Would you live to 150?

On reframing longevity and what it really takes to feel alive again.

“𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂’𝗿𝗲 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗱𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘁?”

Esther Perel famously asked that question to longevity expert Peter Attia, who reflects on this in the very last chapter of his book “Outlive”.

After 300 pages of VO2 optimization, metabolic regulation, and sleep hacking, Peter vulnerably puts himself in the patient seat and discussed his psychological and emotional struggles. The last chapter is where he finally tackles emotional health.

He shares the story of his child being admitted to the ER and him being too busy on a trip to come back home.

The guilt and shame of this moment forced Peter to reconsider his priorities in life.

Turns out there is more to it than your HDL and testosterone levels.

The title of his book says it all: “Outlive”. It denotes that longevity is a sports competition. Not surprisingly, many of the people pushing the current zeitgeist of “health and longevity” are previous athletes themselves.

I wrote about this before about how we bite into this longevity sandwich a bit too hard, and many of us non-athletes end up injuring ourselves or losing motivation completely.

So today I ask what if longevity was not about living long…but living well? And what does that really mean?

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“So do you know David Sinclair and Brian Johnson? Do you think we’ll be able to reverse aging?”

I was coming out of a 10 day silent retreat (where the whole point was to practice non-attachment). The first conversation I had after we broke the silence, was with a Bengali startup founder who had recently found himself in Silicon Valley.

Once he knew about my work in holistic health and wellness, his eyes lit up and he asked me the question above.

“No.” I said. “I don’t think we need to reverse aging really. ”

“But what if someone gave you a pill that extends your life by 50 years, would you take it? Wouldn’t you live for 150?”

“No, I probably wouldn’t take it.”

“But why not? Why wouldn’t you”

“How old are you now?” I asked.

“ I’m 28.” he said.

“Do you feel content right now?” I asked.

“Yes. But then I can be even more content.” he said. “If I can extend my life then I can build more, see more and travel more.”

I wanted to shake the guy and ask him if he had learned anything at all during the 10 day retreat! However, I was still in the loving kindness afterglow of the retreat and so instead I took a less personal approach:

“At the current rate, who knows if our planet will event make it that far?”

“Then I’ll go to Mars!” he said.

The guy was triggering, mainly because my views on longevity and progress were very similar when I first moved to San Francisco, and sought to assimilate in the high-tech digital health craze.

Today, I no longer believe that health is about how long we live, but is about having a life that is so healthy, that I’d still be content if I died tomorrow.

Only five years ago however, I probably would have nodded at my friend fervently, and divulged a bunch of the stemcell-powered, neuro-enhanced, and organ-regenrating brave new data-driven world of human longevity.

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Why are we so afraid of death?

When the world shut down in 2020, I started collecting data and planning my mornings meticulously in the name of longevity.

I was super into it, and it really informed a lot of the philosophy of my program. I wanted to heal my dysregulated metabolic system after years of consulting glory (i.e. drinking, eating out, and weekly jetlag).

I became engrossed in health and longevity podcasts featuring experts like Andrew Huberman, Peter Attia, and Tim Ferris, inspiring me to experiment further.

Suddenly, an endless list of protocols, routines, and habits dictated by science surrounded me. With newfound time, I created exhaustive to-do lists.

Long morning routines, HIIT workouts, hot yoga.
Paleo, keto, intermittent fasting, water fasting.
Magnesium, iron, electrolytes, macros, micros...
Hot saunas, cold showers, meditation.
Pushups, pull-ups, planks.
Men’s and women’s circles.
Immune boosters, psychedelics, nootropics, breathwork.
Morning sunshine, wearables, sleep tracking, biohacking...

Anything anyone recommended, I tried.

After multiple cycles of overwhelm, I found the right balance of eating, movement, relationships, relaxation, and sleep that helped me recover emotionally and physically. Within a year, my labs normalized, my mood stabilized, and my back felt strong again.

However, I noticed a certain struggle with compulsive behaviors. Cannabis. Sugar. I kept as many of those out of the house, but whenever I reintroduced them socially, my addictive behaviors would come flooding.

More cannabis meant more munchies, more sugar, and worsening HbA1c.

There was something that felt off, but I thought I was doing everything right.

That’s when I started studying addiction through books like ‘Chasing the Scream’ and Gabor Maté’s ‘In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts’. Those two books put forth the resounding truth about addiction: It was not the chemical that was the problem—it was my trauma.

Hindsight is 20:20

Around this time, I discovered the profound healing power of psychedelics. I had previously enjoyed LSD and MDMA in party settings, but deep journeys with ayahuasca, psilocybin, and mescaline revealed subconscious wounds I didn’t know I carried.

I confronted my shame around societal judgments and realized I had spent years running from my cultural roots. Healing, I saw, lay in reconnecting with them. These insights came to me as memories that cropped to the top of my consciousness during these psychedelic trips.

My earliest memory of anxiety dates back to age seven—long before I understood epigenetics or intergenerational trauma. I told my mother, “I feel like something is chasing me, and I have to keep running.” She held me and said I was too young to feel that way.

Too young to feel that way. I thought.

Was that how adulthood felt like?

Anxiety and Addiction as Avoidance

Sure enough, anxiety followed me into adolescence. My high school fostered peacocking, bullying, and one-upmanship. Social outings filled me with dread—my mind consumed by thoughts of not being interesting enough, cool enough, or fashionable enough. That’s when I picked up smoking. I hated it at first, but like beer, it became a social staple. Through college and medical school, stress transformed into obsessive thoughts about grades, patients, work, and validation.

I started feeling much better. Armed with knowledge about my past, along with therapy, I unshackled the hold addiction had in my life. However, I started noticing that even when I was not smoking, there was still some sort of pull towards compulsive behaviors. If it wasn’t marijuana, it would be sugar cravings, late night work, too much coffee or even hitting the gym more than was necessary.

I began wondering: were therapy and psychedelics just more short-lived solutions? It felt like there was an invisible force that kept me stuck in a loop. That was when I read It Didn’t Start with You by Mark Wolyn, and the puzzle pieces clicked into place.

It started with Grandma

In the same year Wolyn’s book came out, my grandmother passed away after a long battle with dementia. She had been a strict disciplinarian—so much so that my grandfather called her The Government, a nickname we all laughed at.

One day after dinner, during my time back in Egypt, I went for a walk with mom and we opened up to each other. I told her about my recent struggles with anxiety, and felt more open to talking to her about my depression, having hidden it from her for ten whole years at that point.

“You know, it is funny you say that. I also felt an anxiety since I was a young, and I never understood where it came from.” She said. “I mean, there was nothing happening in my life to cause that. I had a pretty good life, so I brushed it off.”

I explained intergeneration trauma and what I was reading these days, then I said: “Tell me everything about Grandma. What was her life like?”

Mom’s answer was an unexpected twist about grandma that I knew nothing about, and would change my life forever.

Beneath my grandma’s apparent mental strength lay a deep-seated fear of loss. At two years old, she had lost her father, leaving her family in financial ruin. Women could not easily get jobs, and her childhood became one of scarcity. She could not experience the toys, gifts, clothes and trips her older sisters spoke about. That trauma shaped her every action. Only two years old, my grandma witnessed her mother’s mourning.

Fast forward 70 years. I remember her locking doors obsessively, always reminding us how many ways a thief could enter the house. She had prayers for every scenario, including getting in a car or riding an elevator. She would call each one of us every night to make sure we were ok. Eating in her kitchen meant sautéed vegetables, lean roasted chicken, and chamomile tea. Grandma was very particular about her behaviors. She made green smoothies before they were cool. The Government was afraid of death, and she spent every living moment avoiding it.

Grandma was afraid of death, and she spent every living moment avoiding it.

As her case deteriorated over the last 5 years of her life, she could barely recognize us. We could barely recognize her, too. As any caretaker of an Alzheimer’s or dementia patient knows all too well, these neurodegenerative diseases are detrimental for both the patient and the family.

The silver lining of grandma’s fate was that dementia protected her from the biggest fear of her life. She was in a blissful coma when grandpa finally passed.

She was successful in that way. She avoided the inevitable death of the man she loved the most.

Outliving vs. Living Well

However, one truth remained, she had never faced her fear.

That fear of death.

Her anxiety, passed down epigenetically, explained my mother’s mysterious nervousness, and sometimes irrational Germophobia—a quirk we had always joked about. My struggles, I realized, were not just mine. They were part of a generational legacy.

This revelation reshaped my relationship with anxiety. No longer a personal failing, it became a marker of my lineage.

It was no longer something to control, but something to understand and integrate. I realized most of my struggles, up to that point, had revolved around running away from death.

That was what I described to my mother at 7 years old when I told her I was running away from something. I was running away from the death of my great-grandfather, and the trauma of my grandmother, who did not have the resources to handle it back then.

And now that I think of it, the medical education I received was all about prolonging life and avoiding death, regardless of what that meant to the person and to society. Last week, I wrote about the death of my patient and how I was running away from that on my secret trips to Alexandria.

The death of my career as a doctor was why I hid away from society during my depression. The layoff and the death of my consulting career pushed me to travel away from San Francisco where I associated with that job.

In the same vein, I started seeing how a lot of the longevity experiments, despite how much benefit I got from them, were still an attempt to avoid the brutal fact of death.

I began reconstructing my life through writing—novels, short stories, health essays, journaling. I lived in Egypt’s Sinai, Kenya’s Lamu Island, and Mexico’s Oaxaca, where my perception of human health shifted.

A Better, more Human Way

Longevity isn’t about adding years to your life. It’s about learning how to live fully right now.

That’s exactly what we practice inside The Human Dash — where ambitious professionals recover from burnout, build sustainable health habits, and reconnect to themselves.

Here’s what’s included:

• Six 1:1 coaching sessions (75–90 minutes) to uncover and resolve your health blocks

• Comprehensive biomarker analysis so you can measure real progress and understand what habits you need.

• Personalized habit architecture that makes healthy routines actually stick

• Research-backed strategies tailored to your unique health needs

• Accountability structure so change lasts

• Access to group membership, retreats, and your personal health dashboard

We’re opening 15 new spots at locked-down founder rates until Oct 1st.
After that, pricing will increase as we expand the program.