The Longevity Obsession (And Why I'm Ignoring Most of It)

#151 - Reflections on investing and life from building my holding company

Dec 06, 2025

3 Paragraphs to think

You say longevity, I read shitting your pants thinking about dying alone. That’s what this whole obsession is really about. Nobody wants to die young. We all have people we want to keep seeing, things we want to keep doing. I picture myself at 90, cheering at my granddaughters’ weddings. That image drives my fitness goals.

Fitness gurus all agree on fundamentals: eat well, move consistently, let your body recover. But go one level deeper—how to accomplish these things—and you’ll find as many variants as there are people on this planet. Carnivore, vegan, Zone 2, HIIT, cold plunges, red light therapy. The noise is deafening, and most of it is people selling certainty for their own interest where none exists.

The only fitness guru I love to listen to is my body. During the year it has whispered at my ears 3 founding principles:

(1) Accept your mortality—you are a fragile creature in an infinite universe. I learned this lesson losing both my parents. Making peace with that fact removes more stress than any yoga retreat ever will.

(2) Treat anger and envy as silent killers—they’ll take years off your life faster than cigarettes. They corrode you from the inside while the person you resent sleeps fine.

(3) Avoid iatrogenics - what the Greeks called the harm caused by healers trying to help. Creatine, ashwagandha, whatever’s trending? I stay away. Sometimes the smartest move is refusing to be clever.