The Longevity Myth: Why Living Longer Isn’t Always Better

Hyperbaric chambers, IV drips, enzymes, biometric scans, plasma exchange and ultra-exclusive clinics retreats: longevity has become the new luxury frontier. Once framed as medical research, the quest to live longer is now a multimillion-dollar industry selling the promise of “forever” to those who can afford it.

For midlife women, this obsession arrives at a particularly vulnerable moment. As our bodies change and cultural pressure around aging intensifies, the anti-aging industry positions longevity as both salvation and status symbol.

But what happens when science is replaced by hype and aging itself is treated as a disease?

In his latest book “Morbid“, scientist at University College London, Saul Newman, dismantles what he calls the “myth of longevity”: not the serious study of aging, but the almost-religious belief that living longer is the highest possible good—and that science can sell it to us like skincare.

He argues that much of today’s longevity boom is built on weak evidence, deregulation, and fear-driven marketing. The result is not better health, but a narrowing definition of what it means to live well.

As the focus shifts from quality of life to sheer lifespan, it’s time to ask a harder question: are we chasing more years or losing joy along the way?

When Longevity Science Becomes Marketing

There is a moment in midlife when the cultural noise around aging grows deafening: optimize your biomarkers, reverse your age, hack your hormones, live longer, whatever it takes. The promise is seductive, especially for women who have spent decades being told that our value peaks early and declines fast.

Why does this argument matters profoundly to midlife women? Because we are the prime targets.

Reading the work of researcher Saul Newman from the Oxford Institute About Population Ageing, feels like cold water on the face, in the best possible way. Newman doesn’t mince words. The longevity craze, he argues, is one of the clearest examples of how science can lose credibility when it is bent to serve marketing and money. What is sold as “disruption” is often little more than rebranding: old fantasies of immortality dressed up in biotech jargon, venture capital, and celebrity endorsements.

“Think of longevity– Newman says-  as the Bitcoin of medicine. A shiny new label that conveniently sidesteps regulation while claiming to reinvent the future“.

From miracle supplements sold via email in the early 2000s, to Harvard professors promoting compounds like resveratrol (once hailed as the anti-aging secret hidden in red wine, later shown to cause little more than digestive distress), the pattern is familiar: hype first, evidence later (if ever). And the stakes are no longer trivial.

What truly worries Newman isn’t just pseudoscience; it’s policy. In recent years, especially in the U.S., lobbying efforts have pushed through laws that allow unproven treatments to reach the public after only the earliest phase of clinical testing.But hope without evidence is not empowerment. It is risk, disproportionately borne by those who are aging, anxious, and willing to pay (emotionally and financially) for a promise of control.

The Longevity Obsession

It’s clear that the obsession with longevity now touches nearly all of us, so much so that Time magazine has devoted an entire issue to it.

My concern is that sooner rather than later, an unnatural selection of the human species will quietly unfold and only the economically strongest will survive. Multimillionaires can afford detox transfusion packages ranging from $8,000 to $12,000, or personalized consultations with longevity doctors like Peter Attia, whose fame started in Silicon Valley and now extends across California with genetic testing, biomarker analysis, and cardiac CT scans costing between $40,000 and $150,000 per session—plus follow-up check-ins. Elsewhere, the price tag climbs even higher: luxury wellness retreats in cities from Zurich to Dubai charge $50,000 to $200,000 for 10–15 day stays.

Yet this burgeoning longevity industry raises deeper ethical and scientific questions.

As geneticist David Sinclair observes: “How can you think about eternity when there are people in the world who don’t survive?” Moreover, “none of the so-called pro-age products have received WHO certification confirming their effectiveness,” warns the international committee that coordinates medical journal The Lancet.

Living better not longer

For midlife women, already navigating menopause, changing bodies, and a medical system that often dismisses our symptoms, this should raise alarms. When aging itself is framed as a disease, women become perpetual patients. When youth is currency, our fear is the business model.

Perhaps the most radical part of Newman’s work is not what he debunks, but what he questions. What if aging isn’t simply mechanical decline? What if the basic metaphor—humans as machines that inevitably wear out—is wrong?

In a striking study, Newman analyzed data from 65 million vehicles and found something counterintuitive: after a certain point, older vehicles that are still running are less likely to fail. Survival itself changes the math. Aging, he suggests, is more complex—and more surprising—than the dominant narrative allows.

Nature, after all, is full of contradictions. Some organisms live longer when they stop reproducing. Some plants bloom once after a century and then die. Bees sacrifice themselves for the hive. Longevity is not the ultimate value in biology—function, meaning, and context are.

Rethinking Aging

So why, Newman asks, should humans obsess over living 800 years in a joyless world that measures worth only in time lived, not life experienced?

This is where his critique intersects powerfully with women’s lives. Midlife is not a problem to be solved. It’s not a failure of maintenance. It’s a transition, biological, psychological, social, and while good science can and should help us live healthier lives, the cult of longevity risks stealing something vital: our permission to prioritize joy, connection, purpose, and pleasure now.

Not later. Not “after optimization.” We do not need to be younger. We need to be freer, from myths that tell us our bodies are broken, from industries that profit from our fear, from the idea that more years automatically mean more life. The real question is not “How long can we live?” It is: “How fully can we live—at this age, in this body, in this world?”

And that is not a question Silicon Valley can answer for us.

Like this post? Support Us or Sign up to our newsletter to get more articles like this delivered straight to your inbox!