Longevity, Legacy, and the Pursuit of a Meaningful life

Note to self: There's a 1 in 10 billion chance you will live to 120. There's a 1 in 1 chance you'll be loved till the day you die, living for others, taking good medicine, and embracing "YOLO" moments.

Sitting here, pondering my mortality in Coupa Café, Palo Alto - a place where many biotechnology breakthroughs bubbled into Stanford spectaculars, and billion-dollar seed rounds were decided for epic tech giants we know today. All sparked by a chance, overheard murmuring of a bonkers idea from a bold dreamer to a VC's ears.

The power of serendipitously concentrated human beans and coffee beings knows no bounds.

Here, as in decades past, I find myself pondering what’s next, how much time I have left, and what, beyond these spontaneous and AI-less brain dumps, I might do to change the world as other Coupa Café patrons so famously do.

More so than in my venture-backed days, I find myself venturing back to my origins as a child obsessed with how life begins, how it ends, and what we can do to make that magnificent gap brighter and a bit bigger.

I spent time texting with an old friend this morning briefly about life, change, family, and the grief and shame of not being the perfect parent or partner. She'll be just fine, but doesn't it go to show how, no matter how hard you try, plan, and do all the things, human chemistry can just end? And oh, does it do so more often than you expect on that day of white dresses and speeches of eternal unity - hard to hear again today.

Like relationships, biology does not work terribly predictably. Our relationship with life itself, while a marriage, always ends in parting. This is not to say that when that bond breaks, it needs to be a slow, burning fading of the sparks or a fiery divorce. It's what we fill the marriage with, what we put into this most precious and delicate of nests, that counts.

Gripping too tightly onto things you are gifted to borrow for a while squeezes the essence from them.

Gripping onto dreams of life beyond 120 is, for only a very few, their highest form of flourishing. For me and most, it's a promise imposed by loud voices, first movers, shakers, climbers, and fallers.

For me and most, we’re scientifically curious second movers, advantaged by wisdom. We are happy for our "marriage with life" to end before our 120th anniversary, making sure our 90th isn't missed by a stupid move, or at least not by something dull not worth writing a funny obituary story about.

There's a 1 in 700,000 chance your marriage with life will end at 120 if you spend the rest of your life and money perfecting your biological aging, trying to halve it. If you're a woman, it's a bit less ridiculously impossible. But still.

There's a 1 in 1 chance my late-night half-pint of Guinness with an old friend at the Rose and Crown opposite Coupa Café will result in memories that are immune to time and last far beyond when our lives end.

Live with life until you’re bold enough to part as best friends.

Don’t just live until life’s attorneys serve you papers.

Be well,
JK