In the old days, the search for immortality was cool. It involved something excitingly neo-colonial, like chartering a boat and going places where you weren’t invited, i.e., ethnobotany.
These days, it’s just reading books and podcasts. Borrring.
Anyway, obviously I’m still doing it; it’s not like your body makes it to 120 all by itself, especially when you were raised in the 1980s and all your food was neon for a stretch.
Unfortunately, the path to longevity is totally uncomfortable, and robs your days of the qualities that made you want to live forever in the first place.
Case in point: Longevity Blueprint, a program by Ben Greenfield offered through Vishen Lakhiani’s MindValley. According to Ben Greenfield, in order to do the bare minimum and yet live forever, one must take a shower in which you alternate the nice, friendly, warm-to-hot water you know and love with a bitter and angry frigid stint. In 10-to-30 second ratios. No, the warm part isn’t the longer time amount. And you have to do that ten times per shower.
Goodbye, enjoyable showering!
What was once a pleasant how-do-you-do nod to my overly comfortable Western plumbing situation becomes a northeast North American winterland horrorshow. But now that I know this is the secret to living forever in a body that won’t break a hip, every time I don’t shower this way it’s like an invitation to the reaper: Please, take me; I refused to do the one thing that was going to save my life.
Oh, but it’s not one thing, folks, of course not. Ah ha ha no NO. It’s a series of a heptillion things: the way you shower, the way you eat (you’re not supposed to be eating, idiot, you’re supposed to be fasting), the way you sleep, the way you do some other dumb thing. Oh; here’s another thing we’re all doing wrong: breathing.
This Dutch lunatic, who obviously is also all-in on the freezing, figured out how to breathe, so now I need to sign up for this ten week course so I can stop suffocating my cells, which causes: you guessed it, aging and dying like a loser.
This all begs the question, why am I trying to live so long if it just involves starving and freezing? Good question, intelligent reader. Also, what the hell do tech bros know about survival? It’s cool that you made a gajillion dollars off the internet or whatever, and figured out how to work for only four hours a year, but when they interview anybody who makes it past 100 or 110 they usually say something like, I ate bacon and smoked a cigarette a day, or, I never miss my Coors Light.
I’ll be damned if I’m gonna drink Coors Light. But if it’s between that, and learning how to breathe from a guy sitting in ice cube water, well…
