A few years ago, a group of scientists asked me to discover the code for immortality. Everybody was okay with being 100 if they could still be independent, which meant going to the bathroom alone, but nobody wanted to be 200. They told me, « All my friends are going to be dead.”
Today, the Zeitgeist has changed. There are close to 800,000 centenarians worldwide, more than the entire population of Luxembourg. The predictions are that by 2050, we will have over 4 million centenarians, which is twice more than the population of Iceland. But this is not all. Being 110 is becoming very common, and more people surpassing 110: Jeanne Clement in France is 122, and Kane Tanaka in Japan is 118.
This gives us an entirely different perspective. According to experts, 130 will soon be our « reasonable expectation.” We should not think about how old we are but how many decades of life we still have in front of us.
I discovered then that we have three ways to look at age.
- The date on your passport: your official age.
- Your biological age: we now say that 70 is the new 50.
- Our psychological age: we found that people in retirement homes acted more like teenagers than grandparents. They don’t respect the rules, they are rude, always looking for sex, and complain all the time.
Rupert Murdoch is getting married at 92 with a very young woman who is 66.
Okay, it helps to have a lot of money, but 92, WOW.
Centenarians usually have a unique sense of purpose. It is not just the Okinawa diet that keeps them alive over 100 (86,510 Japanese are over 100) but what they call « Ikigaï, » or your higher purpose.
An old friend told me, « I am too busy; I don’t have time to die. » He was very busy creating animal shelters.
It is never too late to start a new adventure, learn a new language, make new friends, be provocative, discover your new « Ikigaī, » or fight for something or someone you love.
Remember, happiness is a choice.
Happy « Ikigaī”!
