On his 70th birthday, in 1905, Mark Twain gave a speech about the secret to successful ageing. (If 70 doesn’t sound aged to you, bear in mind that because of high infant-mortality rates, the average life expectancy for someone born before 1850 was less than 40.) “I have achieved my 70 years in the usual way,” he declared, according to an account in The New York Times, “by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else.” The maxim he offered was this: “We can’t reach old age by another man’s road.”
Typical for Twain, this was solid folk wisdom wrapped in a joke. The secret to a long and happy life is clearly not smoking, drinking and carousing. But he’s correct that there is no plug-and-play formula that works for everyone. Within obvious parameters, each of us should experiment with different ideas and specific ways of living, a proposition I have previously discussed. Some people are at their healthiest on a vegetarian diet; others will be so by eating Mediterranean. Some are happiest living in a big metropolis such as New York City or Los Angeles; others are living their best life out in the country.
Atlantic