Your human-size life

Hmm, money. Just today I have thought: "If only I had $630 to buy my stepsister a decent laptop so that she can study outside her noisy home with her heavy aspie brother."

The core thesis is really only true if money can't be exchanged for some expectation value of additional years of healthy life. Up until fairly recently (say 20 years) that was the case. You couldn't really do a lot with a lot of money to swing odds, any more than you could with just a little money and some forethought. The free stuff like planning, exercise, and calorie restriction outweigh everything else, and by the time you're in late old age how far you get is a complete lottery of genes and happenstance.

It isn't true any more, however. You can outlay money to increase your life span down the line - though it isn't an individual thing, it is increasing life span for everyone. It is a collaborative effort.

How: money can be used as a lever at all levels of research and development in the science of aging to increase everyone's life expectancy by pushing forward the right lines of development. Whether that is by being an insider putting in five figures into a seed round in a useful startup, or by being a billionaire establishing a research foundation, you can move the needle. Early stage research is dirt cheap. Venture capital is overflowing the sandbags for any venture that can do something credible with its seed round. There are startups at various stages today that have means of repairing/removing some of the cell and tissue damage that causes aging, and are pushing towards human testing.

The game of life used to be limited. It used to have a line at the end, you are done. Everything in life and all of our culture is very much defined by the existence of that once-immutable endpoint. The endpoint is fading, however, in the sense that bringing aging under medical control is a research and development project that can and has been envisaged in some detail. But next to no-one has yet adapted to the new reality: the world is still full of old people playing the same old game of gathering points in politics and markets for some final score, and of young people aiming to be in the same position.

If there was sanity, the old game board would be thrown out, and immense interest and investment would be directed towards the biotechnologies of aging and longevity. There is a big difference between a world in which you can't buy time with money, and one in which you can.

I'm struggling just to live that middle class lifestyle. Housing ain't cheap!

The problem with those of us who make money in the tech field is that it's often pretty much binary.. all work pretty much all the time (and decent to great money) or no work (living on savings). Add to this employer's resistance to hire if you have you haven't been working lately... :/

But with a big house you could sleep in a different bedroom every night!