly the Silicon Valley set, a crowd known for its obsession with making moonshot ideas into reality.

      The wealthy indulge in countless health trends of varying dubiousness, whether it’s getting IV drips to reduce hangovers, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, implanting devices in the body to monitor health and live longer, even injecting themselves with young blood (a treatment called parabiosis, which Johnson is receiving). This year alone, Johnson will reportedly spend at least $2 million on reducing his biological age.

      Society treats them as idols, geniuses whose savvy has vaulted them into the 0.0001 percent of the wealthiest people on Earth. It’s a small hop from there to believing they’d also be savvier than the rest of us about turning back the clock.

      Investing in de-aging

      Last year, according to a report from the news and market analysis site Longevity. Technology, more than $5 billion in investments poured into longevity-related companies worldwide, including from some big-name tech founders and investors. Many of these companies are aiming to prolong life by focusing on organ regeneration and gene editing.

      The buzzy life extension company Altos Labs, which researches biological reprogramming — a way to reset cells to pliable “pluripotent stem cells” — launched last year with a whopping $3 billion investment, and counts internet billionaire Yuri Milner and, reportedly, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos among its patrons. Bezos was also an investor in the anti-aging startup Unity Biotechnology.

      OpenAI founder Sam Altman, meanwhile, recently invested $180 million in Retro Biosciences, a company vying to add a decade to the human lifespan.

      Some of the most famous names in the death-defying sector are old: Calico Labs, a longevity-research subsidiary of Alphabet, was launched by then-Google CEO Larry Page in 2013.

      Tally Health, a new biotech company co-founded by Harvard scientist David Sinclair — who is something of a celebrity in the longevity community — boasts some Hollywood A-list investors: John Legend, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ashton Kutcher, Pedro Pascal, and Zac Efron.

      Possibility of de-aging

      “It’s not possible to reverse your age,” Stuart Jay Olshansky, an aging expert and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois Chicago, tells Vox. “There’s validity to some of the work that’s going on in epigenetics that may be telling us something about the rate of aging. It’s not yet telling us about longevity.”

      No two people age in the exact same way. Discrete from chronological age, “biological age” is the attempt to capture the often invisible difference through epigenetic gene expression, the state of someone’s organs, their immune system, and more.

      A 40-year-old with a history of heavy drinking and smoking, for example, may have a higher biological age than someone who never drinks or smokes. (In 2018, a Dutch man even complained that he ought to be able to change his legal age to match his biological age.)

      Johnson again

      Johnson, who made his hundreds of millions after selling a payments platform he developed to eBay in 2013, has become renowned not for what he’s invented, sold, or designed, as is the case for many other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but for the unimaginably strict lifestyle he leads.

      According to his website and the many interviews he has given, he exerts constant vigilance over the 78 organs of the human body, consistently tracking everything from BMI to brain white matter. Johnson is often described as the “most measured man in human history.”

      The point isn’t merely being healthy. It’s laser-precision optimization of his health.

      Johnson, for example, never eats pizza or drinks alcohol. It’s simply not a part of his algorithm. “I was just a slave to myself and my passions and my emotions and my next desire,” he said in an interview with Vice Motherboard. That doesn’t mean he never stumbles, but when he does, he calls it an “infraction,” as though he has committed a minor crime.

      Leaderboard

      Johnson tops the Rejuvenation Olympics leaderboard; he created the game along with Oliver Zolman — who leads Johnson’s team of 30-plus doctors and other health experts — and TruDiagnostic, an epigenetics lab based in Kentucky that provides the biological age test kits that participants in the Olympics must submit. The cheaper version costs $229. The more expensive one, at $499, provides more data on your results, including how habits like smoking or drinking alcohol have impacted a person’s aging speed.

      Ultramarathon

      It’s a contest that participants hope never ends — the most ultra of ultramarathons. The most dedicated members in the longevity community are, in essence, spending their lives obsessing over living. Says Lustgarten: “I plan on doing this for at least the next 70-plus years.”

      27 votes
    3. What’s something you’ve noticed about getting older?

      No minimum age requirement for the question. Getting older is relative to you, and you can answer for any age or period of life. What have you noticed about getting older? Could be about yourself;...

      No minimum age requirement for the question. Getting older is relative to you, and you can answer for any age or period of life.

      What have you noticed about getting older? Could be about yourself; about others; about the world.

      32 votes
    4. What's something that's changed for you as you've gotten older?

      No age requirement on the question so anyone can answer, and it can be about anything -- opinions, beliefs, preferences, your own body, etc. If you're comfortable sharing specific ages/ranges,...

      No age requirement on the question so anyone can answer, and it can be about anything -- opinions, beliefs, preferences, your own body, etc.

      If you're comfortable sharing specific ages/ranges, feel free, but if not that's fine too.

      19 votes
    5. Thinking about death

      Up until recently my girlfriend’s grandmother had a relatively good life. She’s taken care of, had some interesting allucinations, slept most of the day and had funny interactions with her...

      Up until recently my girlfriend’s grandmother had a relatively good life. She’s taken care of, had some interesting allucinations, slept most of the day and had funny interactions with her grandaughter, some of which ended up on Instagram.

      In recent weeks, she started refusing food and spent days at the hospital. The sudden lost in autonomy made her hostile. It’s a struggle to change her diapers. The situation was made worse by the feeding tube up her nose, which she attempts to remove non-stop, and can only be replaced at the hospital. We had to restrain her arm. That is no way to live.

      She's made it very clear she does not want to be in this world any longer. Today I heard a hundred year old lady scream, multiple times: "just let me die!".

      I don't know what to make of it.

      Edit: I'd like to thank everyone's answers. I wasn't really looking for a solution since the legal situation in my country does not allow for any wiggle room. But it is always nice to read the smart people of Tildes passionately explore their ideas, sharing knowledge with compassion. Sometimes it is enough to feel less alone. Thank you and good night.

      15 votes
    6. An open discussion related to time and/or the aging process

      I just finished Elena Ferrante's "Neapolitan Novels" and am grappling with this idea of time and the aging process. Some themes that I find peculiar are: Those pesky things our parents told us in...

      I just finished Elena Ferrante's "Neapolitan Novels" and am grappling with this idea of time and the aging process.

      Some themes that I find peculiar are:

      • Those pesky things our parents told us in adolescents, which we often absentmindedly or hotheadedly disregarded, make much more sense as an adult. And, sometimes, we don't get the chance to share our revelations with them.
      • The things we wanted to dissociate from/ we found disgusting as youths are things we may cling to for comfort as an adult. (Be that as it may, sometimes the things they say are atrocious, which makes one think, what atrocious things am I saying now?).
      • Sometimes the things we fear are inevitable.
      • Things we said and our attitude towards our parents were harsh. As we grow older and become the receiver of such harshness, we grow to have compassion for them (possibly after they have passed) and wish we were kinder to them.
      • Quarrels between friends and family members seem so important at the time of the incident, however, as space and time grow, those quarrels fall to the backdrop. Human connection is craved and desired more as we age. This makes me feel that grudges are so wasteful (although I am guilty of holding them and am holding them currently - That's an internal battle I am fighting).

      There's more I can say about this, but I should hold back from rambling. So, what do you think of when you think of time and/or the aging process?

      25 votes