Advice from a 104-year-old PhD student [video]
Fruit and cold showers!<p>Every interview with a centenarian asks "what's the secret of your longevity?"  They answer and we all nod and stroke our chins and think <i>maybe there's something to that cold shower thing after all</i>.  Or whatever. If his secret had been that he drinks three Dr. Peppers a day, or that he does a headstand for five minutes every morning at sunrise, our response would be the same.<p>He no more knows the secret of his longevity than a gambler knows the secret of a hot streak.  Like every centenarian, he's on the mother of all hot streaks, that's all.  Our impulse to find some causal agency that we can understand and adopt is no different than a gambler's.  When he said "fruit and cold showers", it's no different than saying "if I stand on one foot and close my left eye when I throw the dice, I don't crap out."<p>I have to think that he knows this and he's just humoring us because he knows we want an answer other than ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.  After all, we are all just children to him.