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Comment by unnouinceput | Hacker News Reader

You mean those grandparents who had childhood filled with debilitating diseases without vaccines and who were using asbestos in their young adult life? Pretty sure @maury91 going to live over 90 as he/she expects it. Genetics is still king in life expectancy.

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> Genetics is still king in life expectancy.

Heard on the Lifespan podcast that recent studies of twins suggest genetics determine about 20% of your longevity, the rest is all environment / diet / lifestyle / stress etc.

I hope that's not been disproven by newer studies that I haven't heard about? Almost all of my grandparents and parents have already died at (much) younger than average age, and I am really hoping the science about this is right otherwise its not looking good for me.

My hometown I believe ticks all 4 of the things you mentioned. So I agree with you that genetics is a minor part of the equation

This is a personal anecdote of mine:

I lived in 3 nations: Sardinia ( hometown ), London and Vilnius. I do a lot of running and I love collecting data, something I noticed is that every time I go back to my hometown my VO2 max starts skyrocketing, after training as little as 3 weeks in my hometown it goes up by more than 10 points, when I go back it starts declining slowly until it goes back to slightly above the value when I left.

I do believe there must be something special about the environment, I do continue working from home when I'm in my hometown to stay longer, so it is not an holiday effect, my diet actually goes worst when I go back home because I go a lot to restaurants that I missed. And even with worst diet my fitness improves fast ( I run faster with same HR ( even for a while when I'm back ), VO2 and race predictor improves drastically), my stress goes down and my sleep score almost maxes out ( 98/100 )

If it’s so great (which it sounds like it from your description), then why don’t you just stay there?

Same reason why everyone leaves ( and at some point comes back ), career.

I did leave the first time ( for London ) for work, came back 3 years later but had to leave again because my wife had trouble find a job in Sardinia ( she doesn't speak Italian ), maybe we will go back to Sardinia in the future when both our careers will be fully remote

As I suspected. I know you say you’ve worked remotely from Sardinia, but have you thought that maybe your career is also a major factor along with environmental differences (which is definitely an issue with London due to air quality / weather alone)? Working remotely is often very different health wise than doing the same job in an office based on my anecdata experience (both working from home, but near-ish to my employer, for over a year, as well as spending a year on the road working remotely from an camper/RV).

The good thing is that I don't work in London from many years, now I'm working in Lithuania, air quality is way better than in London. From when covid hit being in the office has become the exception more than the norm ( we need to compile a form to being able to go the office ) so on the working remotely not much did change

The figures say otherwise:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/27561...

I'm not from US, the article says "US life expectancy has not kept pace with that of other wealthy countries and is now decreasing."

Asbestos, leaded gasoline, various pesticides like DDT and there's a long list of stuff we banned.

And a long list of new technologies thay we have no idea the long term effects of.

I once confessed to a friend that I did not like my apartment being encircled with equidistant 5G towers due to possible standing waves, and he (probably rightfully) scoffed at me

We may not know the long term effects of many new things but our standards for health and safety testing along with increased ability to detect and treat many health problems early definitively give us a big leg up over past generations.

5G spectrum is various bands from 700MHz -> 95GHz [1]. So the corresponding wavelengths range from 45cm down to 3mm - if constructive interference is a concern than rather than worry about the siting of your apartment it's the positioning of your sofa and how deeply you breathe that matters.

[1] https://www.rfpage.com/what-are-5g-frequency-bands/

thanks for this link, and the context

We don't know the long term effects of any invention, but...

At least we <<think>> of them and <<plan>> for them now.

Some stuff we can analyze based on similar materials, technologies, and we can extrapolate. We can even design tests to age them and see what happens.

There's a reason everything is more complex these days, because we're starting to add a magic word to everything: <<sustainability>> (i.e.: does it kill us directly or or does it kill the environment around us, ergo killing us indirectly?).

Ignoring this aspect would mean that we assume humans never learn, which is provably false.

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