Some of my earliest memories are of summers with my grandparents, in New Delhi. I spent long, scorching months drinking lassi, playing cricket, and helping my grandparents find ripe mangoes at roadside markets. Then I’d return to the U.S., my English rusty from disuse, and go months or years without seeing them. At some point, my India trips started to feel like snapshots of loss. My grandfathers died suddenly, probably of heart attacks. My Biji, my father’s mother, fell and broke her hip in her seventies, and she spent her last years moving back and forth between her bed and her couch. My Nani, my mother’s mother, developed excruciating arthritis in both knees; in order for her to leave her fifth-floor walkup, my uncle practically had to carry her down the stairs. I have always wondered whether their fading vitality—the way their worlds contracted and their possibilities vanished—was an inevitability of aging or something that could have been averted.
Many of us have come to expect that our bodies and minds will deteriorate in our final years—that we may die feeble, either dependent or alone. Paradoxically, this outcome is a kind of success. For most of history, humans didn’t live long enough to confront the ailments of old age. In 1900, a baby born in the U.S. could expect to live just forty-seven years, and one in five died before the age of ten. But twentieth-century victories against infectious diseases—in the form of sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccines—dramatically extended life spans, and today the average newborn lives to around seventy-seven. Lately, though, progress has slowed. In the past six decades, medicine has added about seven years to the average life span—less by saving young lives than by extending old ones, and often in states of ill health. In many cases, we’re prolonging the time it takes to die.
A growing number of celebrity doctors, futurists, and so-called biohackers now argue that it doesn’t have to be this way. There are, by some estimates, hundreds of specialized “longevity clinics”—including some that charge six-figure annual fees—which claim to offer more of the world’s most valuable commodity: years of healthy life. Perhaps the most prominent longevity evangelist is Peter Attia, the author, with Bill Gifford, of the best-selling book “Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity.” Through his telemedicine practice in Austin, Texas, for an undisclosed price, Attia offers health advice, diagnostic tests, exercise protocols, and supplements to a wealthy and exclusive clientele. He also interviews an eclectic mix of scientists, doctors, and entrepreneurs for a popular podcast, “The Drive.” Oprah has interviewed him; Hugh Jackman and Gwyneth Paltrow follow his regimens.
Attia graduated from medical school and trained to be a surgeon, but grew disillusioned during residency and dropped out. He became a consultant for McKinsey instead, and then worked for an energy company. Finally, in his mid-thirties, a fixation with his own health brought him back to medicine. As a new father, he learned that he was prediabetic, and he reflected on men in his family who’d died early, of heart disease. In his book, he describes his former physique as “sausage-like”; on a beach one day, his wife told him, “Peter, I think you should work on being a little less not thin.” Soon, he was “down the rabbit hole of complete physical optimization.”
Attia, now fifty-one, has become convinced that science, technology, and targeted work can solve a uniquely modern problem: the “marginal decade” at the end of our lives, when medicine keeps us alive but our independence and capacities bleed away. It’s a scandal, in his view, that our life span has grown so much more than our health span. Many of Attia’s prescriptions are obvious: work out, eat healthily, sleep well, nurture relationships. (The Harvard Study of Adult Development has found, in eight decades, that human connections may be the single most critical determinant of long-term happiness and health.) But Attia often extrapolates from scientific data to offer jarringly intense and specific advice. Want to be able to lift a grandchild when you’re eighty? Goblet squat fifty-five pounds when you’re forty. Hope to lift yourself off the floor unassisted in old age? Try “toe yoga.” Attia notes that each decade after thirty we lose a meaningful amount of muscle mass and cardiovascular fitness. If we wish to slow that decline, and to complete a “Centenarian Decathlon” of important late-in-life activities—carry groceries, climb stairs, have sex—we need to become “athletes of life.”
The increasing obsession with longevity has inspired a backlash. Many in the life-extension movement are quacks or hacks who peddle pills, potions, and false promises; longevity skeptics tend to see the loss of our capacities as something to accept, not avoid. Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and a health-policy professor at the University of Pennsylvania, derides Attia as an “American immortal” who overcomplicates straightforward advice. “The idea that you’re going to get another healthy decade of life just by doing the things he says is hocus-pocus,” Emanuel, who served as a special adviser to the Obama Administration, told me. “No one’s got that evidence.” Half an hour of daily exercise clearly improves and extends lives, but it’s hard to prove that Attia’s intensive regimens are much more beneficial. By incessantly preparing for the future, the skeptics say, we mistake a long life for a worthwhile one.
On a recent afternoon, I chased my three-year-old daughter around the playground for an hour. When we returned home, she spread a jigsaw puzzle out on the floor and looked up expectantly. I liked the idea of sitting still, but my knees hurt and my back was tense. I had to transfer the puzzle to a grownup table and sit my daughter in a booster seat. She didn’t seem to mind, but I remember that day as the first time that my physical limits noticeably constrained what we could do together. Longevity has become a concrete problem, just as it was for my grandparents: I wake up with aches in long-ignored joints and tendons; I calculate, with dismay, the age I’ll be when my children graduate from college or start their own families. One day, we’re going to die. What should that mean for how we live today?
In 1980, James Fries, a Stanford rheumatologist, predicted in The New England Journal of Medicine that better medicines and behaviors would soon enable a “compression of morbidity,” which would delay disease and debility until the very end of our lives. In the late nineties, Fries supported his hypothesis by publishing a decades-long study. University of Pennsylvania graduates who, in their forties, exercised more, weighed less, and didn’t smoke much were half as likely as others to suffer a significant disability in their seventies; they seemed to postpone the onset of disability by more than five years. But the alumni of an élite college may not have been representative. Fries died of end-stage dementia in 2021, at the age of eighty-three, and his broader prediction never seemed to come true. If anything, longer lives now appear to include more difficult years. The “compression of morbidity may be as illusory as immortality,” two demographers, Eileen Crimmins and Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez, wrote in 2010. According to the World Health Organization, the average American can expect just one healthy birthday after the age of sixty-five. (Health spans are greater in countries such as Switzerland, Japan, Panama, Turkey, and Sri Lanka.)
Earlier this year, I flew to Austin to hear Attia’s thoughts about how to change that. When my Uber pulled into his driveway, he was finishing his morning workout, so an assistant led me inside, where I spent a few moments looking at Formula 1 paraphernalia. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked lush hills, and a herd of life-size elk and deer models stood in the sun. I would soon learn that they served as targets for archery practice.
Attia has a shaved head, a sharp nose, and a stubbled chin, which make him look like a mix of Stanley Tucci and Jeff Bezos. When he appeared, he was wearing a fitted T-shirt that emphasized his biceps. He led me to his kitchen, where he offered me coffee and mixed a brightly colored concoction for himself. “I always try to get some protein in the morning,” he said. He eats as many as six sticks of venison jerky a day.
When I asked Attia about the longevity movement, he bristled. The term “just smells of snake oil,” he said. “Most of what I see out there is what I think of as sci-fi longevity. We’re going to live to be two hundred, and death is going to become irrelevant.” He handed me my coffee. “The way I talk about it is in a very low-tech way.” Attia has said that he wouldn’t want to live forever, even if he could, and he seems wary of a stereotype of longevity doctors. At parties, he sometimes pretends he’s a race-car driver or a shepherd. “I thought I was going to get skewered for writing ‘Outlive,’” he told me. “I thought doctors were going to say, ‘This guy is a grifter. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’” Some do say that—but others have become his followers.
Like a consultant, Attia often explains himself using frameworks. In the time of Hippocrates, he said, there was Medicine 1.0, a pre-modern system of diagnosis and treatment based on observation, anecdote, and guesswork. In the twentieth century, Medicine 2.0 deployed the randomized controlled trial to produce scientific marvels such as dialysis, organ transplants, and antiviral drugs. But Attia also sees Medicine 2.0, arguably the type of medicine that I practice, as passive. It often acts after the onset of damage—debilitating arthritis, a broken hip—instead of aggressively and proactively warding off illness and injury. Attia preaches Medicine 3.0.
We sat down at a sort of command center in his home office. On a large monitor, Attia pulled up a patient’s “longevity risk assessment”—his team’s calculation of threats to life and limb, ranked by relative importance both now and in the future. Although Attia describes his approach as low-tech, his patients receive dozens of tests, some of them outside the medical mainstream: full-body MRIs, body-fat-composition scans, DNA analyses. He often screens for Alzheimer’s risk, something that many doctors advise against, in part because patients can’t do much about a distressing result. (While filming an episode of the longevity docuseries “Limitless,” Chris Hemsworth, the host, learned from Attia that he has a gene associated with a roughly eight-hundred-per-cent increase in Alzheimer’s risk; afterward, Hemsworth took time off from acting.)
The assessment on Attia’s monitor was for a middle-aged patient who had been given a diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder, and had also undergone several surgeries. Running down the left side of a chart was a list of conditions, starting with the ones that posed the greatest risk: emotional-health problems and physical injury. The right side showed percentages—the guesstimated chance that each condition would become an issue in the future. Cancer and neurodegenerative disease were small risks now, but they ballooned into dominant hazards later in life. “It’s more art than science,” Attia told me. “There’s no A.I. that’s ever going to be able to spit out these numbers. It requires clinical judgment.”
