Newsflash: marketeers have realised Boomers are getting old

Ageing: gracefully or otherwise?

If I had known how much time a book called Outlive was going to take from my one, wild life, I would never have started it. But to buy back precious time, I will summarise it, so you don’t waste yours.

This book on longevity confirms that the most status you can have late in life is a strong, healthy body that will outperform the bodies of all your mates and carry you through to a very late appointment with the undertaker.

Status, you say? Yes, indeed because while we all aspire to a healthy long life, the attitudes that have developed around this subject are so competitive and, in a subtextual way, judgmental that it ends up being all about “my body is going to last better than yours”.

You might see them cycling at dawn or towelling down after a swim or greeting the sun on a yoga mat but if you stop for a piccolo latte, they will admit they’re on a mission to beat ageing because growing old is not on their agenda.

Unsurprisingly, the most avid competitors in anti-ageing are old internet guys (I don’t think they describe themselves quite that way). In start-ups like the Methuselah Foundation, Altos Labs and a pop-up city called Zuzalu in Montenegro, retired tech billionaires are in a huddle having thought showers about their quest/greed for more life.

Some don’t even want to admit that their life will only be one, wild life. Tech guy Bryan Johnson reckons he’s ageing backwards. “I was 45, I’m now 18” says the self-described professional rejuvenation athlete, who sometimes raids his son’s blood for a pick-me-up.

Apart from the institutes, drug trials and YouTube performances, there are books. I won’t bore you with the titles of all of them – Lifespan, The Blue Zones, Live Younger Longer, Young Forever, How Not to Age, blah, blah. But Peter Attia, our author of Outlive, beats them all because his book is paired with a recipe book, a workbook, a biography of the ­author and a ­summary.

I think someone just discovered the boomers are getting old. And the marketers are betting that they won’t do the ageing business like their parents. None of this go gently into the night. No way are they swapping the fitness monitor for a personal alarm pendant and they’re not going near a retirement village even if it has a pool, yoga studio and tennis court.

While we don’t want to rain on parades of athletic endeavours – after all, Medicare will thank them for it – we should feel grateful that the rejuvenation athletes didn’t convince WHO to agree that ageing is a disease. Just last year, WHO resisted the entreaties that would have sparked a land grab for new drugs for the disease of being old. I wonder if WHO also thought about the nastiness of declaring someone diseased just because they got old.

Perhaps they were worried about this generation sucking the lifeforce out of younger ones. Maybe they’re just old fogeys – oops.

I did say I was going to summarise the book. Exercise, more than you want to. Eat real food, probably less than you want to. Sleep well, not too much, not too little. Practise good mental health, good luck with that. Maintain a healthy bank balance because this regime costs a lot.

I might add a few of my own, free of charge. Choose your parents well, choose the country you were born into, beware the bus coming around the corner and keep your friendships alive … and that means not boring them to death with your health stats.

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