Soulspan: Beyond Lifespan and Healthspan to Feeling Alive |
Measuring and improving lifespan and healthspan are important, but what matters more is harder to measure.
Longevity is a means to fully engaging with the people, experiences, and pursuits that color our journey.
Being fully alive is about the joy, satisfaction, and meaning we experience in our years.
As sociologist William Bruce Cameron observed, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."
This is certainly true in medicine.
As a physician specializing in precision health, resilience, and longevity, a field increasingly built around lab values, dashboards, and advanced biomarkers, I value and am perhaps a bit obsessed with the unprecedented data and interventions available today to extend healthy years of life.
But at its core, my work is truly about establishing trust, preserving dignity, sparking inspiration, and guiding a path to possibility. The sacred patient-physician bond is a space for unfiltered conversations about fears, struggles, hopes, and desires. These conversations get to the heart of our humanity. They make it clear that what we seek, beyond health and longevity, is more elusive.
Research backs up what many of us already intuitively sense: Some of the most important factors for well-being and longevity are subjective and hard to measure. Connection, contribution, purpose, and meaning aren’t just embedded in our DNA as essential to living longer and healthier. They may be the ultimate goal.
In other words, lifespan and healthspan are tools that preserve our mental and physical capacity to engage with what matters more: nourishing our soul. I call this intuitively recognizable but difficult-to-measure........