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Outside Magazine May 2003

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Mr. Natural
Forget the creepy promise of techno-longevity. Instead, take our advice: Live fast, die hard, and leave behind a worn-out, used-up, good-looking corpse.

By Bill McKibben


	(John Clark)

IT WAS 7:15 ON A GRAY WINTER MORNING, and I was walking across an icy parking lot at the Lahey Clinic, outside Boston, when I slipped and went down hard. Banged but not broken, I jumped up in the cartoon-quick way that guys do, as if to imply that I hadn't actually fallen but was just making a planned reconnaissance of the pavement. It was precisely the kind of accident that I'd had my share of in my first 40 years. A fluke, an outlier, unpredictable.

I was headed in for a full-day battery of tests. Lahey is a vast medical city, its walls filled with posters reminding patients that U.S. News & World Report ranked it one of America's top hospitals, a Harvard of healing. Partly I was there as a reporter, finishing work on a book about the efforts of technoscientists to use genes, nanotechnology, and other new disciplines to keep us alive and young forever. But mostly I was there as a recent arrival at that milestone that is 40, ready for my first real overhaul—an "executive physical," they call it. Looked at another way, I was there for my entrance exam into a statistical universe I'll inhabit for the rest of my life.

Your first four decades are the random decades. Maybe you slip on that patch of ice, maybe your SUV rolls into a ditch. But nothing medically serious happens to a large enough group of people to amount to a statistic worth knowing; the leading causes of death are still things like accidents, homicide, suicide, infectious disease. But slowly, subtly, sometime around midlife, your particular data points start to arrange themselves on the larger human curve. Flukes settle into probabilities, percentages. The doctor wants to start tracking your good cholesterol, your bad cholesterol. If you are a male, this new world hits home the first time someone in a white coat puts a glove on and tells you to bend over. ("Mildly enlarged," my Lahey doctor, internist John Przybylski, told me. "You have to get up at night to pee? That's your prostate knocking at the door.") By the end of my day at Lahey, after I'd been through half a dozen tests—from X-ray (obvious signs of arthritis around my lowest vertebra) to colonoscopy to allergy (lung capacity starting to decrease)—the avuncular Dr. P. promised we'd be able to calculate how likely I was to die of a heart attack by the age of 50.

My results were not all that startling, or all that bad, just the first inexorable signs of what could only be termed decline. All on schedule—but that was the point. My body was now on a schedule. "We're here to talk to you about the next 40 or 50 years of your life," the doctor said as he picked up my chart. Looking a little more closely at the dates, he corrected himself subtly: "The next 30 or 40 or 50 years of your life."

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Bill McKibben lives in the Adirondacks. His latest book, Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case for a More Joyful Christmas is on the shelves.

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