People spend billions of euros to look younger.
The desire to look younger has spurred a huge anti-aging industry. Many books, supplements, videos, courses and Insta,gram accounts help fight the signs of aging. In addition, there are weight loss clinics, personal trainers, nutrition consultants, and other health gurus who help their clients stay young. Anti-aging creams and cosmetics hide some of the signs of time. With cosmetic treatments or surgery, you can even lose a decade or two of weight the way you look.
I don’t want to be old.
We all want to “grow old,” but do we really want to be old? We are like death because of loss of function, weakness, or deterioration of “what was.” This makes aging an increasingly important focus of the medical and pharmaceutical industry. Between 2012 and 2018, the number of clinical trials targeting “aging” doubled. Companies such as GSK, Novartis, Celgene and Abbvie have invested in this area over the years. But many young companies are also targeting the longevity market. In fact, investment in longevity startups has increased 16-fold over the same period.
Meanwhile, various methods are being explored,
from older pharmaceuticals such as metformin and rapamycin ( bragging note: I worked on both products ), to a new class of drugs called senolytics, which have been shown to prolong life in mice. Special nutritional supplements, targeted exercise and weighted caloric restriction methods have also become a priority in the race for longevity. But there are more futuristic-sounding solutions on the horizon. Think about using printed organs or stem cell-derived drugs to obtain blood plasma from younger people.Longevity startups
have become increasingly popular lately . There’s the story of BioSplice, which today is already valued at a staggering $11.6 billion , representing over 20% of the rejuvenation and longevity industry. There is the recent story of pharmaceutical company Abbvie investing another 1 billion euros in Google’s Calico Life Science . There are various stories about famous billionaire investors in longevity startups, such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Disney, and many others. And finally, the story of Altos Labs’ top executives .which includes some of the most prominent names in the life sciences: from leading pharmaceutical leaders (e.g., GSK and Genentech) and Nobel Prize winners to genius CRISPR pioneers and famous medical technology founders (e.g. , GRAIL, Juno Therapeutics). Longevity has redefined “big” in the startup world.
Life is what it is. People’s attitudes toward aging are changing as people live longer and stronger. Yes, we get older and grayer. Yes, some wrinkles characterize our faces. Aging is also no longer just a stepping stone to death. We want to “grow old.” But we don’t want to feel old. In this case, aging means living well or aging well. And we’re bound to see a blossoming of this ageless aging trend in the next couple of years. Almost every industry will be affected.
Suppose we apply this latter trend to aging without aging.
In this case, you can put it this way: people may still want to (1) prevent their health from deteriorating, but they also want to (2) accept, (3) enjoy and, if possible, (4) grow. “their health” as they get older. The beauty industry has been well aware of this and has changed its entire strategy for dealing with aging.
