> I’d take 60 years of a challenging, but meaningful life over 90 years of relaxation and low stress. So you equate physical challenge with meaning, and physic

> I’d take 60 years of a challenging, but meaningful life over 90 years of relaxation and low stress. So you equate physical challenge with meaning, and physical relaxation with lack of it? Sorry, but not everyone finds meaning only in the same things you do. It seems likely that the vast majority whose lives revolve more around family/community or intellectual pursuits, or even pure leisure, would prefer 90 years of health just good enough to support those, rather than 60 years of being on leaderboards only a very few (perhaps only you) care about. Also, how would you feel about only 50 years of a challenging but meaningful life as you define such things? Or 40? Or 30? Every year brings a possibility of some setback that puts that kind of physical fulfillment out of reach, and the probability tends to increase over time. Between genetics, dietary habits, smoking/drinking, occupational/environmental stress, infectious disease, or simple accidents, almost everyone hits some kind of limitation before 60. Sometimes through absolutely no fault of their own, and almost always before they expected. High-risk or high-physical stress activities only worsen those odds, and hyper-competitive "type A" behavior does so in specific well-understood ways. There's no dichotomy between maximizing total years and maximizing good years. If you graph quality of life over time, extending the curve to the right also increases the time above any arbitrary threshold. The point of the article is that high-intensity exercise-for-its-own-sake might be less effective for such maximization than more frequent but less intense "incidental" exercise. If you have actually run a marathon, surely you know that sprinting the first mile won't get you across the finish line faster and might ruin your chances to get across it at all.