Living for 500 Years: Health, Wealth, and Alignment

Living below one's means and prioritizing health fosters a fulfilling life, especially when envisioning a long future.

### Embracing a 500-Year Mindset: Living Below Your Means and Prioritizing Health
* 🌱 "Act as if you're going to live forever," encourages the idea of prioritizing **health and longevity** in life choices.
* 💡 Imagining a life expectancy of 500 years suggests that individuals should focus on **staying healthy and alive**, as future advancements may **eliminate many diseases and aging issues**.
* 💰 To achieve this, one should **live below their means**, as demonstrated by the speaker's annual living expenses of approximately **$48,000**.
* 🌳 The philosophy of "**radical alignment**" emphasizes living in harmony with personal truths and needs, prioritizing **individual well-being** over societal and economic pressures.
* 📉 The speaker critiques consumerism and encourages engaging in anti-consumption, suggesting that **happiness can be found in meaningful, low-cost experiences** rather than material possessions.
* 🏞 Nature is highlighted as a **vital component for health and happiness**, with the speaker advocating for **daily engagement with the outdoors**.
* 🧠 The journey to align one's life with personal values and needs may be challenging and requires **patience, introspection, and a willingness to resist societal expectations**.
* 🔄 Ultimately, this approach is about redefining priorities and embracing a lifestyle that promotes **well-being and fulfillment** over conventional economic success.

what's up everybody back in my natural habitat. So before I get started, I really need to add a critical disclaimer. This is not financial advice. This is not legal advice. This is not medical advice. I'm literally just going to tell you how I live, the reasoning behind what I do, and so on and so forth. So the central thesis here is act as if you're going to live forever. Now, some of you pointed out in the comments that statistically speaking, even if you have biological immortality, chances are like most people, like you have a life expectancy of about 500 years before you're likely to get killed by an accident or something. So just for the sake of this thought experiment, imagine that you have 500 years, that you're going to be essentially in a 22-year-old body for the next 500 years. How are you going to live? What are you going to do? What are you going to prioritize? So this is why people like me and Brian Johnson say like just don't die, like literally your

strategy for the next 5, 10, 20 years: just stay alive, just stay healthy. Because at the end of that, between AGI, ASI, and everything else, Quantum Computing, we will probably solve 99% of disease and aging. So, it's like, okay, then what? Then you've got plenty of time to do whatever else you've got. And so, that's kind of the premise, that's the starting assumptions that I'm making here. So, then it's like, okay, well, if you're going to live that long, you don't need to save for retirement 'cause why? You know, like, what are all the horror stories that us, um, well, some of you older people in the audience, Gen X, um, us Millennials and Gen Z? It's all like, well, you got to save for retirement, CU. What if you get cancer? You know, then you're going to need a million and a half dollars for cancer treatments. Otherwise, you just die. You know, you need to afford good health insurance. Otherwise, you're just, you know, you're

going to croak and who cares then um and then of course there's you know climate change, climate crisis, and I know some of you out there are super skeptical of it um person, and here's what we all agree: yes, climate change is real, climate crisis is real, it's probably not going to impact most of us on an individual basis too terribly much, but I say most of us. For some people, it's going to be awful. Anyways, moving on. So for this thought experiment, you've got 500 years of basic, you know, like you're going to be pretty healthy. So then how do you live? 'Cause I get this question a lot, a lot of people message me either on Patreon, Substack, or in the comments. You guys are like, Well, do I go to school? What do I do? And I'm like, I try not to give really specific advice because one, I could be wrong, right? Like that's always a true thing, but at the same time, maybe it makes sense to just tell you what I'm

doing and why I'm doing things the way that I am. So first and foremost on the money front, live below your means. So I read The Millionaire Next Door many years ago, gosh probably 15 years ago, and one of the chief lessons of The Millionaire Next Door is live below your means. You can't always make more money; you often can, but it's way easier to go without. And so I fortunately watched Fight Club when I was a teenager. So Fight Club was like the Gen X, the final gasp of the Gen X rebellion against consumerism. And so now we have like r/anti-consumption, and so on and so forth. But if you really watch Fight Club, if you rewatch it through the lens of anti-consumption, what is it that Brad Pitt says? He says something like, Advertisers sell you that you don't need so that you can impress people that you don't like. That really resonated with me. So I was like, Yeah, to heck with that. Like who needs to

buy stuff just for the sake of buying stuff. And so, I checked out of that rat race before I was even in the workforce. So, live below your means. I have my living expenses, uh, have rarely exceeded $40,000 a year, um, and even, I think last year my wife and I added it up. Even together, our living expenses totaled around $48,000 a year. And like, this is what I do for fun. This is free, right? Like state parks, national parks, um, you know, there's lots and lots of free stuff that you can do, um. You do not need a lot of money to live a healthy, fulfilling, and meaningful life as long as you check out of the, uh, Edward Bern's consumerist lifestyle, which if you're not familiar with what I'm talking about. Basically, consumerism as a public narrative was created by Edward Bernes back in the, what was it, the '50s. Anyways, he was the nephew of Sigman Freud, and oh, by the way, Edward Bernay hated people. He's actually the

one who started the uh that Mantra that people are just sheep and that you can lead sheep to the slaughter because he had nothing but contempt for people once he realized how to manipulate people and so he's the Godfather of Modern Advertising modern propaganda and all that fun stuff so you check out of the consumerist lifestyle live below your means that's what I've been doing for the 15 years it is how I am able to afford to do everything else that I do so that's Point number one and then point number two is like prioritize Health this is why I started that body first living movement I don't know if it's a movement but it's a philosophy that I live by which is basically I'm just trying to optimize for my heart rate variability um heart rate variability if you're not familiar with is one of the easiest ways to measure your physical stress so again not medical advice this is just what I do um but heart rate variability is a great proxy for physical mental emotional stress so the higher your heart rate

variability, the better. And so, if my heart rate variability, just for instance, drops below 50, I know that I'm in bad shape and I need to rest. If it's above, then I'm out here, I'm doing everything that I need to do to take care of myself. Why? Because, again, just stay alive. And so, you might say, Okay, well, those are like great short-term heris STS, but what about larger decisions? Like, what about larger strategic ideas for life? And it's like, Well, if you honestly believe that you might have the next 500 years to do whatever, you know, I kind of like one of the examples that I draw from is the Asari from Mass Effect who live a thousand years. And it's like, You know, imagine if you're 100 years old and your life is just getting started, like Liara from Mass Effect 1. Like, that's kind of where we're going to be. Like, I expect that at the dawn of the 22nd century, most of

us who like you are in the audience, and me, we're still going to be having this conversation 70, 80 years from now, and we're going to realize that in the grand scheme of things, we're still in the first part of our life. And I know, like, I've got some gray in my beard. I look through Google Photos, and before the pandemic, I didn't have any gray in my beard. So, thanks for that pandemic. Um, anyways, so prioritize health, live below your means. I mean, honestly, those are the two primary things. But then, on a longer time scale, I've studied all kinds of frameworks, from the Japanese concept of ikigai to Roger Walsh's TLC, so Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes, um, self-determination theory. I mean, there's all kinds of frameworks out there, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, um, the status game by Will Storr. There is all kinds of stuff that we can spend the next 500 years doing, whether or not you need to make money. I'm sure that money is going to

stick around as well capitalism. It's going to be different. I do agree with the people who say that it's going to be different. No, I'm not in love with these systems as some of you out there in the audience say. They just happen to be the status quo, and it's really difficult to dislodge the status quo. And the best way to dislodge the status quo is through changing everything with technology. Technology has an inexorable habit of completely disrupting socioeconomic and political systems. Anyways, getting off topic, this is about how to live. So, this is where I came up with the idea of what I call radical alignment. And I actually renamed one of my other YouTube channels to radical alignment. So, radical alignment is basically living in lockstep, living within your own truth, and with integrity as to how your brain, body, and spirit want to live. And so, for me, the reason that I'm out here is because I am happiest and healthiest when I am out in nature every day. So, unless it's like actively

raining and oh, by the way, I tried to come out here a few days ago when it was raining, and I about fell into the river a few times because the trail was so muddy. But I just, I'm best out in nature, and I know some of you don't like nature, but um, nature is good for you. Not going to tell you what to do, but just the evidence is there. Nature is good for you. So, for my physical needs, for my spiritual needs, for my psychological needs, I need to be out here in nature. So, that's what I'm doing. And rather than prioritizing economic productivity or social pressure, I am prioritizing my animal-human needs. And so, this is what I call, this is why I call it radical alignment. So, there's basically three antagonistic pressures that we all have to contend with. One, economic pressure, which of course, that's why I referred to um, Fight Club and consumerism, because right now, the prevailing economic doctrine is that we have a consumption-based economy that

consumer demand is what drives everything, and so therefore, if you're going to be a good citizen, you need to spend all of your money. But at the same time, they also tell you that you need to save for retirement and save in case you get cancer. So it's like, well, what are we supposed to do, spend or save? Because if we spend everything, it's our fault for being poor, but if we save, then it's our fault for stalling the economy. You just can't win in a consumerist mindset. So get rid of that. Who cares? Watch Fight Club or whatever, you know? Go join r/anti-consumption, um, and like deal with less, be happy with less. And I'm not saying you will own nothing and be happy. I'm talking more about the Buddhist approach of like just go without, um, so be happy with less, engage with stuff that's free and more meaningful, um, and then there's social pressures. So like keeping up with the Joneses, as Brad Pitt said in Fight Club, don't buy stuff to impress people. You

don't like you. You don't like them anyways. Find better people to hang out with who are radically aligned with your values, with what you find meaningful, with what you find fun. So yeah, those are the three pressures, which is yourself, like what you need as an individual, there's the collective or Society, what Society tells you, and then there's the economic incentive to earn money and take care of yourself. And radical alignment just says we're going to move the self up to the top of that series of priorities, and then social pressure and economic pressure are second and third, depending on how you want to live, 'cause you do still need to make some money, right, for the foreseeable future. There is always going to be social pressure, but particularly so here's kind of the Genesis of this idea. I read Unmasking Autism a couple of years ago when I realized that I'm like neuros spicy as hell, and so I was like, okay, one of the things that they recommend.

that Devon Price recommends in this book is aligning to your true needs, whether that's your true interests. Because us neurodivergent people, we have special interests, and everyone has special interests, by the way, whether or not you're neurodivergent. Everyone has preferred patterns of living, the preferred people we'd like to spend with. We all have sensory needs, we all have dietary needs. And so, taking that to the next logical step, I was like, What if everyone lives in alignment with what they actually need? What if everyone actually lives in alignment with what they truly care about? And so, thus was born radical alignment. And then I realized, Okay, from a structural standpoint, this is just about shifting priorities. It's putting the self above economic and social pressures. That's it. Because part of a big part of the thesis of Unmasking Autism is getting rid of social pressures, because the mask is put on to you by society, saying, You must behave in this way, you must follow this default template, you must, uh, uh, whatever, think in this certain way, and so of

course me always being weird and having grown up watching movies like Fight Club. I'm like, yeah, Stick it to the Man, do your own thing, so on and so forth. So anyways, I hope this is helpful. That's my theory of what to do. So just a quick recap. It is um first live below your means um engage in anti-consumption. Number two prioritize your health act as if you're going to live for the next 500 years because in all likelihood, at least in my opinion, you're probably going to live for the next 500 years. Um and then uh radical alignment which is prioritize the self in all of your personal truth whether it's your neurological needs psychological needs physical needs put the self over society and economic pressures and that's it. That's how I live and um it's a process. It takes a lot of patience um and also making some of these changes are big and scary moving cities quitting jobs changing relationships changing habits. All of these things take a lot of time and energy and patience and introspection.

and some of them are scary, and there's going to be pressures to change back. Um, sometimes your friends or family are going to be like, I don't like this new you. You should go back to the way things were. Um, sometimes your own brain will say, You're misbehaving. You're playing hookie. You need to do something else with your life. You need... And I still fight this, by the way. I still fight workaholism. I still fight that busy-holic need to make more money. Um, even though I've always lived below my means. Um, and I still have that neoliberal capitalist programming. So, deprogramming yourself takes a long time. Anyways, I'm rambling now. I think you get the idea. Let me know what you think in the comments. Um, again, I cannot emphasize enough: not medical advice, not financial advice, not legal advice. This is just what I'm doing and the theory that I operate by. So, thanks for watching. Cheers. Have a good one.

Act as if you'll live to 500 - How I'm living in light of AI (career, education, money, etc)

Navigating the Fourth Industrial Revolution!


David Shapiro

The speaker emphasizes the importance of acting as if you'll live for 500 years, suggesting that staying alive and healthy should be the top priority.

They challenge the traditional notion of saving for retirement, arguing that with a long life ahead, there's no need to stress about future financial burdens.

The speaker also acknowledges the reality of climate change but believes its impact will vary for individuals.

Living Below Your Means and Prioritizing Health

Living below your means is a key lesson from "The Millionaire Next Door" and has been a guiding principle for 15 years.

The influence of "Fight Club" and its anti-consumerism message further reinforced this mindset.

Prioritizing health through heart rate variability measurement is another important aspect of the author's philosophy for a fulfilling life.

The Importance of Heart Rate Variability and Long-Term Life Strategies

Heart rate variability is a key indicator of health, with a drop below 50 signaling the need for rest.

The speaker envisions a future where people live for centuries, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing health and living below one's means.

They advocate for "radical alignment," which involves living in harmony with one's true self and values, and highlight the potential for technology to disrupt and change socioeconomic systems.

Prioritizing Nature and Radical Alignment

The speaker emphasizes the importance of being in nature for their physical, spiritual, and psychological needs, advocating for a radical alignment with animal-human needs.

They critique the conflicting pressures of a consumption-based economy, where individuals are torn between spending and saving.

The speaker encourages a minimalist approach, promoting the idea of being happy with less and engaging in free and meaningful activities, while also rejecting the social pressure to impress others through material possessions.

Radical alignment prioritizes individual needs over social and economic pressures.

The idea was inspired by the book "Unmasking Autism," which emphasizes the importance of aligning with one's true interests and needs.

The goal is to create a shift in priorities, allowing individuals to live authentically and in harmony with what they truly care about.

The speaker advocates for living below one's means and engaging in anti-consumption.

They emphasize prioritizing health and personal truth, aiming for radical alignment with one's needs.

The process of making significant life changes is challenging and requires patience, introspection, and the ability to resist societal pressures.