What Longevity Science Gets Wrong About Life & Death | (#091) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Welcome to the Beyond Success podcast: Psychology and Philosophy for Achievers on the Inner Life of Success, and I’m your host, David Tian.

Now, picture with me the person who’s serious about living a long time, about as serious about it as anyone he knows. He has read Peter Attia, and he didn’t stop at the book. He has been to the longevity conferences. He has worked through the scholarly papers. He has watched all the long talks from start to finish. He runs the long Zone 2 workouts. He tracks his VO₂ Max. He takes the supplement stacks. He eats the Blue Zone diets.

He’s ahead of his peers on every longevity marker that he can measure, and he’s very confident that he will see 100, maybe even 120. He’s optimized the length of his life down to the decimal point and he’s built his whole approach to his health around getting the longest run he possibly can, and in all of that, there’s this one question that he’s never stopped to ask: “What’s all of this life actually for?” [00:59.6]

By the end of this episode, you’re going to see three things clearly that most people in his position never see at all. First, the longevity work that you’ve poured your money and your mornings into is, at least, in part, a defense against a fear that you haven’t identified yet.

Second, that fear doesn’t get solved by adding more years to your life. The defense never addresses what it’s defending against, so it just keeps asking for more and taking more, and that more never resolves the fear.

Third, the one thing that metabolizes the fear is a life that’s actually being fully lived, and the two variables that make a life fully lived are the two that your optimization stack can’t affect. If you miss this and you run the immortality project harder, you hit the diminishing returns and reach the far end with that fear still intact, still driving you, and the full life still sitting there postponed, waiting to be lived. [02:00.5]

Yeah, you bought yourself the extra years, but you skipped the living. Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you’ll miss it—the inimitable words of Ferris Bueller. This is a Gen X reference—so, if you pay attention to what I’m covering in this episode, then the opposite becomes possible. You stop being driven by a fear that you never looked at, and you start doing the work that actually dissolves it, resolves it, and ensures you live a full life.

But, first, let’s address a major misconception. It’s that more years equals more life, and that optimizing for length is just rational health behavior. The hidden assumption here is that the longevity drive is about health, but for the high-achiever it mostly isn’t. The drive is substantially an immortality project, a defense against a death anxiety that he isn’t even conscious of, and because he isn’t conscious of it, no amount of optimization will ever resolve it. [03:01.7]

You can keep adding to the stack for the rest of your life and the thing it’s aimed at will stay exactly where it was at the beginning. Years and life are not on the same axis. What decides whether the years count as living is a fully lived life. That includes inner development and it includes close, connected relationships, and neither one of those ever shows up on your optimization dashboard.

Before I go any further, I want to say this upfront. I’m not here to talk you out of any of this. I do a lot of it myself. I track my VO₂ Max and do the painful once-a-week VO₂ Max workout. I do the long Zone 2 workouts, the plyometrics, the functional movement work. I take the supplements, not nearly as many as I used to, but I still take supplements and I think they’re helpful. I’ve tried the Blue Zone diets, the keto, the intermittent fasting, and I do my own version of them. [03:54.3]

The science behind a lot of it is sound, of course, and the impulse behind it is sane. So, wanting more good years is not a neurosis. It’s one of the most reasonable things anyone can want, so nothing I’m going to say here is an attack on the longevity work per se. The protocols are fine. The deeper question is what the drive behind them is for and what it can’t deliver, no matter how well you run it.

You’ve probably seen one of the more extreme versions of this by now. Bryan Johnson, the tech founder, who turned his own body into a full-time research lab. Hundreds of measurements. He got a team of doctors, and every variable he can reach pushed as far as it’ll go. It’s easy to point at him and laugh, but I don’t think he’s a punchline. He’s just the most public, most literal version of something a lot of accomplished people are doing in their own quieter way. He makes the ordinary case visible. When you watch a man do it that openly, that completely, you can see more clearly the shape of the thing in yourself. [04:58.6]

So, let’s take one of the more credible voices in the space, Peter Attia. He has done maybe more than almost anyone else to put longevity science in front of a wider audience, especially high-achievers. He’s rigorous and he’s the last person you’d accuse of going soft, but his book Outlive, which is great, I recommend it to everybody, ends with a chapter that most readers don’t usually see coming.

After all the chapters on the science, on the protocols, on how to add healthy years, he closes with a long, honest account of his own mental health, his anger, his regrets, what it cost his marriage, what it cost his fatherhood, his regrets about the way he’d actually been living while he was busy optimizing how long he would live. [05:48.2]

See, how strange that is for a second. Here’s a man whose entire public identity is built on optimizing the physical body, but at the very end of his book, he writes that the variable that would decide whether his extra years were worth living was the one that no protocol addressed, not VO₂ Max, not the blood work. It was something the whole apparatus that he had built his name on couldn’t address—and that’s not Attia being incomplete. He didn’t run out of room and tacked on a personal chapter. I don’t think that’s what happened. It’s Attia being honest.

He got all the way to the top of the Longevity Mountain, looked around, and told the truth about what he found there. He arrived at the exact recognition that this episode is building toward. He didn’t get there through the protocols. The protocols couldn’t take him there. He got there by turning and facing his own life, the relationships, the anger, the sadness, the regret, the things the dashboard didn’t measure. The science got him those extra years. Facing his life, though, was the only thing that could tell him whether those extra years would be worth having. [07:00.8]

So, why would this scientifically rigorous doctor arrive somewhere his whole method couldn’t take him? To answer that, I want to hand you a very important frame. I want to be clear that this is not some accusation. It’s simply a fact about being human, and it applies as much to me as to anyone else listening.

In 1973, a cultural anthropologist named Ernest Becker wrote a book called The Denial of Death. It won the Pulitzer Prize. Becker argued that a huge amount of what we do, including the achievements we’re most proud of, are actually an unconscious defense against a piece of knowledge that we can’t tolerate, and that’s that we are going to die.

We can’t live with that staring at us, so we build what Becker called “immortality projects.” These were symbolic systems that let us feel like we’re part of something that outlasts our lives. This would include heroism, wealth, legacy, monuments, where with our names on them, achievement itself. [08:05.5]

These are the culturally approved ways of managing the death terror that most people never turn and face directly. They make it look like ambition or drive, but underneath those, a lot of the time, they’re a way of not looking at the one thing we can’t bear to look directly at. This concept is so important that, back in 2017, I filmed a four hour talk on this and uploaded it to my old YouTube.

Here’s the cost that Becker put his finger on: people spend their whole lives managing the fear instead of living. Now, I want you to take that frame and try it on yourself, not because I’m telling you that it fits, but because you’re the only one who can really check for yourself. Of all the immortality projects a person can run, physical longevity optimization might be the most literal one there is. [08:57.8]

Most immortality projects are symbolic, like you write a book or you build a company, or you put your name on the building so that some version of you survives after you’re dead. But the longevity project isn’t symbolic. It’s not symbolic at all. It’s literal. It’s not trying to live on through your works. It’s an actual attempt to not die, or at least, to push death so far out that it stops feeling real or urgent.

It stops feeling like it’s coming for you the way it comes for everyone else, and to the degree that what’s driving it—like the biomarkers, the protocols, the confidence that you’ll see 120 years old, to that degree—it can’t do the job. You can’t supplement your way out of mortal terror. There’s no stack for it, no wearable that tracks it. The defense keeps asking for more precisely because it never addresses or resolves the fear that it’s defending against. [09:52.4]

Think more deeply about what that means. If the optimization were actually aimed directly at the fear, then at some point, you would do enough, and the fear would ease, dissipate, disappear, and then you would feel at ease. But that’s not what happens, is it? You hit the targets, but the relief doesn’t come, so you raise the targets, and then you add the next protocol, the next test, the next intervention, not because the last one failed on its own terms.

Your numbers might have been excellent. You might have actually met all of those goals, and that would be why you moved on, right? So, it’s not because they failed. It’s because the numbers were never what the deep part of you was actually seeking. That’s why it never feels like enough. It’s not that you haven’t optimized hard enough or well enough. It’s that the whole effort is aimed at the wrong target. You’re firing at the readout on the screen, but the fear is sitting somewhere that the screen can’t see or can’t display. [10:50.3]

Sit with this, you spend your life optimizing so that you get more years. That’s the whole deal, right? That’s the trade you signed up for. But what happens to those extra years once you’ve bought them? You spend them the same way you spent the earlier batch, by optimizing, tracking, testing, adjusting the protocol. You bought yourself more optimizing time, and then you handed all of it back to the very thing that was eating your time in the first place, optimizing. You didn’t buy more actual life, more living, more full living. You bought more optimizing, and the reward for running the machine well is more time to run the machine.

So, if more optimizing isn’t the answer, we have to ask what actually resolves the fear. Here, the book on this that I recommend the most, even more than Becker’s The Denial of Death, which is really like a graduate-level seminar reading level, the book I recommend the most to most people is by Irvin Yalom, the renowned existential psychiatrist, and it’s his book, Staring at the Sun. [11:52.7]

Yalom spent a lot of his career sitting with people who were dying, and he noticed a key pattern. He drew part of this from Epicurus, who noticed the same thing thousands of years ago. It’s the unlived life that generates the most death anxiety. The unlived life.

The people who feel they’ve actually lived fully tend to fear death less because they’re not clinging, but the people who deferred living, who kept postponing the relationships, postponing the presence, the things that actually mattered the most to them, those are the people who meet the end in the most terror.

Yalom’s sense of why is that the ledger feels unbalanced. There’s a bill that never got paid, a life that was supposed to happen and kept getting pushed to the next year. Now take that frame and hold it up to the person we were describing at the beginning, because look what happens when you put the two together. The one optimizing hardest for length is very often the same one who has most deferred their living. [12:57.0]

They’re so busy building, measuring, running the protocol, so busy that the relationships and the emotional and mental presence got postponed to some someday that keeps receding in time, so the death anxiety runs high. Of course, it does. The ledger is unbalanced. And because it runs high, what’s the move? Optimize for length. Reach for more years. You see the trap closing. The high anxiety is exactly what drives the optimizing, and the deferred life is exactly what’s generating the high anxiety.

I want you to notice how vicious this loop, this cycle, this circle actually is, because it’s not just a sad irony. It’s a closed loop that feeds on itself. The thing he reaches for to manage the terror is more time, but reaching for more time commits him to spending even more of his time, his life, doing the thing that’s causing the terror in the first place, which is to defer his life, not living, so the cure he picks deepens the disease. [14:04.4]

Every year he adds is another year handed to the machine. The harder he works the solution, the worse the underlying problem gets. The optimization isn’t the problem you solve. The optimization is the symptom. The deferred life is the cause, and you can’t fix the cause by doubling down on the symptom. You can only dig the hole deeper, with better equipment, while telling yourself you’re climbing out. So, what does pay the bill? [14:36.6]

Sometimes, the real problem isn’t more effort or more motivation. It’s knowing the right direction. A lot of people listening to this podcast are capable and driven. Things still look fine on paper, but life still feels strangely flat. When that happens, more advice usually isn’t the answer. Clarity is.

I’ve put together a short assessment that takes about two minutes. It’s simply a way to see which area deserves your attention most right now, whether that’s relationships, decision-making, or how pressure is being handled day to day. Based on your responses, you’ll be sent a short set of master classes related to that area.

If that sounds useful, you can find it at DTPhD.com/quiz. That’s “dtphd.com/quiz.”

Yalom has a beautiful concept here. He calls it rippling. His point is that peace with mortality doesn’t come from escaping death. There is no escaping it. That was never on the table. It comes from something else entirely. It comes from the ways that your actions and your relationships carry outward beyond you, the effect you have on the people that you care about around you, which moves on to the people around them in widening circles that eventually you’ll never fully see. [15:54.3]

You don’t have to be remembered by name. You don’t need the monument. The contribution, the connection, that’s what outlives you. It’s something of how you lived, how you loved, how you treated the people closest to you, keeps moving after you’re gone. That’s what eases death anxiety—and notice what that points at, not a number on a screen, not a marker that you can track. It points at two things: how you develop as a person and the people you’re actually closest to.

Those are the parts of a fully lived life, so let’s take them one at a time. Let’s start with the relationships. Here, the evidence is about as strong as social science ever gets. There’s a study out of Harvard University, the Study of Adult Development. It started in 1938 and included among its subjects, people as famous as the former President John F. Kennedy, and it is still running—1938, so that would be almost 90 years now. [16:51.1]

It began as two separate studies that got combined into a group of about 725 men, and over the decades, it widened out to include their wives and their children, so now there are more than 2,500 people in it. Robert Waldinger directs it these days. It’s the longest in-depth study of adult life anyone has ever done. They’ve tracked these people year after year, their health, their work, their marriages, their disappointments, their mental health, and they did this for the better part of a century.

So, here’s what they found, and it’s not what they expected going into the study. When you look at how well these people aged, genetics did matter. Long-lived ancestors mattered. But neither one of those factors mattered as much as how satisfied they were in their relationships in midlife. Waldinger puts it simply. The people who were most satisfied in their relationships at 50 were the healthiest at 80. [17:50.4]

Let that sink in. Relationship satisfaction at 50 years old predicted physical health at 80 years old better than cholesterol or any other biomarker. The thing you’d put on a chart and track and worry over and over, like your cholesterol, all turned out to be a weaker signal than whether you felt connected to the people in your life.

It even shows up in lifespan. In the study, Waldinger reports that married people lived longer. For the men, on average, happily married men lived an average of seven to 17 years longer, for the women, five to 12 years longer. Look at the size of that effect. We will track a supplement that might buy us a few extra months. Here’s a variable where the difference is measured in years, sometimes well over a decade.

Now, before you picture some greeting card version of this, the study is clear that the good relationships didn’t have to be smooth. Some of these couples into their 80s, bickered day in and day out, and that wasn’t the thing that hurt them. What mattered was whether underneath the bickering they felt they could count on each other when things got hard. It was that feeling of trust and connection, and it wasn’t some surface harmony. This is also what the Gottman research would tell you. [19:05.5]

You can argue with your partner over breakfast and still be held by the relationship. It’s the reliance that protects you, not the surface politeness, and the flip side is brutal, because the absence of this long-term relationship shows up in the mortality data, too.

Julianne Holt-Lunstad pulled together 70 studies that included about 3.4 million people in 2015. Loneliness was associated with a 26% increase in the risk of dying early, social isolation, a 29% increase, living alone, a 32% increase. The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory in 2023 put the mortality impact of lacking social connection in the range of smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Her earlier work, 148 studies back in 2010, found that stronger social relationships went with roughly a 50% greater likelihood of survival. [20:06.5]

So, notice this irony: the optimizer is out there chasing longevity through every protocol there is, but the single most documented longevity variable that we have, the one with the most evidence behind it by a wide margin, is actually close, connected relationships. That’s the one variable the immortality project isn’t touching. You can’t buy it. You can’t track it. You can’t run it as a protocol. You can’t hit a target on it, so it gets neglected precisely because it won’t submit to the optimization method. The most powerful lever, ignore it, because you can’t put it on the dashboard.

Now, suppose you fixed all that. Suppose you had the relationships, the close ties, the connection. You would still be missing the second piece, more years without any inner development. These more years don’t actually give you more living. They just stretch the same arc out longer. [21:05.0]

Here’s a strange place to find the argument. Think about the elves from The Lord of the Rings. They live forever, but in the mind of J. R. R. Tolkien, they are not happy creatures. They’re tragic creatures. The elves in Tolkien’s work, The Silmarillion, are deeply melancholy, precisely because they don’t die. People miss this about them. Tolkien was an Oxford professor and a careful thinker about death, and he didn’t write the elves as a fantasy of how great it’d be to live without end. He actually wrote them as a meditation on what deathlessness does to you.

The elves accumulate grief, but they never get the natural completion that lets the grief close. They watch every world they love decay and fall, decay and fall, over and over down the centuries. The sadness doesn’t resolve. It just compounds. More time didn’t heal them. More time gave the sorrow simply more room to pile up. [22:02.9]

His closest friend, C S Lewis, came at it from the other side. In his book, The Weight of Glory, Lewis argued that mortality isn’t a defect to be engineered away. It’s the very thing that lets a life carry weight. Think about why a moment matters so much to you. Part of why it matters so much is that it won’t last, and neither will you. The finite arc is what gives the moments inside it their weight. Take the limit away, and you don’t get infinite meaning. You get the opposite. Nothing presses, nothing counts, because there’s always more where that came from.

You can watch the culture work this out again and again. Vampire stories, all the way from Bram Stoker through Anne Rice, they keep circling the same point. The vampire isn’t happier for being immortal. He’s restless, cut off from the living, collecting the surface of experience century after century, without the depth that mortality gives it. He has all the time in the world and almost none of the meaning. [23:06.7]

Then there’s a version maybe you and I grew up on, Thor. Let’s take the MCU Thor. More people know that one. In the first movie, here’s a god who’s over 1,000 years old, and how does he spend that? In what’s basically extended adolescence, procrastination, status games, picking fights, leaving the growing up for later.

The character is funny on screen, but think about why he’s so funny. He’s recognizable, 1,000 years young and still not done growing up, not because he’s stupid, but because nothing in the shape of his life ever forced the development. When you’ve got forever, there’s no pressure to become anyone in particular by any particular time.

So, here’s the point: more years don’t produce more living, unless internally you’re actually developing. If you aren’t, the same arc just slows down and then spreads out. The immaturity that takes four years in a normal life takes 40 in a long one. [24:01.7]

Look, you don’t need elves or vampires to test this out. Look, honestly, at most people under 40. They haven’t done twice the inner development of people at 20. They’ve mostly just stretched the same arc over more years. The clock ran longer, but the growth didn’t.

Now follow the thread back, because this connects to everything we’ve looked at so far. The avoidance of development and the avoidance of death turn out to be the same avoidance. Why? Because real development requires letting aspects of yourself die off, the old identities, the old defenses, the Self that got organized around achievement, around being driven to be the one who wins. At some point, that one has to be laid to rest so the next version of you can emerge. Those are like deaths, small ones, but real ones, and someone who can’t face their own mortality won’t be able to face those smaller deaths either. [25:04.8]

It’s the same flinch aimed at really the same thing, so the person stretching their adolescence across decades Peter Pan style isn’t avoiding two separate problems. They’re avoiding one thing twice, dodging the small deaths that growth asks for and dodging the big one at the end, or trying to, and the longevity project run as a defense lets you do both at once. It promises to push the big death away and it keeps you so busy optimizing that you never have to sit still long enough to let the older parts of you retire.

So, the longevity protocol can buy you more years. That part is true. What it can’t buy you is a fully lived life, and it can’t resolve the fear that it’s been defending against unconsciously. The reason is the same for both. A fully lived life and a peace with dying both ask for the one thing that the protocol is built to avoid: facing your own finitude, letting old Selves retire, pouring yourself into relationships and development that you can’t micromanage, control, or optimize. [26:10.5]

The fear of death and the life you keep deferring aren’t actually two problems. They’re one problem seen from two sides. The optimizing was never the solution that it looked like. It’s the symptom I’m thinking of someone specific as I say this. I’ll keep him anonymous, but this isn’t hypothetical. I’ve worked with him.

He co-founded a tech company, had a large exit, and afterwards, the thing he threw himself into was longevity. It’s a big part of the work that he does now. He got his diet dialed in to the gram or the milliliter, the training and recovery routine that ran for hours, morning and evening, and he would never break it.

He ran every protocol, every test, every supplement he could get his hands on, and while all of that ran, the rest of his life kept getting pushed aside. The bucket list could wait. There’d be decades later for it, right? Meeting someone special, building the relationship and the family he said he wanted, that could all wait, too, and he started skipping things. [27:05.7]

He skipped the dinners with his old friends because it didn’t fit his eating window. He skipped the trip because it would wreck his sleep. He skipped the family gatherings he later regretted missing, and this went on for years. What he told me, when we slowed down enough for him to reflect on it, was that he was lonely, bored, and anxious most of the time. He’d gotten his body into excellent condition, but he built a life that was barely worth being in. He’d been so busy buying more years that he forgot to be present for the ones he already had.

Now, picture where that road ends if no one catches it. You run the project harder. You add the next protocol. You chase the next marker, but the returns start to shrink, they always will, and the fear doesn’t lift because it was never about the markers. So, you reach the far end that you bought with the fear still driving you and the life still on hold. You outlived the clock, but you never started living. The extra decades showed up right on schedule, but you spent them the way you spent the earlier ones, head down, optimizing, postponing. The reward for doing it well was more time to keep doing it. [28:15.6]

None of this means the impulse was wrong. Wanting your life to matter, wanting your years to count for something is one of the most human things there is. It was just aimed at the wrong target. The work that actually metabolizes the fear, processes it, and resolves it is the work that produces a life worth extending, and that has nothing to do with biomarkers.

It starts somewhere else—by turning around and facing the very thing the biomarkers were supposed to help you not look at, your mortality, your affinity, the life you’ve been deferring, and the old Self that has to retire so the new one, the next one, can emerge and live. [28:57.8]

That work is hard, maybe harder than any protocol, and it’s worth being honest about why it’s so hard. The aspects of you, parts of you that built the career, the fortune, this whole immortality project, are very good at what they do, but they’re not great at building a close, connected relationship, or doing the inner development psychologically, or even sitting still and facing your own mortality.

The skills that got you here are, in some cases, the exact skills that are in the way, the drive, the control, the micromanaging, the optimizing instinct. What you would reach for first is what can’t help you in this now new domain, new phase of life, and sometimes it will actually make it worse.

So, how do you work with those parts of yourself that won the game back then up to now, but can’t give you the full life? That’s where we go next in the next episode. Can’t wait to welcome you to that.Thank you so much for listening. Let me know if you have any feedback whatsoever, I’d love to get it. Leave me a comment and send me a message, love to get your feedback, and I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [30:06.7]