With greater longevity, the quest to avoid infirmities of aging is more urgent

Depends on the body type and age and history. these movements are super hard on the spine. Try planks and step ups

> You're following the narative trope of one person being immortal and watching as everything around them dies.

No, that is not the reason for my comment.

It seems clear to me, both by life experience and reading related research that humans require meaning to have lives worth living. This might be a hard pill to swallow, but I suspect that it is ultimately our mortality that gives our lives meaning. If there is nothing to strive for, then there is only pleasure seeking. Your life becomes an infinitely long hedonistic binge. Human beings were not designed to withstand hedonistic binges for too long without dark consequences (as in, dissolution of meaning, extreme depression, etc).

I guess you could argue that with infinite time, you could figure out how to redesign yourself until you are comfortable with immortality. But are you still yourself by then? Or is this problem also already solved by... just dying?

What I'd like to more accurately identify is the point at which we get diminishing returns to health from strenuous exercise, in measurable form. Exercise of course provides enormous health benefits, but progressive overload for instance demands ever increasing caloric intake which runs counter to health recommendations. This is probably easier to track than high intensity cardio except in terms of pure caloric need. I deadlift twice my bodyweight at up to 5 reps and consume somewhere in the range of 2000-2500 calories a day. But is reaching the 1000 pound club worth it from a health standpoint? I doubt it, but the evidence surrounding this is sorely lacking.

"I could understand the impulse people would have to not extend their lives if that's truly what they wanted, but the almost _cultural_ belief that seeking immortality is Bad and Wrong, something only pursued by cartoon villains and insane emperors ..."

I've spent some time thinking about this. Bear with me ...

First, let me agree with you that I am flabbergasted by the notion that one would have nothing but ill-use for another 40 or 80 or 200 years of life - I would certainly find good and productive use for it, provided I was in good physical and mental health.

However, I ask you to consider the most liberal and progressive figures of the 18th century. Pick any that you like (hint: they're all men). Now bring them forward to the present and they are impossibly reactionary and conservative. Their wives didn't wear pants, they would refuse to speak to a divorced woman in public (if such a woman was even present) and they probably believed that homosexuals had no place in society.

That's us 200 years from now. No matter how "woke" you are or how liberal or progressive you believe your attitudes to be: either civilization collapses, or you're hopelessly - even dangerously - conservative and reactionary 200 years from now.

To put it succinctly: progressive people, and their opinions, turn into reactionary conservatives with nothing but the passage of time.

So now consider if all of those "woke" 18th century (white males) were walking around with us today. How does that affect politics and civilization ? We don't need to do a thought experiment - it's right here in front of us: the "villians" in the housing/NIMBY/prop13 debate are basically anyone over the age of 50 who owns property. Those people aren't even a full generation away from us and we're trying to decide whether they're just sort-of evil or all-the-way evil.

So yes, there is a cultural resistance to people living (a lot) longer and if you can extrapolate political mores forward 50-100-150-200 years I think you can see how quickly that would get murderous - and I do mean that.

...

Looking deeper, I think the prohibition is more than a political one, as I've described above, but one of individual vs. group optimization. You are thinking of your personal self as the organism - and that makes sense because we aren't bees or ants. However, there are other units that can be thought of as an organism and there is, by definition, a conflict between optimizing for the individual vs. optimizing for the tribe/race/species.

Remember: we have a word for what happens when a single cell reserves resources and prolongs its own life at the expense of the larger organism: cancer.

Yes.

Don't eat sugar. Don't smoke. Don't drink. Eat fruits and vegetables. Exercise regularly. Walking counts, but you probably want to throw some upper-body stuff in there as well. Working in the garden counts.

That's about 80-95% of "how to stay healthy using forces under your control" as far as I can tell.