How Stoic thinking and longevity science can help you make more time

Executive overview

Most people treat health as a passive matter of genetics and luck. The Stoics understood time as our most precious resource — and that our daily choices either extend or erode it.

Applying Stoic reasoning to health behaviours and supporting longevity science are two concrete ways to make more time.

Stoic philosophy applied to health

• Memento mori does not mean neglecting health — Marcus Aurelius kept a physician precisely to extend life
• Awareness that behaviour shapes health outcomes is the starting point; the Stoic emphasis on time as scarce turns that awareness into a priority
• Short-term pleasures (smoking, poor diet, excess sun) are easy to choose; healthy choices require mindfulness and long-term thinking
• Corrosive emotions — anger, fear, jealousy, chronic stress — undermine physical health directly
• Using reason to regulate emotional responses improves both mental and physical wellbeing
• Healthspan (years lived in good health) matters more than lifespan; the goal is to extend the productive, healthy years

The science of ageing and healthspan extension

• David Sinclair (Harvard) distinguishes lifespan from healthspan and argues ageing itself — not just disease — should be the target of research
• Cells age due to information loss in the epigenome, the biochemical signalling system coupled with DNA
• Sinclair's lab has accelerated and reversed ageing in mice; blind mice regained eyesight after cellular reprogramming; primate replication is underway
• Mainstream medicine focuses on diseases that accompany age, not on ageing itself — a critical funding and framing gap
• Key researchers working on complementary angles: stem cells (Tom Rando, UCLA), senescent cells (Jim Kirkland, Mayo), immune response (Tony Weiss-Coray, Stanford), centenarian genetics (Nir Barzilai, Einstein)

Why longevity research is underfunded

• Major foundations and universities view healthspan extension with scepticism, conflating it with nursing-home longevity rather than extending prime productive years
• Progressive critics worry it will worsen inequality — expensive treatments will reach wealthy people first
• Academic economists raise concerns about fiscal sustainability of ageing populations
• Silicon Valley is the exception: dozens of startups and billionaire investors (Bezos, Page, Brin) are active in the space

Where private capital is moving

• Altos Labs — founded by Rick Klausner, modelled on Bell Labs, $3 billion committed, recruiting top scientists with million-dollar salaries and research autonomy; mission: cellular rejuvenation to reverse disease and disability
• The Buck Institute is the leading independent non-profit in the field
• Impetus Grants — ~35 grants to high-risk longevity researchers, selected from 1,000+ applicants; first round (late 2020) produced over a dozen published papers and several potential breakthroughs
• Saudi Arabia's Hevolution Foundation matched the Impetus grants in 2023 and has become the second-largest funder of longevity research globally after the NIH