Us humans are running the longevity gauntlet, we always have been, and we always will be. The gauntlet is a series of obstacles that we face in our quest to live a long and happy life, and the one we are running today looks different from the one we were running a hundred years ago, and much more different than the one of a thousand or a hundred thousand years back. And the gauntlet will look much different in the next couple decades as well. The gauntlet we face is always changing due to breakthroughs in medical science as well as personal lifestyle choices.
We all may be running the gauntlet, but because of personal choices we make in the way we live our lives, the gauntlet looks a lot different for each of us. For some the gauntlet feels like an endless set of obstacles, while for others it seems almost non-existent.
Most people living in the Western world address the gauntlet via medical treatments, prescription drugs, or questionable supplements, each of which is designed specifically to help us clear the current hurdle we are confronted with. If we are lucky, and most are, we clear the hurdle, take a breath and then, after a bit of time, find ourselves facing the next one, which modern medicine has been working diligently on a treatment for. We undergo that treatment and if we are lucky enough, we survive and get to face the next hurdle. This is the gauntlet.