Episode 5: Is Longevity the Goal of Our Lives?

Welcome back to Wisdom from the Aerial View, a podcast between two friends and among great listeners. This is episode five. We're glad you came back. How are you today, Mark?

Great, how are you today, Enid?

I'm doing fine. I want to talk to you a little bit today about me. Good topic. I have been, as you know, been working in the field of aging for many years, actually about 40 years now. Which is fascinating since I'm still only 21. But during those years, and still to this day, one of the big things we talk about is longevity.

you

We want to live longer. It's all about how do we get people to live longer. And I think one of the things that I've been thinking about since I reconnected with you was this notion, you keep saying life is not about longevity. And yet in my professional career here, it's always about longevity. The longevity revolution, the longevity evolution, it's all about longevity. How do we live a longer life? How do we live a longer, happier life? How do we live a longer? more healthful life. We talk about age span, we talk about health span, we talk about lifespan. It's all about longevity, longevity, longevity. And okay, we can do that too. You do, huh? well there's always spanned X, we can talk about that too. I'm wearing it right now, as a matter of fact, it's a crazy thing. And it's very tight and my voice is getting higher. But I wanna talk to you about this whole notion of longevity because you are on one side of it and I'm.

We should talk about bridge span. I like spans. You

with you sorta. On my professional side, it's about the other way. We have to think about how do we live longer. It doesn't mean that we're not thinking about how do we live more meaningfully or less, but it's how do we keep us alive longer? And you're saying, no, no, no, no. Because when the jukebox, that last record is played, it didn't matter that you were 100 years old as Jimmy Carter was. It was what he did in those 100 years. And if Jimmy Carter had died when he was 52, was he still, was that long enough? So my question to you is, let's talk about longevity. What is long? Is it a question of long enough? Tell me.

That's a great question. So I'm not against longevity. I'm not against people living a long life at all. What I'm against, not against, I'm not against anything actually. What I'm in favor of and what I think we should be focusing on is what, how we live our lives, how we view our lives, what we do in our lives during whatever number of years we have. instead of the focus being, look, every best seller now, not everybody, silly statement. Some, there are best sellers on

Right.

life health span, how we live longer. There's so many of those out now and everybody's focused on that. Eat the right foods, make sure you move every day, exercise, all these things are important. I do all those by the way. I exercise almost every day. I try and eat right. But that's not because I want to live that my goal is to live as long as possible. It's because while I'm here, I want to feel as good as I can. That's really for me personally.

Yes.

My point is not that longevity is a bad thing. It's a good thing, of course. But we should be focusing instead on how we live our lives, why we're here, what we're doing. And if longevity comes along with it, fantastic. Right? That's the point. So instead of longevity being the focus, it should be the byproduct. Right? Should be a nice, it's like the French fries with the meal.

Mm-hmm.

Maybe french fries wasn't a good idea. We're talking about healthspan. How about the broccoli with the piece of fish? This is a healthy podcast, right? Having fish and broccoli. But anyway, the focus isn't on the broccoli. When you order off the menu, you don't say, I'll take the broccoli. can you throw a piece of salmon on it? It's the other way around. You know, they say, what do you have? I'll have a salmon. What do you want for your side? The side is the broccoli. So what we're doing now is we're saying, the longevity is the salmon. It's the main course.

Yeah. Yeah.

And in how we live our lives in terms of meaning and purpose, that's the broccoli. And I'm saying, I think we have it backwards, right? The focus should be on why we're here, what we're doing while we're here, what we should be doing while we're here, and certainly we'll take the side order of longevity to go with it. And so yes, exercise, eat right, I'm all for these things. Like I said, I do them every day, but it's not the main focus, right? It's the side dish. That's my point. Does that help at all?

Well, yes, does. And it's an interesting concept because again, there's an industry that has evolved right around, evolved from that whole notion of longevity. There are people out there making a living on making sure that you do the right things, that you eat right, that you do, because you can live longer. So what I guess what I'm saying is maybe that what the emphasis ought to be so that you can live better, you can live a more meaningful life. It's not about the years, it's about what you do with those years that you're given. Is that what you would? Yeah, good.

I have a good one for you, Enid. So you talk a lot about the fact that have anxiety and so many people have anxiety, right? So how does it sound to have an extra 20 years of life filled with anxiety?

Sure.

Yeah, that's right. Okay.

Right? So that doesn't sound like a great plan. Another 20 years is great. Can we leave the anxiety out of it? Then now you got something. Right now it's, that sounds pretty good. I'll take another 20 years of anxiety free living and meaningful and purposeful living. That's great. So longevity is the side dish, right? So we want, well, the reason we're doing this podcast, you and I, is because we're trying to help people move into a, to move their life away from anxiety, away from stress.

That's right.

Okay, right.

towards more meaning, towards more fulfillment. And along with it, they're going to drag their neighbors with them and we're going to have a better society. That's why we're doing this. You and I have talked about this and I've talked to other friends who think, you are a Don Quixote. You are just swinging at windmills. What are you talking about? There's no way you're to get rid of violence. There's no way you're going to get rid of anxiety. There's no way you get people to listen to all this stuff you're talking about. And of course, what I say is, well, there's a famous phrase in the Bible that says to save one person is to save the world. If you don't try, right, if you don't make the effort, I guarantee you, you will fail. And maybe we'll fail anyway. But maybe it's part of the byproduct of my being a physician all these years, but I do believe in what we're talking about. do believe we can. create, we can certainly minimize anxiety in people's lives, we can enhance meaning in their lives. And along the way, you know, we might convince them to eat some more broccoli and they live longer. Fantastic, right? So I'm much more focused on the quality of anxiety, hopefully anxiety free, but certainly less anxiety filled life, more meaning, more purpose, and to create a society in which we really all want to live.

Well, you know, it's interesting. When you and I first talked and you told me about the book and I said, OK. And I read the book and all of sudden reading the book was eye opening for me because, I am anxious. I'm an anxious human being. There's no question about that. And I thought he's going to take anxiety away from me. There's no magic wand. There's no pill. There's no deep breathing or whatever. And you and I actually had a talk one day. I was actually out walking, because I like to walk about four to five miles a day. And I was in a park here where I live, and I was on my headphones talking to you. And I sat down on a bench. And I said to you that I had just taken meditation lessons. And you said, you're meditating. You said, I did that in college and gave it up. Didn't work for you. And I thought, hmm. But it's working for me. I do it every day. I'm supposed to do it twice a day. I didn't do it twice a day. I do it once a day. figured at least I'm doing that. And I thought anything to get the anxiety away. And then you and I got really deeper into these conversations. And all of a sudden I'm looking at things differently. And I realized that some of the anxiety is literally going away. I'm not as anxious or as I used to be about certain things. There are things that do make me anxious. But when I look at things from a different perspective, when I take myself out of the picture, when I take myself off that page, because I love when you talk about the book, the protagonist in the book, if I'm no longer on the page anymore and I'm looking at it, things seem to go a little bit more easily for me. And so this whole notion of longevity, well, I have to live longer. But you're right, Mark. I don't want to live longer if I'm going to live 20 more years being anxious. So I thank you for that. And I thank you for writing the book. And now a word from our sponsor, Wisdom from the Area of View. If only we had a sponsor. Anybody out there want to sponsor this? But I think it's interesting because you say on the cover of this thing, the superpower that can change your life and this world.

If only we had one.

highfalutin and yammeria. But if we really did listen to it and listen to what you're saying and then listen to ourselves, what are we anxious about? And how do we change that? How do we go about changing that? And so I just, it's a plug for the book. It's a plug for what we're doing, but it's also a plug for ourselves because if we want to live longer, this whole notion of longevity, but we want to live it in peace, in peaceful thought, in peaceful meditation. Just everyday life being more at ease with ourselves because you're the dis-ease. You talk about dis-ease. That's what doctors do. They talk about disease. And we're talking about ease, aren't we?

Yeah, you're right. The subtitle of the book is the superpower that can change your life in this world. And again, this is not hyperbole. You you plug the book. Fine. People buy the book. That's great. If they don't, that's OK, too, because that's not what I wrote the book for. I wrote the book because I want to help people. Period. That's it. No, zero. I have no other agenda. I am one layer thick. You what you see is what you get. Right. I believe in this. I know it's correct. And what you said is when you talked about removing yourself from the page, becoming, leaving your role as a protagonist in your own story where you're trapped in what we call the street view and you're getting battered to and fro by whatever happens in your life, whether it be something you hear on the news or something that perhaps your water heater might break one day. Sorry, folks. Inside joke. But anyway, stuff happens to all of us, right?

Don't bring that up.

And so that's the street view, right? But if there was a way to remove yourself from that temporarily and get a perspective on what's happening and you go, okay, fine. It's really not that big a deal after all. That's not what this is all about. Time to return to my regularly scheduled program and become, remember that I'm here to become, to make that evolution, to become a better person, to become more selfless, to care for other people, to pay attention to other people. As long as you're doing that, you're golden, right? Yes, we're all going to have ups and downs in our lives. Things are going to happen, right? But that's not what the story is about. the only way to appreciate what the story is about is to get off that page, to stop being the protagonist in your own story, become that disinterested observer hovering in the aerial view who sees not only what's going on in her life at the moment, but sees her entire life and... has the perspective of where her life sits in all of history or all eternity, whatever you want to call it. That when you have that perspective, you realize, returning to that metaphor of the jukebox, I'm only on a few records relative to all the records. Okay, I know I'm going to die. Death is 100 % certain. Maybe we should talk about death right in a minute, but once you realize that, that there's no getting out of the game, we live our lives as if we make every right move and make every, quote, right decision. then we're going to win. Something's going to happen. We're going to live forever. We live as if we make every right choice and decision. We will win the game, which implies living forever. But of course, that's ridiculous. Everybody's story ends the same way in the sense that we all end up on that last record. That's why long.

Okay, but let's talk about this for a second. Let's delve into this. So we're having a bad moment. Something's happened in our lives. The kids are screaming and I'm just, I'm having a fight with my husband and how do that take me in that particular moment? I'm in the street view right now. I'm just at my, what do I do? How do I get to that aerial view?

Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Right. That's the real value of the area view. Exactly. It's not some impractical thing. It's extremely practical. So let's say you're in some type of stressful situation, whether it's your kids, your spouse, your job, anything, right? Okay. And you're in the middle of it. You're in the street view. It's happening, right? And at that moment, your reaction is probably very appropriate. Either you're afraid or you're sad or you're worried or you're anxious. All these things are very appropriate human reactions in that situation. But there's another view, right? If you say, okay, time out, I'm taking a time out here. I'm going to quickly fly up to the aerial view. I'm going to remove myself. I'm going to no longer be the participant in what's happening at that moment. I'm going to... I'm going to view myself from afar. It's like I'm, I mentally say that I'm going to escape. Well, I don't have to say it anymore because it's natural for me now. But yes, you might say to yourself, okay, oops, time to go to the aerial view. I'm going to ascend to the aerial view and watch myself in this situation. And all of a sudden the view widens, the field of view widens. Instead of that narrow focus you have only on that moment, from above the view widens, you say, now you see what happened an hour before, a week before.

You mentally say that to yourself, you just, okay. Right, right.

10 years before and you recognize the fact that there will be five minutes ahead, there'll be 10 minutes ahead, there'll be an hour ahead and there'll be many, many years ahead. You're just in this one thing and you realize, this too shall pass. It's not the most important thing. All I gotta remember is A, my life is of limited time. I'm gonna die so I don't have to worry about that. Death is 100%. Don't think about that, we're gonna get to that in a minute. So take that off the table, because we already know the ending to the story. So that can't be that important. What's important is, why am I here? Okay, I'm evolving from selfish to selfless. I need to focus on other people. I need to stop focusing on myself here. So then at that point, you go back and you go, if you're having a fight with your spouse, focus on your spouse. If you have any problem with your children, focus on your children. Forget about how you feel. If it's somebody at work, Say, give them the better for the doubt. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they're right, right? Or they're having a bad day.

Do I physically step back, take a breath and say, wait, I've got to control myself, I've got to elevate myself? How do I, let's get me there, get me there.

Yes, taking a breath in the beginning, in the beginning it's like anything else, right? So I started taking piano lessons about eight or nine years ago, right? In the beginning, my left hand and my right hand wanted to do the same thing all the time. I couldn't get it. Then all of sudden this magical thing happened where my left hand and my right hand could actually function independently. It's practice. It's the same thing with this. So in the beginning, yes, maybe take a deep breath, stop for a second, freeze in place, take a deep breath, say, okay, mentally say to yourself, okay, there's another perspective. yeah, I remember that other perspective is something called the aerial view. I have to get out of the situation and look, remove myself for a second and look as an independent observer as if somebody else is watching this. That's the key, the independent observer. So maybe if you're having an actual situation, you could say to yourself, how would Mark look at this? Okay, and you say, Mark would see this as this, right? He'd see it differently than I, the protagonist in this event, is seeing it. Or it could be your brother, or it could be how you might say, how would my mother have seen this? How would somebody I really respect have seen this? You need a disinterested observer. So you can play, bring in another role, or eventually it will be you. You'll be able to remove yourself and become that disinterested observer. And then say, it's not that big a deal, right? It's not that big a deal. Whatever it is, all I have to do is work, focus on my behavior. How am I doing? So I have gotten into... arguments with people that I look back now and I think, I was such a jerk. I was such a jerk, right? But I give myself some slack because I recognize that the whole purpose of life is to make this evolution. If we were great at it at the beginning, we wouldn't have to be living this life. But we live for this life because we have to go through this evolution. We start out stupid and completely as infants, we cannot do a single thing for ourselves, totally dependent. And we evolve from the selfish, useless person to become somebody who is who evolves towards this selfless thing and focuses instead on other people. One of the things I tell people all the time is that when things get really rough for you personally, go help somebody else. That is a magic trick, right? It's hard to do, but if you have the opportunity, take the advantage of it because then what that does is it takes you out of yourself and changes the focus from yourself to somebody else.

So if something's really bad happening to you or in a terrible place for whatever reason, if you can, take a time out and go help somebody else because that's where the joy is. You already know that. So that's why this is so important. This is how you eventually crush anxiety. In the beginning, you try to limit it, but in the end, you will crush it. So I'll give you another example. When I say to myself, when I find myself getting anxious, I do two things now. Every day, right? I mean, less and less because I've gotten a lot better. But first thing I say to myself is, go to the aerial view. Let's get this perspective. OK, all right, right. It's not about me. It's about somebody. It's about other people. It's about how I treat other people, how I behave. This is not a big deal. What's troubling me now is not that big a deal. It'll get fixed. It'll get repaired. Something will happen. We'll go on. And the second thing I do is we're to spend a lot of time talking about this in another episode. is I'm in complete control of how I feel. That is the real superpower. You get to interpret everything that happens in your life is interpreted through your brain. You have 100 % control of how you feel about everything. You don't have to get upset. You don't have to get angry. You don't have to flip out, right? You can say, ooh, I choose to behave a different way. Most people don't realize they have that power. But they do that, it's tremendous superpower. We'll talk about that. So those are the two things I do. I flip up to the aerial view and I remind myself that I'm in control of how I feel. So for instance, if I get anxious, I go, don't have to feel anxious. I'm in control of how I feel. So a combination of that different perspective from the aerial view and the fact that we have the power to determine how we feel, when you practice those two things, it is magic.

Now you're in control of how you feel, but you're not always in control of your environment. So, for example, well that's right, so I'm a terrible flyer. I ain't scared to death of flying. Do I do it? I do it.

You're rarely in control of your environment.

You know, I've watched you, I've watched you, you're not moving your wings fast enough. That's the problem. Yeah, I noticed that. Okay.

Well, I never thought of that. Okay, thanks. Next, next subject. So I can control, I will be honest and tell you on this podcast that I had such a terrible fear of flying that I actually went to a hypnotist. I wanted him to help me get on that airplane and just, it didn't work, it didn't help. But so how do I control, I can't control that. I can control how I feel, can't control that airplane, I can't control the turbulence, God wish I could. I can't control the door flying off, I can't fly in the air. How do you do that? So how do I take myself out of my street view of being on that airplane and into that aerial view of saying, how do I do that?

That's a good one because I have another good friend of mine who will not get on an airplane. For him, it's more of a claustrophobia feeling, but still, whatever. Phobias are real. How do deal with those things? There's desensitization and so on. Psychologists have all these little tricks. Hypnosis didn't work on you, although I bet your hypnotist isn't afraid of flying anymore. Just kidding.

Hmm?

He's afraid of me now. It's the craziest thing. He sees me on the street, he runs, but you know.

Yeah. So, there's a couple of ways to do this. One is, first of all, the chance of having a, I shouldn't say this, but obviously plane accidents are very, very rare. We just saw a couple of them, but they tend to be rare. So on a logical basis, you could say, okay, the odds are one in a kajillion that I'm going to die in a plane crash, but that doesn't work, right? That doesn't work for hardly anybody because still you're in this can and it's completely out of your control. And two people up in front. and you have no idea how good they are, what they did last night, you have no idea. So yeah, you're in a vulnerable situation. Well, the way to deal with that is understand that longevity is not the point of life, right? So if you go down, which we hope you never do, that happens to be the record you end on. You were gonna end on a record anyway. There was gonna be a last day of your life, right? There is gonna be a last day of your life.

That's right.

So which one it is, as it turns out, is probably not as important as we think. We'll get into that later because that sounds very callous, but it's not meant to be callous, it's meant to be helpful. there is a last record in your particular portion of the jukebox, whether it's on that plane or someone else you don't know. So that's one way to deal with it, I think, to recognize that life is finite. That's one way. And the other way to look at it is to, again, go back to how you feel about it. You can say to yourself, okay, I recognize that there is a tiny, tiny risk here, but I don't have to be anxious. I get to choose. Remember everything that we see and hear. I'll you a quick example. So let's say you go on a safari and you're in one of these little jeeps and you're watching a lion attack a wildebeest. And the lion wins and catches the wildebeest and proceeds to tear that wildebeest to shreds. Now, if I was watching that, I would be very distraught because that violent, my initial reaction would be I'd be very distraught. To watch that violence of one animal tearing another apart, I wouldn't think that was cool. I would think, poor wildebeest. But the lion isn't upset.

All

And I'll bet you the lioness who's watching this isn't upset, right? This is what they do, right? we catch wildebeests and we tear them to shreds. They're not upset. So what's the difference? Because from your perspective, you have seen this image and interpreted it in your brain in a certain way. So everything we see and hear, none of it has any intrinsic value, right? We would say, when we watch, we see that video of somebody pushing somebody on a subway track, we recoil in horror. Well, the person who pushed that person off the subway track didn't recoil a hara. What's the difference? The difference is how they interpreted that scene. Now, to a normal human being, that's heinous. That's as bad as it gets. We can't imagine doing that to somebody else. We care about other people. That's again the goal. We want to evolve from selfish to selfless, from inward to outward focus. But that person for some reason didn't because that person interpreted that in a totally different way. It tells us that each of our brains is an interpretation machine. Nothing that is actually happening that we see or hear has any intrinsic value, just as the lion or the lioness wasn't upset by tearing a wildebeest apart, whereas we might have been. Their brain is interpreted in a different way. Everything you see and hear is interpreted in our brain. It's given meaning in our brain. Well, once you realize that, you go, oh, well, I can decide what that meaning should be. I get to choose. Holy mackerel, since it's happening in my brain, I get to decide what I want to make of it. So you can see the same activity, same event in two different ways. One, in maybe your natural anxious, stressed way of seeing things. Or you can say, I choose to interpret this in another way. And that's the superpower. Okay, we're not victims. Nobody's a victim. This whole idea of victimhood, you I don't want to be too harsh. Okay, people are victims. of crimes and other things for sure. But in terms of how we view the world, we shouldn't view ourselves as victims. We have the power to interpret every action and event, every word we hear.

how we choose to, that's our superpower. That's one of our major superpowers to do that. So that's why that's so important. We'll talk about that more in another episode. But that ability to interpret the world that is really ours and ours alone, unique to us, that's how you deal with that. So while you're on the plane, you can say to yourself, my natural reaction is to be stressed. But you know what? I don't have to be because I get to decide how I feel. I choose not to be anxious at this point. Somebody might be laughing out there, but you know, do it a thousand times and it works. Practice, you know, it works.

When did, thank you. Let me ask you this. You haven't been doing this your whole life. You haven't thought about the area of your whole life. When did it come to you? How did it come to you? I mean, how important is it in your, I know it's very important in your life. How did it come to you? When did you get here?

No.

It's not very important in my life. It's the most important thing. I love my wife, I love my children, I love my grandchildren, I love you Enid, I love my friends. These are all super important things to me. But the single most valuable thing, not most important, but valuable, is to be able to see the world from a different perspective. It changes everything. It changes relationships. It changes your level of anxiety. It changes your approach to everything you do. It changes your reactions to events and situations. So it took a long time. I don't know. It's a very good question. It certainly didn't happen in one day, but as the more I thought about these things, I mentioned that I was kind of an iconoclast in a previous episode, meaning that I questioned everything. And the things we take for granted, we should question every single one of them. And I realized, wait a minute, is there another way to look at this? And I think I told you my wife was really the initiator of all this when I found, she get anxious? Never. has never had an anxious moment in her life. Crazy, right? So I told her, used to tell her, you're not a normal person. I'm not sure how she really liked that, but it was flattering, right? It was a compliment. But then I realized it's better to be her than me. She's never anxious. I'm anxious. This is crazy. Why wouldn't I want to be like her? Instead of making fun of her, I should try and figure out how to get there. And that's what I spent years and years doing. And slowly as I thought about these things, I realized, wait, you know, When I learned about time, how time works and it's not what we think, and I learned some of the other principles of physics that we've talked about and we'll talk about in the future, I realized the world truly is not what we think. And once you realize that the world is not what you think, then you get to question everything. This whole idea of how we interpret the world, that we have, why we're here, what our purpose is, and apropos to this conversation, how we get to control how we feel about things, how we react to things. So just again, the analogy, just looking how one person might react or an animal might react to a situation, tells you that that situation itself, that event, that moment, that sound, that word, doesn't have any intrinsic value. It's our interpretation of that sound or event or word or situation that's creating our feelings, our reactions.

we get to control those. Holy mackerel. Once that light went on in my head, I went, my God, why am I worrying so much about these things? Now, I will tell you, I'm not a natural like my wife is. I have to work at it still. I catch myself all the time. I catch myself getting, starting to get anxious. I catch myself judging people unfavorably. I catch myself saying something to somebody that is out in keeping with what I know to be the correct way to speak. So,

Yeah.

I have to stop myself. I don't get it right all the time, nearly all the time, but at least now I'm aware of it and I can try and fix it and repair it. And certainly I'm much, much better at controlling how I react to any situation.

Right. Well, that's, I couldn't agree with you more. I think taking this journey with you has really been helpful and will continue to be helpful. And I'm hopeful that it's helpful to everybody who's listening to us. So with that, we're going to end this particular episode of the podcast. The next episode, I want everybody to stay tuned for it. Because it's going to be about something that we're all scared to death about. Death. With that, I say, have a good day.

Are you doing it? Love you. Have a great day. Bye.

Love you too.