Health and Well-being - Part 1 - Setting the Frame
"Healthy habits look unhealthy to unhealthy people." - Ed Latimore
[NB: The Health and Well-being series of articles are reworked and updated from a similar series that first appeared on The Stoic Agilist. My goal for this series of articles is to serve as an example of how anyone might go about improving and sustaining their health and well-being.]
Airline Safety Announcement
"In the unlikely event of a loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the compartment above your seat. To start the flow of oxygen, pull the mask toward you until the tubing is fully extended. Place the mask over your nose and mouth, secure it with the elastic strap, and breathe normally. Ensure your own mask is on before assisting others."
Like any good sage, the Airline Flight Attendant guru has hidden their wisdom within sound practical instruction: Know how to work the equipment and be sure you're taking care of yourself first so that you can take care of others. Another weathered sage, after you spend days struggling to reach his mountain-top hermitage, might say it this way: "Do not serve people from your cup. Serve them from the saucer that catches the overflow around your cup."
When we are young there is much we take for granted about our health. Even though I worked in numerous nursing homes to pay for undergraduate college, I can still look back and recognize an abundance of attitudes and beliefs with which I shrouded myself from the fact that my health would deteriorate as I got older. I was clueless about how hard Fate would test me and how adverse the impact would be on my health. While hindsight has improved my capabilities for making better decisions, my past actions were more or less conscious decisions during difficult times to pour my cup down to three quarters empty in the service of my partner's health. It was a Hobson's choice and it was 16 years after her death before I gave serious attention to refilling my physical health cup to it's full capacity.
"In this way you must understand how laughable it is to say, Tell me what to do!' What advice could I possibly give? No, a far better request is, Train my mind to adapt to any circumstance.' . . . In this way, if circumstances take you off script . . . you won't be desperate for a new prompting."
Epictetus, Discourses, 2.2.20b1; 24b25a
Having grown much older now, I can see my skills and physical strength gradually waning. I can no longer help others on a whim or without concern for my own health and well-being. I've had to reassess my actions in light of diminished physical capabilities from when I was in my prime. Since my goal is to live a healthspan that matches my lifespan, whatever that duration may be, the conclusion is that the day is coming when I'll best serve others by being as self-reliant as possible until the very end. To cling to breath and a beat, sucking up enormous resources, strikes me as neither dignified or peaceful.
As a rule, I'm more inclined to be positive and optimistic. But I don't always follow the rules. Particularly my own. Nonetheless, I work at it constantly. Perhaps the biggest part of my daily living that pulls on this desire to be positive and optimistic is how society as a whole will treat me as I age. My time spent working in nursing homes have left a clear and acute picture of what elder care can look like for people without family, the means, or both to provide quality and dignified care during the winter of their lives.
Family
Recent decades have eroded the traditional sense of family as a foundational unit of society. Rather than us figuring out how to support the family unit, we seem to have gone quite the opposite direction. Emblematic of this shift in thinking can be found in the unapologetic comments made by teacher Melissa Harris-Perry. She sees the need to "break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities."
The roots of this cultural shift probably go back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the migration of people from rural to urban life. It's a shift that has accelerated over the years and has only recently begun to capture the attention of a significant percentage of the population. Falling birth rates, obsessions with identity and victim status, strongly held beliefs about entitlement, nanny-statism and hyper regulation - these and many, many more aberrant manifestations are symptomatic of an unhealthy society.
This shift is leaving more and more of us without a family structure to help support us. In 2021, 12% of US adults reported having no close friends, up from 3% reported in 1990[1],[2]. Rather than a family member, people increasingly rely on Uber or Lyft for transportation to and from outpatient surgery.
Thankfully, I'm not among the 3%ers. Yet I'm estranged from all but one of my siblings. There are eight of us. My sister and I bring the "strange" to the party. But that all depends on one's point of view. The two of us confronted our father, dealt with the adverse and abusive family we grew up in, and moved on. The others have buried it under variously thick layers of motivated reasoning, religion, and self-righteous judgement. As for children of my own, relying on or burdening them is moot. I have no children. My first wife's cancer put an end to that possibility and the care she needed during her ten year battle nearly erased the financial means I had to provide for myself. Other then my present wife, I have no immediate and local family to rely on when I can no longer take care of basic needs.
I'm under no illusion that my story is at all unique or special. When compared to many people I've come to know over the years, it isn't even especially bad. But like comparing scars, there's little value in comparing degrees of suffering unless you define yourself by where you're stuck. I'm much more interested in the stories of other people if they include the cool bits about how they overcame their troubles. To the extent I share my story, I promise to move on as quickly as possible to the cool bits with solutions and resolutions.
Inconvenient Facts
With a minimalist lifestyle and hard work, I've since rebuilt my financial resources. Even so, I'm all to aware how quickly those resources can be depleted, either unexpectedly (accidents, for example) or by known risks (growing old or the possibility of theft.) So I continually scan for the ways I can prevent or prepare for the known risks. My scientific/technical background has put me in a good position to insure a digital life that is as secure as I can make it. When I was laid off from work and turned 60 a few years ago, the unexpected flood of "free" time, however, brought forward the need to apply the same focus and diligence toward developing self-reliance with my physical health and emotional well-being.
I had arrived at an age where many of my more clueless peers have donned a stunned countenance because they could no longer deny the evidence that their bodies had begun to betray them in ways they didn't think possible. The assumption that loosing the extra 30 pounds they've been carrying for as many years would be as easy when they are 60 as it might have been when they were 20 makes a tremendous thud when it lands on the cold, hard floor of facts, GLP-1's notwithstanding. It isn't just the weight. It's everything else the biological system has had to deal with over time. GLP-1's don't clear clogged arteries, repair damaged joints, reverse osteoporosis, or counter the effects of neurodegeneration. With the aging human body, things fail slowly and then all the sudden.
Over the past five or six years, what had been an intellectual understanding in my youth has become more of a direct experience to my 60 year old self. Beyond the aches and pains that have become more persistent, there were other signals telling me that I had crossed into a phase of life where the buffers to injury and systemic imbalance are less robust and the margins for recovery are thinner. The change almost seemed sudden. Not in terms of days or weeks, but over months across the last several years.
Science affirms my observations. Recent research[3],[4] claims to have identified three major shifts in our biochemical health. The first occurs in our mid-40's, the second in our early 60's, and the third as we approach 80.
“Most people think of aging as occurring gradually, constantly, and linearly,” senior study author Michael Snyder, PhD, a professor of genetics and director of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford University, told Health.
But “we’re not just changing gradually over time; there are some really dramatic changes,” Snyder said in a news release. “It turns out the mid-40s is a time of dramatic change, as is the early 60s. And that’s true no matter what class of molecules you look at.”[5]
The work from researchers found that...
"…participants clustered into four groups: the under-34s, those aged 34 to 60, people aged 61 to 78 and the over-78s. Within each group, the protein profiles were very similar, but at the ages of 34, 60 and 78, they suddenly changed, with levels of some proteins rising dramatically while others plummeted. What’s more, some of the proteins that became enriched in the older age groups were already known to be associated with cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s."[6]
My intuition was telling me my physical health had become a clear and present issue. Not hole-in-the-hull or dead-in-the-water trouble, but listing hard to port trouble. For the past decade I knew I was sailing close to the wind while working to avoid crossing the Type 2 diabetic (T2D) line. A set of comprehensive blood tests in May of '23 revealed the line had been crossed. Working the strategy and tactic sails that had kept me in pre-diabetic waters for so long were no longer sufficient. Fortunately, it has been demonstrated that a T2D diagnosis can be reversed. This didn't stop me from doubling down on and staying with my familiar strategy and tactics for another year. The slight improvement wasn't encouraging.
The Work Begins...
It was past time to I accept that my current strategy and tactics were completely broken.
In the Spring of '24 I decided to make understanding the changes I was experiencing my new full-time job and set out to complete a list of medical test aimed at a better understanding of the current state and possible future risks. My research lead me to signing up for Dr. Peter Attia's Early Medical program. It took two months of daily effort to work through all 12 modules of the Early Medical program and several more months to work through the supplemental content. In hindsight, it seemed I'd merely skimmed the material. There are mountains of information organized within a set of frameworks defined by Dr. Attia. So I went through the entire program a second time.
Much of the information is biochemical and as such has reignited my interest in biochemistry. The program has challenged me to leverage every ounce of what I learned for my undergraduate degrees in biochemistry and cell biology. The depth and breadth of what's been discovered in the past forty years is truly amazing. The program also presents considerable anatomical and physiological information essential for understanding the modules on exercise. Other broad areas of inquiry and evaluation include sleep, nutrition, medications and supplements, and emotional health.
I was drawn to the Early Medical program after listening to Dr. Attia's podcasts for the past several years. I greatly appreciate Dr. Attia's thorough and pragmatic approach to exploring the science around two pillars of his approach to health and longevity, which he refers to as lifespan (how long you live) and healthspan (how well you live, your quality of life.) What good is living to 100 if the last thirty years are spent hobbled by illness and propped up by machines and medication? Better to take charge of your health now and coordinate healthspan with lifespan so that your marginal decade is as healthy as it is long. It's a choice. I'd rather live a healthy life for the next twenty years and die at 80 than live crippled by numerous maladies for thirty years and die at 90.
The plan for this series of articles is to chronicle my journey toward better and more resilient health while acquiring the knowledge I need to remain self-reliant with respect to my overall health and well-being. I'm not sure how relevant the perspective and experiences relayed in this series of articles may be to someone in their 20's or 30's except as a trail of cautionary tales, a warning to them of what's to come should they be fortunate enough to live into their 70's and 80's.
This journey was more or less organized around the Early Medical program, certainly at the beginning. However, as I'll cover in the next part, the overarching objective for this series of articles is to first identify my specific phenotype for health and then apply that to the development of robust stratagies and tactics for maintaining my health. To that end my goal is for this series of articles to serve as an example of how anyone might go about working out their own phenotype, strategies, and tactics for health and well-being.
Disclaimer
The author is not a licensed practitioner of medicine or psychotherapy and nothing presented on this website claims or should be construed to provide medical or psychotherapeutic advice. This series of article is presented as a personal reflection by the author on work he's done to improve his health and as such is relevant to the author and no one else. The author makes no recommendations as to any course of action the reader may chose to follow other than to encourage the reader to work closely with qualified health professionals when making healthcare decisions relevant to their personal lives.
Footnotes
Cox, D. A. (2025, March 10). The State of American Friendship: Change, challenges, and loss - the Survey Center on American Life. The Survey Center on American Life - A nonprofit organization dedicated to understanding the way cultural, political, and technological changes are shaping the lives of ordinary Americans. https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-friendship-change-challenges-and-loss/
Faria, J. (2025, July 10). Number of close friends had by U.S. adults 2021. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1358672/number-of-close-friends-us-adults/f
Shen X, Wang C, Zhou X, et al. Nonlinear dynamics of multi-omics profiles during human aging. Nat Aging. 2024;4(11):1619-1634. doi:10.1038/s43587-024-00692-2
StanfordMed. (2024, August 14). Massive biomolecular shifts occur in our 40s and 60s, Stanford Medicine researchers find. EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1054359
Higgins, L. (2024, December 20). Science says your body starts “breaking down” quicker at these 2 ages. Health. https://www.health.com/study-aging-peaks-8756326
Lawton, G. (2025, July 10). Rapid bursts of ageing are causing a total rethink of how we grow old. New Scientist. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2485338-rapid-bursts-of-ageing-are-causing-a-total-rethink-of-how-we-grow-old/
"Health and Well-being - Part 1 - Setting the Frame" last updated on 2025.07.17.
Health and Well-being - Part 2 - The Table of Contents to Your Owner's Manual →
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