A listener asked me a question I couldn't answer straight away, and it took me weeks of thinking to get anywhere near a response. I'd said on the podcast that a timeless mind and an ageless body come from presence. Fair enough, they said — but what's the actual mechanism? How does that work?
I want to attempt an honest answer here, including the parts where the honest answer is "not as neatly as I made it sound."
The fantasy at the heart of anti-ageing
Let me start with the uncomfortable bit. Ageing is inevitable. Whatever the experts tell you, whatever the latest protocol promises, you are going to age.
Can we extend life? Almost certainly, to a degree. Is there an upper limit? Only time will tell. But can we stop the process? No. Life is transformative by nature. It doesn't stand still, it doesn't hold its shape, and we have no mechanism for freezing it.
I find a useful parallel in physics. Scientists have spent a very long time trying to cool matter to the point where all movement ceases — absolute zero. They've got remarkably close. They've never got there. There is always some minuscule residual motion. That's roughly how I think about pure presence: we can get closer, we can get very close indeed, but the absolute isn't available to us. Our minds wander. Thoughts arrive. That's not a failure of practice, it's the nature of being alive.
So when I talk about a timeless mind, I'm describing a direction of travel, not a destination. We reach degrees of presence, and those degrees improve with practice. We don't reach permanence.
How the obsession turns on you
Here's where it gets interesting, and where I think the real risk sits.
Fixating on longevity can accelerate exactly what you're trying to prevent. Not through any mysterious mechanism, but through something quite ordinary: your emotional state. When you're obsessed with not ageing, every cue that you are ageing becomes distressing. A slower recovery. A stiffer morning. A number on a test result. Each one lands as a small grief.
And we do this in two directions. We either fantasise about a future self who'll finally be optimised, or we're emotionally stuck in a past self — my body worked so much better back then. Either way we're not here. We're somewhere else, comparing, wishing things were different, generating a steady low hum of dissatisfaction about a body we're currently living in.
I'd offer that framing as a lens rather than a proven mechanism. But I've seen enough of it in myself and in clients to take it seriously. Chronic dissatisfaction is not a neutral state.
Purpose does more than any pill
If you asked me for the single highest-leverage thing you could do for a long, good life, I wouldn't point you at a supplement cupboard. I'd ask you what you're for.
Here's my concern with the way longevity is marketed. People reach for pills and protocols hoping to extend a life they're not currently enjoying — as though more years will eventually deliver the meaning that's missing now. I'd far rather you found the meaning first. Living with genuine direction and purpose tends to bring energy and vitality with it, which is exactly what the protocols are promising to sell you.
Because extending life is a wonderful thing when the life is meaningful. The challenge I see constantly is that many of us are, broadly speaking, a bit lost — without a strong sense of why we're here or what we're contributing. Adding decades to that isn't the win it sounds like. Prolonging a life you're not enjoying is simply prolonging it.
And there's a practical argument too. What works brilliantly for one person can do nothing for the next, or work against them. We have different genetics, different environments, different histories. The longevity influencer whose routine transformed their energy is reporting on a sample size of one, and that one isn't you.
Healthspan, not lifespan
This is the distinction I'd like you to hold onto, because it reframes the whole question.
What almost nobody actually wants is more years in a hospital bed. What we want is vitality — the capacity to enjoy the later decades, to be active in them, to be present for the people in them. That's healthspan, and it's a different target from lifespan.
When you aim at healthspan through purpose, the ageing itself starts to read differently. If you must call it ageing, you can equally call it becoming wiser — accumulating the understanding that only comes from having lived a while. That's not a consolation prize. For most of the people I admire most, it's the actual prize.
The speed at which we age depends on far more variables than any single intervention: environment, genetics, and I'd argue how well we stay on purpose and avoid living in emotional comparison with a self that no longer exists or doesn't yet.
Key takeaways
- Accept that ageing is inevitable. Fighting that fact is what costs you, not the ageing itself.
- Aim for degrees of presence, not permanent presence. The absolute isn't on offer and chasing it is its own frustration.
- Notice when you're emotionally living in a past or future body. That comparison is the thing worth interrupting.
- Find your purpose now rather than hoping extra years will deliver it later.
- Target healthspan — vitality and capacity in your later decades — rather than lifespan alone.
- Be sceptical of anyone whose longevity routine worked for them. Your genetics and environment are not theirs.
- Reframe ageing as accumulating wisdom. It's the same process with a far more useful story attached.
Where I'd start
To be clear, I'm not telling you that nutrition and supplementation don't matter. They do, and genuine deficiencies, particular life stages and clinically indicated supplements are real and worth addressing properly with testing and a practitioner. If you're taking something your doctor has recommended, keep taking it. My argument isn't against the tools. It's against reaching for the tools while leaving the foundation untouched.
That foundation is the holistic approach we take at me&my wellness: your nutrition, your movement, your sleep, your stress and your sense of purpose considered together, as one system, rather than as a shopping list. In my experience, the person living with real direction and reasonable habits does better over a lifetime than the person with an immaculate protocol and no idea what it's for.
And if a question like the one that prompted this has been sitting with you, ask it. I've learned as much from being asked things I couldn't immediately answer as from anything I've studied. Staying curious is, I suspect, its own longevity practice.
Want to go deeper on this? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Anthony at meandmywellness.com.au