Longevity
Live Long and Prosper
Longevity Domain
01
What is Longevity?
It’s basic meaning is narrowed down to “life expectancy” or how long human beings live.
It’s most intriguing meaning comes to life when Longevity refers to long living individuals and their life extending secrets.
Usually long living individuals have the proper genes and follow a low calorie diet and have no secrets to share.
Have you got the longevity genes?
Have I?
We don’t know that.
What we do know is what modern days Longevity incorporates and how to use scientific research to strive for it.
It’s common sense that we all, as a society, should aim to achieve Longevity as a species.
Longevity integrates four pillars – Lifespan, Healthspan, Beautyspan & Egospan.
Lifespan
Lifespan is a very straightforward measurement. The longer we live, measured in years, the longer our Lifespan.
Healthspan
Healthspan is more evasive. Often people believe that they are healthy until it’s too late and certain age related illness has overcame them.
Beautyspan
With age our body becomes unsightly. The passage of time leaves its obvious and unpleasant traces on all of us.
Egospan
Time wears out not only our body but our psyche too. The longer we keep our youthful spirit, the longer our Egospan is.
- Longevity
- Lifespan
- Healthspan
- Beautyspan
- Egospan
02
What is Lifespan?
What is Lifespan?
Lifespan is a very straightforward measurement. The longer we live, measured in years, the longer our Lifespan.
Scientists look at Lifespan from specific perspectives. They look at people as aging living machines. To stay alive means to avoid complete disfunction of a vital system. To age means that the number of events of partial biological disfunctions increase over time.
In the Handbook of Biology of Aging (Sixth Edition), we read that:
“In Reliability theory of aging and longevity *, aging is defined as a phenomenon of increasing risk of failure with the passage of time (age). If the risk of failure is not increasing with age, then there is no aging in terms of reliability theory, even if the calendar age of a system is increasing.“
From this perspective Lifespan is completely dependent of the speed of aging.
* (nerds only) In terms of reliability theory, the dating problem of determining the system age is different from the performance assessment problem of a system’s aging. In reliability theory, failure is defined as the event when a required function is terminated. Reliability of the system (or its component) refers to its ability to operate properly according to a specified standard.
- Lifespan
- Aging
- Living machines
- Bilogical disfunction
- Failure of a system
03
What is Healthspan
Healthspan concerns the well-being of the body.
The longer the person’s body is in a state of well-being, the longer the Healthspan.
Health means no malady – no disease, no illness, no injury and no toxins. With aging our Health is compromised. It deteriorates.
There are four basic types of disease – Viral/Bacterial infection, System disorder (digestive system problems, immune system, respiratory, cardiovascular, urinary etc. system disorders), Genetic/Epigenetic disorder, Toxin exposure.
According to the differentiation made by the famous American physician Eric Cassell in the late 1970’s: “Disease is something an organ has, illness is something a man has.”
This practically says that disease is something that needs to be cured. An Illness, on the other hand, is a state of suffering from certain symptoms.
You can have a disease without an illness as it is the case with cardiac disease – “The silent killer”.
You can also have an illness without having a disease as with Headache.
From the standpoint of Health itself as long as you stay completely healthy there’s no aging and you have a prolonged Healthspan.
Nerds only:
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine by Bjorn Hofman says:
* There are many heated debates about the concept of disease: Is aging a disease? What about obesity, electromagnetic hypersensitivity, insomnia? How can we understand myalgic encephalomyelitis, chronic fatigue syndrome, and Lyme disease?
* There are many diverging definitions of disease, and it is difficult to make a coherent and consistent synthesis. One of the reasons for this may be that our conception of disease is complex, comprising various dimensions of human malady (Hofmann, 2001). For example, it is covered by a personal perspective—i.e., how it feels to be ill (illness); a professional perspective—i.e., how health care professionals define, detect, predict, and handle disease entities (disease); and a social perspective—i.e., how a person’s social role is defined or changed by social norms and institutions (sickness).
* The distinction between illness and disease has been noted in the theoretical literature on medicine since the 1950s (Parsons, 1951, 1958, 1964). The sociologist Andrew Twaddle was the first to elaborate on the distinction among disease, illness, and sickness in his doctoral dissertation defended in 1967 (Twaddle, 1968, 1994a, 1994b).
- Healthspan
- Well-being
- Types of malady
- Types of disease
- Symptoms
04
What is Egospan
Egospan concerns the well-being of the mind and represents all of its manifestations. The longer the person’s mind is in a state of well-being and can be described as youthful, the longer the Egospan.
The Ego (latin for “I”) is a complete manifestation of the mind. It includes the mental state, the inner desire or will to live, consciousness and all mental phenomena.
There are four measurements of the Mental state – Mental ability (all types of intelligence), Mental attitude (positive/negative), Mental energy (ability to do high output operations for a long period of time with no rest) & Mental stability (strong focus, broad attention span, not moody, not subjected to illusions, not dreamy and always living in the present).
The list of mental phenomena is very long. It includes perception, pleasure/pain experience, emotion, feelings, belief, desire, intention, personal principles etc.
The will to live is the most basic feature of life. The will to live brings life to existence and through instincts keeps it from extinction. It powers the drive in every living organism to grow, to seek well-being, to run away from harm, to reproduce, to flourish.
Consciousness is the most elusive part of the Ego. Today, consciousness is generally defined as an awareness of yourself and the world. A strong Ego possesses a strong and ever present conscious mind. Coma, Confusion, Delirium, Disorientation, Lethargy and Stupor are examples of consciousness breaking apart.
As long as all manifestations of the mind do not decline over time, your Ego is not aging.
Nerds only:
* The will to live or Wille zum Leben is a concept developed by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, Will being an irrational „blind incessant impulse without knowledge“ that drives instinctive behaviors, causing an endless insatiable striving in human existence, which Nature could not exist without.
- Manifestations ot the mind
- Mental state
- Will to live
- Consciousness
- Mental Phenomena