Outlive

This is absolutely unrelated to the text of the book, but the book-as-object here is kind of infuriating. It's a very weird size! The book is almost sized like every other nonfiction self-help hardback, except it's about inch or two wider. The page width is ridiculous, which means the line length is a little uncomfortable, and even just opening the book and holding a spread open feels like I'm setting out a picnic blanket.

I'm sure the publishers and designers had a good reason for all this, but I would LOVE to read the email threads where they hashed this out.

Noted on May 2, 2024

Another anecdata I'll be thinking about for years: most car accident deaths aren't highways - they're getting T-boned in an intersection, on the driver's side. The light turns green, you enter the intersection, you get crushed by a truck running the red light coming from your left side.

And while highway accidents are multivariate and complicated - entering an intersection is not. You can just... LOOK. Is somebody hauling ass to make it through the red? Don't pull in front of them.

Noted on April 25, 2024

A really notable thing for me: you can't just think of what you want to do when you're 80 and train for it linearly. Like, if I want to be able to go for a 2 mile walk when I'm 80, I can't just do 2 miles when I'm 40 and keep it up for forty more years. You'll decline in predictable ways as you age, like losing some % muscle mass per decade, etc. So if I want to do X at 80, I need to be doing 5X at 40. Those aren't real numbers, of course, but that's the idea.

Noted on April 25, 2024

The core idea is: you want to live longer, and you want to be healthy enough to enjoy your later years. Modern medicine is all about treating diseases, and so while it can prop you up when you get old and sick, it's not great at prevention. And the prevention that it DOES offer is really sub-par; you don't want to be an average 'normative' old American. You want to be a healthy, lively, old American.

Attia starts with the Charlie Munger approach: tell me where I will die, and then I won't go there. If you're like most Americans, you will die of: A. Cardiovascular trouble (your heart goes bad) B. metabolic disfunction (you mistreat your liver/kidneys/pancreas, eg diabetes) C. Cancer, D. Cognitive Decline. There is stuff we can do when we're middle-aged to stave these four horsemen off!

Noted on April 25, 2024

Two close friends recommended this in the same week; I may have led them to it by discussing my recent (first!) heart scan. While it suffers from a severe case of Airport Bookstore, it's not terminal - there's really a lot of clear argument here about how to plan and prepare for getting old, and I'm right smack in the target demo for this.

Noted on April 25, 2024