Optimism associated with exceptional longevity (2019)

Welp, I guess I'm dead then.

>around 25, making personality changes MUCH more difficult

Maybe it's just me but my personality keeps changing every year or so, based on the positive and negative experiences and challenges from living abroad alone, having to always adapt to new stuff to stay mentally, financially and socially afloat.

I assume it's different if you spend your whole life in the same place you grew up in with the same people doing the same things. Maybe the brain checks out from the repetition.

>avoidant behaviors that limit my social ability

Move aboard to another country where you don't speak the language.

What’re you doing for fun?

I was miserable in college but I’ve made significant changes since that have made me way happier.

I think changes are possible at any stage of life. They just might require more commitment since we’re so spongy as kids.

It’s true that neuroplasticity tends to decline around this age, but there are several important caveats:

- Exercise, especially cardiovascular exercise, promotes the release of BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), which enhances neuroplasticity. Consistency matters, regular aerobic activity raises baseline BDNF levels, while sporadic exercise only causes short-term spikes. Studies even show that long-term cardiovascular exercise can alter brain structure.

- Belief in your ability to learn is associated with better learning outcomes and higher neuroplasticity markers. Whether this comes directly from belief or from the behaviors it encourages, it’s still practical advice. Don’t entertain thoughts that you can’t adapt or learn -- especially during exercise.

- Psychedelic experiences (with substances such as psilocybin, ketamine, or LSD) can open what’s called an “acute neuroplastic window”. During this time, brain network dynamics become more flexible and neuroplasticity increases. Surround yourself with the right people, ideas, books, during this period, and it can lead to dramatic positive change. But as this state can amplify both constructive and destructive influences, proceed with care and good research.

But if you do want to be happy, you can find stories, if you look hard and long enough, of "outliers". People who, against all odds, defied "statistics" and broke out of whatever expectations society and "facts" projected onto them.

I tried "everything" until age ~27 when I finally found one dial (very specific elimination diet) that made the rest of my body act mostly normally. Other changes were easier to make from that point onwards, altho there's a lot of damage to undo still. Diet is just one factor, for others it could be completely different.

My point is - I thought I would never be healthy. This stuff runs in my family too. But I just kept trying things. There's no other option.

You are a unique human being and soul who has something valuable to contribute to this world. Even if that's being unhappy.

Hope that doesn't sound condescending, it's something I tell myself too.

1. I have never been more depressed as I was in grad school. My life has gotten way better and stayed there after college.

2. I got married at 30 and I have friends that got married older. This same statistical logic is what you hear about marriage (52% divorce!). What you don’t hear in that statistic is that a lot of people make terrible decisions. My point is that not being married early is a proxy for having a bad attitude, which I suspect they’re really measuring.

3. Intergenerational trauma may be a thing, but you have tools at your disposal. Cognitive behavioral therapy is something I stand behind and recommend to you personally.

Just remember: things won’t change in your life without faith that they will change

Some of this sounds more like ideology and less science, especially when deterministic tendencies are getting mixed up when talking about psychology.

> Everything I've learned from psychology (and by this I mean watching psychology lectures from Yale and Stanford

Also interesting that sensationalized statements always end up coming from places like that, exclusively pertaining to the rotten individualist lifestyle in the United States.

Psylocybin Mushrooms, 2.5g every three weeks. After 6 months I'm assure you that people around you won't think personality changes are difficult.

It may be that those things are all predictive on average, because most people don't take steps to change them.

- I was a moody mess in college. Having an income and stable partner made life much better.

- I'm glad I didn't marry that young. The partner I have at 37 is much more compatible with me and we have a solid and compassionate relationship with space for the child we've had.

- I exercised more in my 30s if I factor in running. All I did was lift weights before, thinking I was healthy.

- Trauma therapy helped a lot. I can't dramatically change who I am, but life went from bearable to enjoyable.

Good luck :) 67 isn't that bad, at least you might avoid the really bad years.

By making this prediction you already run afoul of the findings in the article!

>At 35 I am starting to suspect that I may be on the spectrum

I mean, the ample parentheticals in your comment are proof enough :)

...which is bunk; the studies that are cited as showing this actually showed changes in the prefrontal cortex up to the oldest people in their study, which was 25-year-olds.

Current research suggests that it continues changing throughout our lives.

It would be rational for things to work that way, but personalities and emotions are not very rational.

There are some people who seem like they have everything in life going for them, and they're still pessimists, their narrative of the world is petty and ugly, or cruel.

Conversely, there are other people who have suffered tragedies that I might consider literally unbearable (i.e. suicide-worthy), and they are still optimists.

I think these are more fundamental personality traits. You can see it in siblings that grow up in essentially identical conditions, but one has a "sunny disposition" and another is anxious and worried.

Well there's the old story about the lonely mountain blacksmith from hillbilly times who was hard at work one day, when the beautiful widow from the next mountain over came in and wanted him to fix her broken iron. You know, the kind they had before electricity. So he dropped everything and got right to working on it, and was proud to make it better than new in only about 15 minutes.

She was very thankful, gave him a big smile and then he asked her if it would be OK if he called on her real soon. The only thing is, he was a strong-hearted gentleman, but not very tall, less than 5 feet. And she was a statuesque beauty, just over 6 feet tall. But she was agreeable right away, and he said "How about a kiss good-bye right now?", she nodded and he jumped right up on top of his anvil, gave her a big hug and kiss and there was some excitement between them.

Looking straight into her eyes he then tells her she doesn't have to leave so soon, and they can go out in back and pick some fresh flowers on a wonderful spring day, to take home with her. The hard work can wait for a little while.

It is very romantic and they stroll around for a few minutes until they come to the spot where the roses are growing, then he asks her for another kiss. She was too bashful this time, and said that once was enough for their first meeting, but she was looking forward to having him visit. He said "I understand, but if there's not gonna be any more kissin', I think I'll put this anvil down."

My personal feeling is that the reason has to do with the mindset that comes from a combination of taking more responsibility for all of my failures (including the business failures, including result of things other people do) and of deciding that I have control over my situation in a broad sense. For example, I could find myself unlucky at any given moment, when I get cheated and lose money, have an accident, someone gets mad at me, or business goes down because of something in the news. All of these things used to make me feel unlucky, but I started to think instead that unlucky things are the result of a situation I put myself into from earlier past decisions. Whatever bad situation comes my way, my life decisions lead me there, so it’s somehow my fault. I started assuming responsibility for all bad luck, and that makes me always ask the question what earlier choices lead me there, and how can I make better choices, even when the answer is thinking about how to avoid unlucky situations that really were out of my control.

This might be one reason why successful founders and other optimists often attribute their success to hard work, but I should add that I do believe strongly that luck plays a very big part in success, and there are downsides to forgetting that or being unable to see it. I try not to take all responsibility for the good things that happen to me, even though that makes me inconsistent.

That said, one way that I think luck can feed optimism is realizing that because success is lucky, it means I should try a lot of different things rather that work harder and try to fix bad situations. If nine out of ten startups fail, then try ten startups!

So… yes my optimism is learned, and luck plays a part. My feeling is that deciding to take responsibility for my failures caused a mental shift towards greater optimism. Maybe that’s rationalization on my part, I can’t tell, but I do feel like it was more than luck.

Your mindset absolutely has an influence on outcomes - how you come off to other people influences how they react to you and treat you. How you look at a problem influences whether you decide to engage with it, and how.

This exists in a gradient space - some things are more readily influenced in this way, others are not, a few are (nearly) completely untouched.

Existence, that is - the Universe, is a complex system. We know at least a few things about those:

- they behave in unintuitive ways. Attempting to predict the behavior of a complex system has an inverse relationship with the granularity and specificity of the prediction.

- the behavior of the whole is unrepresentable in the behavior of the constituent parts (you cannot drive an axle to work, unless it is part of a car)

- they are very resilient against attempts at control, but more susceptible to influence

- they can exhibit features like recursion, inertia, and attraction. Each of these has specific consequences for the behavior of the whole.

The relationship between outlook and outcome is bidirectional - one influences the other and vice versa. This structure has a high chance to exhibit recursive reinforcement, which is why I think we're used to seeing very optimistic and very pessimistic outlooks, with not so many 'middle-of-the-road' types. It does provide a lever to push, however, if one has the fortitude to push through the failures on the way to that tipping point.

I have a brain and as my wife once told me in a moment of frustration.

"You're just happy to be here" and that is true. I didn't ask to be born and I've generally not enjoyed it, I'm only here because random luck geographically and temporarily allowed me to just squeak by surviving childhood and adolescents, I am a few years away from a cardiological surgery I could easily die in.

But, it's all so damn funny isn't it, what an odd thing to be alive, a little cluster of atoms arranged human wise. I hope I die not having achieved what I want to achieve, I hope, like sharks, I never keep moving.

Humans generate meaning, we are the known, empirically observed generators of the mosy complex meaning in existence and we still don't know and haven't created most stuff, it's early days yet. In the meantime, we're part of the entropic cycle, and we emit meaning the way stars emit photons.

People will say we aren't special, but we are, special and rare and should be preserved, dolphins, et all should be too, but let it be observed that it will be humans and not dolphins that deflect asteroids for the foreseeable future.

Many times when things got bad I thought I'd kill myself, I woke up from so many surgeries I started getting disappointed when I'd wake up, but I was too damn curious about what happens next, I can always end it tomorrow, nbd, I look forward to the perma nap, I'm an accident that shouldn't exist and I can exert casual leverage on the world with mere speech.

Who knows what the future holds, let's give dolphins thumbs, let's give silicon rockets to explore the universe, let's engineer long life so we can start worrying about solving entropy instead of whether or not a single spinning rocks "mid air collision" or 5 degree increase in temperature will cause total societal collapse and put an end to our weird little epicenter of meaning generation.

Maybe we solve entropy, maybe we figure out how to change the topology of spacetime, maybe we don't, it's too early to tell.

Optimism is just the headspace to try again, it's not emotional ignorance, it's not positivity, it's the curiosity to keep trying new experiments, and the humility to not be intellectually certain of despair.

If you start getting out there and communicating with real people on intimate level - most addictions melt away by itself.

It makes more sense to focus on the root cause instead of fighting the symptoms.

Not wealth specifically, but income is probably as good of a controlling factor.

> "For NAS, the demographics model includes baseline age, being white, being married, education, *family income*, and father’s occupation"

Anyway, this definition of optimism

> or the belief that the future will be favorable because one can control important outcomes

Isn't what one colloquially means by it.

Though it is eye catching that it will make a positive impact even if you don't, actually, control important outcomes, like by not smoking

> These relations were independent of socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors (e.g., smoking, diet, and alcohol use). Overall, findings suggest optimism may be an important psychosocial resource for extending life span in older adults.

Pessimists look at anything good as an unexpected bonus.

All the good humorists are pessimists.

We don't like to talk about it, but there is a biological component to how happy or anxious someone is. Not to say that everyone is doomed to be a certain way because of their genetics, but I've known people who are basically never sad, and it's not because they've found some kind of secret of happiness. I have a friend who has the temperament of a golden retriever.

Which makes even more sense, since stress affects all cause mortality and all kinds of outcomes, and even mere positive disposition towards a treatment is found to make a big difference in patients.