We Live Too Short and Die Too Long

PREFACE
 
This is a book about aging. It will challenge everything you ever thought about the subject.
 
First, We Live Too Short and Die Too Long will challenge the boundaries you probably place on the human life span. Exactly how long do you expect to live? The life insurance industry bets that for most of us it will be 75 years. But you’re an optimist, right? So you’ll plan on beating the odds and reaching your nineties. I contend, as do other scientists who have studied the dynamics of human life, that both of those estimates are far short. Several lines of evidence clearly place the human life span at a remarkable 120 years.
 
I will detail my case in the chapters that follow; but for now, the most convincing facts may be those which are the most simple. Newspapers in Oakland, California, recently reported the death of local resident Arthur Reed, age 124. In Asan, Japan, Shigechiyo Isumi died on February 21, 1986, in his 121st year. Such longevity provides an inescapable inference—what is possible for one is possible for others.
 
That’s quite a leap from the time of the first Caesar, when human life expectancy was 25 years; or from the beginning of the twentieth century, when the average American lived to the age of 49. Traditionally, this increase in life span has been explained by factors such as decreased infant mortality, eradication of communicable disease, and improvements in both nutrition and public hygiene. These most certainly are significant developments, but they only skirt the periphery of a more fundamental fact. We live longer because we are designed to live longer. And when we control anomalies such as disease, trauma, behavioral maladaptation, and self-destruction, the natural order of our lives prevails.
 
Expanding our definition of longevity means expansion of terms such as middle age and old age. For example, if you are now 40 and a member of that bold, exceptional generation known as the baby boomers, you’ve been told by much of the media that you are reaching midlife. I challenge this contention. With prudence of prevention and health maintenance, you should think of yourself at a much younger life stage—capable of living far longer, and in a far more healthy status, than did your forebears. In essence, the opportunity to experience these additional years can be thought of as a “gift of found lifetime.
 
Still, some may fear this gift because of misconceptions regarding the physical nature of the aging human body. This is the second and perhaps the most important way in which my book will challenge you.
 
Imagine now that you have reached the magic centenarian mark. How do you envision the quality of your life? Are you climbing a tree or a mountain; or living numb in a nursing home, praying for death? I believe the fear of being old and infirm is what keeps us from being old and healthy. My hypothesis comes as a physician who for decades has watched with astonishment as his patients actively avoided all manner of preventive health care. As our knowledge of aging rapidly advances, such a tragedy is unnecessary, wrong, and inappropriate. I am not speaking now of medical technology, for I do not believe we will find miracles in youth pills or in physical gadgetry. I believe the miracle is with us today. This is because much of what passes as age change is really not due to age at all—but to disuse. Put a broken leg in a cast and in a few short weeks it will wither and appear as a leg many decades older. Similarly, all of our bodily functions—digestive, cardiovascular, respiratory, sexual, and mental—are highly keyed to use. “Use it or lose it” is far more profound than its colloquial tone suggests. Thus, the length of life is determined much by its content. Will you—will we—be a liability or a resource? The issue becomes not just how long or how well, but how long and how well. Quality of life and length of life cohere.
 
Others have described life span as a bell-shaped curve, growing to fullness and richness, only to decline into age and dependency. I deplore the decremental model, preferring instead to think of life as a “square-edged existence”—passionate and forceful to the end. We may achieve the square-edged existence only when we appreciate this remarkable final stage just as we have learned the joys of every other stage of life. A child takes his first steps, and we are exalted. The stages of later life can and must obtain this same status in the human experience.
 
A dominant source for my thesis on aging comes from my father, a physician before me, whose vision and wisdom perpetually reveal themselves to me—particularly as I sense that I have just derived a new and precious insight, only to discover that Father had preempted my discovery by decades. In his book, Creative Aging, he defined man as a Converter of Energy, an Intellectual Catalyst, an Emotional Dynamo, and a Spiritual Wanderer.
 
Such description, to me, was inspired and encompassing.
 
Aging is neither disease nor villain—that which must be cured or vanquished. Aging is a part of our natural growth process.
 
My father, when asked, “Dr. Bortz, how do you prevent aging?” replied, “I’m not interested in arrested development.”
 
Such an intrinsic and developmental process is in communion with the anthropological history of our species and the physical laws of our universe. When we can view aging from this perspective, it is no longer something to fear or avoid. Our responsibility, upon receiving the gift of found lifetime, is then to acquire the most and the best that aging can offer.
 
“But what of the body?” you may persist. “Even if the spirit is bold, the body will falter.”
 
Mark Twain, in Letters from the Earth, wrote, “Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of a thing. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he would have no market.”
 
I intend to explore these flaws in the human condition—our foreshortened life span and our protracted demise. My examination will search out evidence drawn from hosts of sources. I will present to you only the best of the research—both those discoveries which have served as historic benchmarks and those which are just now on the outer frontiers of our medical understanding.
 
Using anthropologic and thermophysical concepts, as well as examples from my clinical experience, I intend to trace the logic of our natural life span. For example, one perspective comes from my research in Africa into physical exercise as an evolutionary force. Over 4 million years ago the biologic transition from the shelter of the jungle canopy to the open savanna was the most important journey of our existence. I propose that the plain was a new ecologic niche for which we had much preadaptation. What set us apart from competing species and allowed us to endure with otherwise modest physical endowments was the unique ability to run long distances in the heat. “Persistence hunting,” as it has come to be called, was—and is—our innate ability to run down food (in early times, the plains antelope) simply by keeping it moving in the midday sun. Such long, hard running is an activity most of civilization has forgotten. Our biologic selves have not.
 
As I have said, this is a book about aging. More important, it is a book about living. The story of one is the story of both. It will prove to you that you are capable of living to the ripe old age of 120. It will explain why many of us will not. And it will show the rest of us how to do it.
 
Others have experienced their Golden Age or their Industrial Age. We have entered the “Age Age.”