If you want to create your own Longevity Roadmap™, I highly recommend you read Barbara’s guest post and consider her workshop in March in Baja. She’s also the featured speaker at the prestigious Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on February 19.
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
When Henry David Thoreau penned these words, he wasn’t thinking about longevity science or wellness protocols. Yet his insight cuts to the heart of a question I’ve been wrestling with lately: In our quest for a longer life, how much of today are we willing to sacrifice?
It’s a paradox I see often in my work with Middlescents. We meticulously track our steps, optimize our sleep, and carefully monitor our nutrition—all valuable practices, to be sure. But in this rush to quantify and optimize every aspect of our lives we often end up with feelings of stagnation or overwhelm. It’s too easy to lose sight of what matters most: the moments of genuine connection, spontaneous joy, and pure presence that make life worth extending in the first place.
This is why becoming your own Chief Risk Officer (CRO), your own Caution Commander, is about more than just minimizing health risks or maximizing lifespan. It’s about consciously making choices that honor both your present wellbeing and your future vitality.
Consider this: The most common regrets shared by those in their final years never center on wishing they’d tracked more metrics or followed stricter protocols. They wish they’d spent more time with loved ones, allowed themselves to feel their feelings fully, laughed more or paused to experience the awe of more sunsets. The irony? These very experiences—connection, emotional awareness, and moments of awe—are now known to contribute significantly to both longevity and health-span.
So how do we strike this delicate balance? How do we invest in our future and our Trophy Years without mortgaging our present?
The answer lies in becoming a different kind of CRO—one who assesses risk through the lens of both quantity and quality of life. This means:
- Questioning the “life exchange rate” of our choices: What are we truly giving up, and what are we gaining?
- Recognizing that some of the best investments in tomorrow might be the very things that bring us joy today
- Understanding that a meaningful and sustainable longevity roadmap should enhance, not diminish, our current quality of life, even when we are pushing ourselves into the discomfort zone
Next month, I’ll be leading The Longevity Roadmap™ workshop at MEA’s Baja campus where we’ll dive deeply into these concepts and help you create your personal roadmap to make your life better now and prepare for joyful, engaged and healthy decades ahead.
Together, we’ll explore how to:
- Assess how to prioritize lifestyle choices that serve both your present and future self
- Create sustainable practices that enrich rather than restrict your life
- Design your path to the “Trophy Years” you envision
- Build the discernment to know when to optimize and when to simply live
If you’re ready to become your own Chief Risk Officer, your own Caution Commander, and create a personal longevity roadmap that honors both your present joy and future vitality, I invite you to join me.
-Barbara
Barbara Waxman is a highly sought-after gerontologist, coach, and longevity advocate who has been studying the art and science of aging for more than 40 years. As creator of the Longevity Roadmap™ and founder of The Odyssey Group, she leads people to design a highly personalized approach to aging well, helping them create lives that are as vital and meaningful as they are long. One of MEA’s original faculty members, Barbara also serves as an Advisory Council Member for the Stanford Center on Longevity and Stanford Lifestyle Medicine and is a member of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.