There was another recent study that made the front page of HN (would have to search to find it) that found two "peaks" of aging, at 44 and 60. As someone in my late 40s, I certainly identified with that.
I was in fairly good shape and feel like, despite some grays and some crows feet, my body was relatively the same from my early 20s to my early 40s. 44 really did hit me like a ton of bricks though - working out got considerably harder, and my face started to show more permanent signs of aging, like loss of facial fat and neck banding. Can't say I was thrilled to later discover I was "right on schedule".
I've only opened these comments in the hope somebody here will debunk these findings or at least point out they are dubious... :(
You’re not going to find a reliable “debunking” in HN comments of a scientific paper published in Cell.
But this paper is about analyzing tissue samples from internal organs. Which is generally not what people feel when they “feel” aging. In fact most internal organs can’t be felt at all (no nerve endings), which is how people get surprised with Stage IV cancer diagnoses like pancreatic cancer.
What people generally feel are their muscles and joints are weaker and more painful. Or their eyesight gets worse. Or their digestive system works worse. And the truth is, there is a lot a person can do to adjust or mitigate these things, through simple lifestyle changes like diet and exercise.
So there is your ray of hope: you can do things differently to feel less old. Plenty of examples in the comments here.
That said, you are 100% for sure going to age and die, and there are also things you can do to help accept and prepare for that. Your body will change; your mind can change too.
> And the truth is, there is a lot a person can do to adjust or mitigate these things, through simple lifestyle changes like diet and exercise.
I lift run or lift daily, have reduced my carb intake significantly, stopped drinking, perform a short yoga routine each morning, and spend some time on the cushion each evening. I only wish I'd done this earlier because I feel so much better than I ever have.
> In fact most internal organs can’t be felt at all (no nerve endings)
That might be technically true, but I think it's worth noting that many internal organs can produce pain, e.g. kidneys, gallbladder, pancreas, prostate, urethra, stomach, intestines, bladder, heart.
Only through chemical means which triggers relatively far away neurons to produce pain. This has the consequence that the pain is not felt at it's source.
E.g. a doctor will become very nervous if you report dizziness with a pain moving from your chest into your left shoulder or neck. Such pain originates along the path of the vagus nerve, which includes your lungs and heart (and half the digestive organs, and even the womb, kidneys and gall bladder sometimes). It's very tricky to diagnose, and usually extremely serious (as in ignoring it may cause death).
You're correct, but I've personally experienced the kind of referred pain you're describing, for both (at different times) prostate and kidneys, and doctors (and now me!) are pretty able to identify that and treat it.
Agree - I’m 58 and still do the same workout I did in my 30s and 40s including 3 sets of 15 to 20 pull-ups depending on the day. I also still skate (hockey) 2 -3 times a week with a bunch of retired pros (echl, nhl, etc) and typically put up a bunch of points every skate (possibly slightly more assists now but I attribute that more toward enjoying that more these days and not needing to be so flashy)
You are reaping the benefits of having an active fitness regime in your 30s . The average 50 year old who starts exercising today will never get to your fitness level .
I'm 30, so maybe still too young to have a meaningful perspective, but I take comfort in the fact that I will always get to choose what I _try_ to do. I can't control my body's state, but I can insist on doing exciting / eventful stuff until my body gives in. My friend's grandma (80+ yo) just flew from Bay Area to Paris on her own, to catch up with old friends. I'm pretty sure her doctors would advise her not to do that trip, but she is doing what she wants. I admire her for making the choice to assert her free will, despite the increased risk; I aspire to be like that.
I mean, I'm 61, working at a smallish SaaS company that "just growed" from a startup, having fun. I write code, which is the work I enjoy most, I do architecture and explain to the kids why we're doing what we're doing. My health is fine, but I exercise regularly and eat reasonably healthy.
Re my health, I kinda feel like Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Neuman: "What, me worry?" I worry more about the state of the US than I do about my own health. We're all going to die - I've lived a lot longer than many people. I've outlived Steve Jobs by 5 years at this point. Suck it, Steve! (And Jim Morrison? 34 years. Looooser!)
If you do cardio - even just walking/hiking - and weight training, you're going to be healther than 95% of people, and live longer with better quality of life. It's not that difficult.
As you age, if you're reasonably sane, you start letting go of the idea that you can or should live forever.
Would it make you feel better if the cutoff was 40?
This certainly matches my personal anecdata. :(
it's worse than that, I can feel it :-) I'll be old when I'll be old. Not before ! :-)
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It's very likely that aging is driven by some kind of scheduled gene program. It makes perfect sense to phase out individuals from a group-level selection point of view.
Perhaps not a phase-out program, but a progressive shut-down program, as a trade off between peak performance and total lifespan, where the characteristic patterns of ageing is what allowed humans to live much longer than other animals around the same size. Similar to the idea in this comic: https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/the-suit
By this logic, as a hedge against sudden death around ~50, the human body start cranking down the output of its diverse subsystems by then, to maximize operacional life, just like NASA engineers from time to time turn off instruments in the voyager to keep it operational against the odds. This is what we call ageing.
I think this argument only makes sense on the surface level. If it was the case that humans hit some hard limit to growth (perhaps running out of 'room' to grow, or losing the ability to process new energy, etc), then I think it could make sense to do this sort of 'graceful decommissioning' behavior, which we'd come to know as aging. But is there a hard limit we hit, aside from the aging process itself? None is obvious to me.
What limitation is our body pushing off by 'choosing' to age, instead of continuing as normal?
Edit: Regardless of the validity of the argument, I loved that comic, thanks for sharing.
It's commonly thought that if your cells kept dividing the way that they do when you're young and they accumulated genetic damages you'd get cancer more often.
Left me shivering.
Maybe. But why in this case do we not see bugs and failures in this program, i.e. no one lived 5 times more than the average or did not live forever at all, for example? I'm not making a statement, just a guess.
You could say this woman is immortal. Or at least her cancer is.
If you want to see that idea explored in art, I highly recommend the movie "The Man From Earth."
Because the whole system is quite resilient and self-repairing, and probably requires a great deal of consistency between the various genes? Aging is quite fundamental to life, and a "bug" in that area would almost certainly cause severe problems in other areas, probably death. Cancer might be an example. And systems of many components tend to narrow the standard deviation of the composite.
But that's just guessing. The article might not even have found something profound, but a life-style effect. On the one hand, we're living long (historically speaking), on the other hand, we have unnatural habits.
Lots of models could explain this. For example, let's say it's not just one program, but thousand of programs running in your body, trying to get you to age or die. The chances that all of them bug out would be astronomically low.
Because the odds of something 5x the average that's more or less normally distributed are really, really low.
It's the same as how although you can occasionally get a "natural" person over seven feet tall, it's very rare. Most really tall people have gigantism or some other form of pituitary abnormality, and I believe every recorded person to break eight feet has had such an abnormality.
It's like asking why we've never had someone with 500 IQ. There's a hard limit where anyone with enough of a mutation to enable that would probably also not survive long at all. And indeed with the height thing we see a lot of super-tall people dying younger due to cardiovascular strain and other issues. You get the picture.
It's because age isn't normally distributed. The annual odds of dying go up by a factor of 2 every 8 years. This gives tighter bounds on age than a normal distribution would give.
Such arguments go both ways. For example, if aging is accumulation of damage and not programmed, then why don't we see lucky people who live 5 times longer. Also how come the patterns of aging are so similar between individuals and even between different species (wrinkly skin, grey hair, fragile bones).
How do you propose someone would "luck out of" the wear and tear your body undergoes just to function? It's accumulation of damage to the very systems that work to prevent and repair damage, leading all organs to accumulate the damage they would have hidden by fast repair in "youth". It's unavoidable and accelerating by definition, and that reflects what we observe in aging.
The "patterns of aging" you describe are, again, definitionally just what happens when the same organs built and functioning the same way across species undergo their respective failure modes. It makes more sense for all skins to exhibit the same signs of aging if they're all just wearing out the way "skin" does, rather than being attacked by species-specific "age limiter" processes artificially enforcing lifespan limits. Why would something like skin even need to decay at all, when it's basically unrelated to aging-related death?
But aren't there a lot of processes that could drive accumulated damage that are hard to avoid (so you can't realistically get lucky)? E.g. if metabolic processes produce harmful products in low quantities that build up ... How would you possibly survive many decades without doing at least a certain amount of metabolizing food etc?
Think this is a statistical thing. Your body is made of lots of cells. But one exceptional one wouldn’t outlive the whole system’s failure. You’d need a hell of a lot of cells to survive that long.
Height is controlled by genes too and you don't get people shorter than 0.5 m or taller than 3 m
True, but one guy was 272 cm (8 ft 11 in) tall:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_people
And another was 76cm high:
Because those will need 5x more time to become adults.
Is there convincing evidence for group-level selection in evolution at all? I read enough Dawkins back in the day to be skeptical of such claims.
Depends what you mean by "group-level". A large part of Dawkins was pointing out that many of your individual genes had a very large stake in wanting your nieces and nephews to survive, as there was a high probability those genes were also present in the niece and nephew.
Which is actually a pretty good reason for something like menopause to get programmed in. A proto-human capable of getting pregnant into her 60s would produce more offspring, but if accumulated damage meant they (and she) rarely survived the pregnancy, that could be less beneficial to the family group (including numerous relatives other than direct descendants) on average than having her switch the capability off and live another generation (but not many more generations, because then there's a lot of infertile people competing for food, and your tribe only needs so much accumulated wisdom)
Intuitively it seems like a logical selection to happen though. One of the reasons why all of the hierarchies have evolved, why some are leaders, why some are inventor minded, and why most people are like most people.
Yes, it's widely accepted that you have variable proportions of individual vs group level selection depending on circumstances.
This would be an optimistic scenario and introduce a possibility for the "scheduled gene program" to be controlled or turned off. The current thinking in the field seems to favour the idea that aging is a complex combination of programmed changes, stochastic damage, as well as various adaptations to help cope with the damage.
Menopause is also an obvious planned partial shutdown (vs males who can reproduce when they're 80) and we're no closer to "curing" it, turning it off.
I don't think it makes perfect sense. For one, group selection isn't widely accepted by evolutionists.
Yes it is: "Group selection, which was once widely rejected as a significant evolutionary force, is now accepted by all who seriously study the subject." (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3110649/)
Life expectancy much longer than 40 is a modern thing for humans though. So where would the over 40s schedule have come from? Or do you mean the schedule basically says: once you hit 50 start falling apart?
No, it’s not a modern thing, you’re conflating average life expectancy at birth with how long people lived in general.
> Back in 1994 a study looked at every man entered into the Oxford Classical Dictionary who lived in ancient Greece or Rome. Their ages of death were compared to men listed in the more recent Chambers Biographical Dictionary. Of 397 ancients in total, 99 died violently by murder, suicide or in battle. Of the remaining 298, those born before 100BC lived to a median age of 72 years. Those born after 100BC lived to a median age of 66. (The authors speculate that the prevalence of dangerous lead plumbing may have led to this apparent shortening of life).
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...
Just one source
Wouldn't those still be modern humans? Have we undergone significant evolution since then? I would think the earliest relevant comparison would be much earlier.
Life expectancy in the past was heavily depressed by high child and maternal mortality. For those who survived into adulthood (say, 20), dying in one's 30s or 40s was not the norm. Most lived into at least their 50s, and many reached their 60s or beyond. Hard labor and disease made very old age rarer than today, but old age itself is not a modern phenomenon. Skeletal remains and records confirm its presence throughout history.
Not even 20s. Childhood mortality by five was once near 50%
The average life expectancy was low because of more deaths during childhood and wars. But the natural lifespan was more or less the same as it is today. For example, take a look at famous philosophers or politicians from Ancient Greece. Majority of them lived to about 70-80 years of age.
Good point. I realize that I was thinking of average life expectancy and that was biased by high child mortality until recently
People keep repeating this, but my understanding is that low overall life expectancies historically were substantially about high infant mortality. If you made it out of childhood, your chances of living to be "old" were decent. It's not that the program used to say to start decaying at 40, it's that other exogenous forces would stop a lot of people from getting to that part of the program.
Life expectancy was heavily skewed by under 5 mortality rate. There were a lot of people living to old age.
I felt incredibly old from ~36 - 42. Then I started seriously working out, took control of my diet (it had very much always controlled me) and started aggressively pursuing a "better living through chemistry" approach to life.
I feel 25 years younger now. My BP and cholesterol are under control and I roll out of bed actually feeling rested (probably due to not snoring anymore).
I started weight training at about age 54. I had never done any form of regular exercise in my life. Attempts here and there, but nothing ever stuck for very long. I am stronger now than I ever have been.
Same here. Started lifting weights around the same age. I am stronger than I have ever been.
I also run and so far I am able to keep improving my 10K results over the last decade. Probably these aren't my best ever but there is no barrier that I can feel other than putting in the training volume.
Its incredible isn't it? There is almost no point at which one just has to give up and say "Well I guess this is my life now". The body always responds positively to exercise and weight lifting.
Same here, though I think I started a bit younger. Now 58 and in the best shape of my life! The trainer who set up my program asked what my fitness goals were, and I said “I just want to be able to stand up from a chair when I’m 90”. He said, “we can do that”.
I weight trained until having a toddler and a new house at 50. 3 months later and I get up from a chair like I'm 75 and all my joints hurt.
Well start weight training again!
Your toddler needs healthy parents.
I’ve been athletic most of my life. At 42 I feel much older than at 32. Chronic injuries add up! Be careful out there everybody
Have you happened upon Keith Barr’s work on tendon repair? Up to a few years ago tendon injuries were thought to be mostly unfixable (you could strengthen what was left of an injured tendon at best) but Barr’s work is proving otherwise. And using a very low risk isometric exercise protocol.
It won’t make you feel 32 again but it might help you get rid of a lot of lingering aches and pains.
How good! Have you tried isometrics at ~30-50% of maximum exhertion instead of stretching? Seems to be about the right dose to promote tendon repair. 3 months to a year will do ya.
(Full protocol if you haven’t seen it is a ~30 second isometric repeated 4 to 5 times, twice per day)
Edit: I’ve not seen any other treatment published w/ peer review etc etc that demonstrates actual tendon repair. If anyone has seen others I’d love to read through the literature.
Glad you found some relief. But take note everyone! Running is probably not that good for you if you plan to live longer than average-lifespan-in-the-past! Cycling, swimming, walking are all low on joint damage. Running isn't.
Had a series of injuries from about 25-35, then changed things up due to concerns about aging. Lighter weights, actually following proper training plans/shoes for running, etc. No injuries since and I'm about to hit 50. Aside from raw strength, don't think I feel any different now than at my athletic peak in my early 20s.
Having lived in San Diego most of my life, I've routinely met people in their 60s doing Ironmans. When you're around that enough, it's clear the difference is training smart than simply training hard.
The loss of twitch/fast muscle makes it feel much different for me. Even if I work out and have strength, it's not to same kind of strength I had at 30 even if it's the same/higher weight amounts.
If you don't already make sure to include optimizing for twitch/fast muscle development. I've noticed it's the hardest loss to overcome for me in my 50s.
I had a similar experience. It really felt like my body became way more sensitive to my diet in my 40s.
I feel great when I eat clean.
I think there's a bunch of anecdata telling that once you start going with a healthier diet you tend to react strongly to eating less healthy food or alcohol.
How did you get the snoring under control?
I lost 30lbs. Gone, I sleep like a baby and more importantly so does my wife
Can you give more details about what you did?
First thing I did was just get out of the house and go to the gym. I work remotely, it became a trap where I spent all my free time sitting in front of the computer. Prioritizing at least an hour a day 5x a week was huge. I just made the time.
I did that for about 2 years with good results. I was 240lbs. I looked big at 6’1 but had lots of fat. I snored all night long, affecting my wife’s sleep as well. About 1 year in I got on trt. Huge changes as far as energy levels, sex drive and confidence. Numbers soared at the gym but I was still 240lbs. Still stress eating after 8pm, easily 1200 calories in sugar a night.
In January I got on Glp-1 and am now 209lbs at 46 years old with a 405lb bench. I just stopped eating after 6pm on it. Weight came pouring off. I never experienced any of the side effects people mention. I can eat a whole large pizza if I want without issues, i just don’t.
I’ve since upped the testosterone im on so one can fairly say im on steroids (i am) plus I am an aggressive user of various peptides. I get my blood work done at regular intervals and feel good.
I just decided to take control of my body and do what works for me and not worry about what the medical establishment tells me to do but to do it with proper insight via regular blood tests.
Just got back from a family vacation and after the pool one day my wife asked if I knew that everyone stared at me when I walk past. Felt good. Funny thing is that at 6’1, 209lbs im not that big, im just lean whereas most people are overweight.
I don’t recommend my regime to anyone i just recommend throwing away preconceived notions of what you can and shouldn’t do and to get after being the you that you are proud of.
All the recent pop sci I've read is the accelerated aging periods in one's life during our 40s and 60s.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/08/massive-biomo...
*aging
“Ageing” is in the original title and is also correct.
Mine started late-thirties. Stomach doesn't handle spices as it used to. Any bravery at dinner time means poor sleep and tiredness for a day or two. Bumps/strained things take days to stop hurting.
No harm in adding probiotics to your daily diet. Kefir, Kombucha, Kimchi are a few.
Ugh, I can feel it!
Wait until you get long-covid, it really stomps on the aging accelerator