My longevity philosophy
I recently was lucky enough to have a great chat with the awesome Abigail Hannah from the Aotearoa adventures podcast.
It was a fun conversation about my experience of the epic NZ outdoors and community I have been lucky enough to be a part of for the past 10 years.
At the end of this chat, we finished briefly on my longevity philosophy. This is something I regularly think about and try to base my decisions around, so I thought I’d share it here. It goes like this:
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Time is relative. This makes longevity more than just reaching an arbitrary number. The way to increase your relative longevity is to experience new things, places, people, ideas, thoughts.
Consider a standard morning commute that you do 5 days a week. You flip into autopilot and when thinking back on that time it is something that is not memorable and feels like it passed in a blink of an eye. Compare this to an adventure in a new location with a new experience, using your body to explore and soak in a unique environment or adventure. The time passes slower when your mind is interacting with all these brand new stimuli, laying down many more neuronal connections in your brain. When you think back on this novel adventure, it feels full, vibrant, detailed and time-filled. You can tell a complete story about the details, feelings and thoughts associated with the experience.
Feeling emotions adds to this time-dilation. Think back to episodes in your life associated with a strong emotion and you realise again that these have more clarity and content than those lacking these emotions. Being mindful of your experiences and feelings day-to-day and allowing yourself to take moments to acknowledge your emotions and activities leads to longevity.
When you reach old age, your new experiences make for a life full of time!
…even better, time doing the things you love :)
If you want to hear the whole chat: you can find it on Spotify, or any podcast provider. I can also highly recommend the brilliant back catalogue of previous episodes.
https://abigailhannah.nz/podcast
