This will probably kill you (not clickbait)

5 years ago I was certain I'd cracked the longevity code. Bulletproof coffee. Nootropics. Friends thought I'd lost it while I condescendingly explained mitochondria to them.

Then Goldman et al. (2023) dropped a review: zero evidence that Bulletproof coffee does anything beneficial. But 230 calories and 84% saturated fat per cup. So for 8 years I was drinking a fat bomb while genuinely believing it was making me smarter.

That's not even the main problem.

The average European lives ~82 years (Eurostat, 2024). But "living" and "living well" are not the same thing. After 60, most people's health falls below 50% of peak. The last 15-20 years aren't really living. They're enduring. Every year brings a new thing you can no longer do.

There's a concept called healthspan: not just how long you're alive, but how many of those years you're actually functional, with no chronic limitations, a clear mind, still doing what you love. I spent 8 years trying to hack lifespan while completely ignoring healthspan.

With ~80% probability, if you don't smoke and skip extreme sports, you'll be killed by one of the four horsemen: cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegeneration, or metabolic syndrome. In the US in 2024, just the first two killed 1.3 million people (CDC).

The logic is simple: you can't avoid the horsemen, but you can delay them significantly. What most people don't realize is that these diseases start developing 10-30 years before the first symptom. Atherosclerosis doesn't appear at 60 — it accumulates from 30. Medicine can slow these processes, but it can't reverse them. By the time symptoms show up, you're already in a late stage.

Extra Life has a sobering chart: strip out infectious disease deaths (antibiotics, hygiene), and mortality has barely budged in 100 years. The same things that killed people in the 1920s are still killing us.

TL;DR

If you do one thing after reading this: get bloodwork done. What gets measured gets managed.

Which tests specifically? Next post.

Stay tuned 🧬🧬🧬