The long game
Longevity is the wellness buzzword of the moment. Susan Ward Davies explores how to live your best life—for longer
If you were fed certain TikTok algorithms, you could be forgiven for thinking that #ageing is the worst thing that could happen to a person. Gen Z’s anxious ‘How old do I look?’ meme started trending in early 2024, and countless hours/days/weeks have been wasted obsessing about early wrinkles and other potential signs of prematurely fading youth. But they are going to have to get over this phobia and face facts, because we all (bar accidents and illness) spend much more of our lives old than young, and the ratio is changing even more as lifespan increases.
According to the World Health Organisation, one in six people across the world will be over 60 years old by 2030, and the number reaching 80 is expected to more than double in 40 years’ time. So, although we may be experiencing a worrying world-wide drop in birth rate, longevity is on the up: in the UK, it has grown 25 years in a century (despite a Covid-linked dip), to 78.6 for men and 83 for women, and globally, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, life expectancy is forecasted to jump from 73.6 years old to 78.1 by 2050. And that is just the average, in reality our chances of reaching 100 is higher than ever before, judging by the current glut of centenarians, and in September 2024, Maria Branyas Morera, the world’s oldest person, finally died at the ripe old age of 117.
This trend should be good news (who wants to die young?) but it will only seem like a positive if we radically change our attitudes towards getting old, and also learn not just how to live longer — but how to live longer well. There is no point in reaching your centenary, just to be confined to a wheelchair and deprived of independence. It also makes sense for all of us to pave the way for a more positive ageing experience by challenging negative attitudes to old age, so it doesn’t seem like such a terrible fate anymore. We should also stop denigrating the elderly, and ourselves when we are no longer young, and particularly avoid the common trap of ‘self -directed ageism’, where anyone over 40 starts making self-deprecating comments about their supposed failing capabilities. No, you are not having a ‘senior moment’, you just forgot something! To slightly misquote Dr Lucy Pollock, author of the just-published The Golden Rule: Lessons in Living from a Doctor of Ageing, you shouldn’t create a prejudice against your future self.
Once we have embraced a more positive attitude to getting older, the first step is to future-proof our health, and it is never too early to start. Recent discoveries show that the effects of ageing may kick in sooner than previously thought. The natural assumption has always been that it happens gradually, as we get older. But new research by Michael Snyder, Professor of Genetics at Stanford University of Medicine, shows that there are two big ageing ‘spikes’, one in our mid 40s and the other at 60, when major molecular shifts happen in our bodies. By 44, you might notice, for example, that your liver doesn’t process alcohol or caffeine as well as before (although I can say from personal experience, this does not happen to everyone), or that you have way less stamina than usual. We should all know the keys to longevity by now: keeping mind and body active, avoiding weight gain, eating plenty of fresh vegetables, fruits, pulses, whole grains and protein — but also maintaining friendships and developing a positive mental attitude. Many people are already ahead of the game, with mid-lifers boosting mood and well-being with cold-water swimming clubs, sixty-somethings signing up for Reformer Pilates, octogenarians cheerfully running marathons or lifting weights, and everyone — it seems — now tending obsessively to their gut microbiome.
At the extreme end, for those who really, really want to not just live longer better, but age almost backwards, you have the rise of extreme biohackers such as 46-year-old American tech guru Bryan Johnson, who pops more than 100 pills a day, uses follistatin gene-therapy to decrease inflammation and increase muscle mass, and has even had transfusions of his 18-year-old son’s blood plasma in an attempt to return his own biological age to 18. And if you thought the anti-ageing industry was lucrative, Johnson’s regime comes at an annual cost of $2 million, so no wonder longevity drugs are predicted to be the next biotech boom.
Clearly we can’t all go to these lengths, and frankly, who would want to? And although biohacking may sound futuristic and high tech (and downright weird sometimes), it actually just means making incremental changes to your lifestyle to improve well-being. Biohacking covers anything from gene editing to just eating more oily fish or taking a Wim Hof-style ice bath. Keeping it simple — and consistent — is often the answer, with ‘exercise snacks,’ as the late, great Dr Michael Mosley called the short bursts of activity he advocated.

With a little willpower, the exercise and diet side of a longevity plan are easy to manage on your own. A more complex issue to conquer is loneliness, which, according to the Campaign to End Loneliness, can increase your risk of early death by 26%. This sense of isolation is now a huge problem in Japan, and even has a name — hikikomori, usually occurring in older people (but it is rising in the young), who stay at home and shun society for months on end. One study has shown that the phenomenon is spreading, a worrying trend when the Japanese are ageing faster than any other society in the world. Where once the elderly were revered in Japan, now they are considered a burden on society, a dangerous mind-shift which formed the premise of Japanese film-maker Chie Hayakawa’s sinister 2022 project, Plan 75. This is a fictional (but maybe prophetic) tale of a future Japanese government deciding to solve its social care burden by offering a financial incentive to any over-75s who sign up for their euthanasia programme. You can’t help feeling many governments around the world may be watching it with an unhealthy interest.
Singapore has come up with a much more positive way of dealing with potential longevity problems by creating a ‘prevention rather than cure’ plan, as the longer people are kept healthy and productive, the better it is for the economy.
Singapore is the ‘next frontier of ageing,’ according to Dan Buettner, the founder of Blue Zones PLC , and he has dubbed the country a Blue Zone 2.0/ ‘engineered Blue Zone’, as opposed to the ‘natural’ Blue Zones of Loma Linda, California, Ikaria, Greece, Okinawa, Japan, Ogliastra, Sardinia, and the Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica, where people live much longer and have lower rates of chronic disease. Their longevity secret is thought to be Buettner’s Power 9 principles, which include good sleep and social connections as well as healthy diet, fasting and regular exercise.
Singapore is more of a man-made Blue Zone, with the government subsidising longevity-boosting healthy food, reducing sugar in sweetened beverages, and offering rewards in their National Steps Challenge, where participants get points to redeem if they walk more than 10,000 steps daily. And because of the government policy of intergenerational integration, something that has been proven to make for better ageing and reduce social isolation, they offer tax breaks to young people who move to live near their parents. They have also built an award-winning, greenery-covered, vertical village, called the Kampung Admiralty, a mixed-use complex to house the elderly, with an integrated community living room, tropical garden and health centre, a Community Plaza, open to the public to promote intergenerational bonding, and buddy benches at shared entrances to encourage residents to chat.

Some countries don’t even have to try to create optimum conditions: the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington recently issued projections for longevity by country in 2050. Spain is set to have the highest life expectancy in Europe, because — it is thought — of its walkable cities, strong family units, (so the elderly can spend a lot of time with their families), and a slow pace of life with leisurely lunches, siestas and sunny weather. Even practising religion is said to help, and the 58.2% of Spaniards who are Catholics tend to be staunch ones.
So Gen Z take note: if we change attitudes and lifestyle and do ageing well — it won’t be anything like as grim as you fear.