Enjoy Your Youth
- matthewpickering32
- May 8
- 5 min read
There is a stubborn cultural script that treats youth as a kind of waiting room. Be careful, be productive, save, prepare, defer. The implication is that the real work of becoming a healthy older person happens later, somewhere in middle age, with green smoothies and cautious investments. The science tells a different and more interesting story. The way you live, love, move, and feel in your teens, twenties, and thirties is not a prelude to graceful aging. It is graceful aging, already in progress.
The body keeps score earlier than we think
The biology of aging does not switch on at sixty. It accumulates. A prospective Finnish twin study using DNA methylation to measure biological aging found that unhealthy lifestyle choices made in adolescence increase the risk of developing several noncommunicable diseases over the following decades. Researchers tracked smoking, alcohol use, body mass index, and physical activity from ages 12 to 17, then read the participants' epigenetic clocks in young adulthood. The results were sobering: the body was already keeping a quiet ledger.
This matters because adolescence and early adulthood are not just chronological stops. They are periods of fast cellular growth in which exposures get written into tissue. Exposures during puberty can have long-term effects on health in later life, and those effects show up not only as disease decades later but as accelerated biological aging visible at the molecular level in one's twenties.
The encouraging flip side is that the same window is a window of opportunity. What you build during youth, you tend to carry. And the building blocks include things that feel suspiciously like pleasure.
Joy is not frivolous, it is pharmacological
For most of modern history, happiness was treated as an outcome of health rather than a contributor to it. That hierarchy has flipped. A line of research now suggests that the emotions we cultivate are themselves a longevity input.
The famous Nun Study analyzed autobiographical essays written by young women entering convents in the 1930s, then tracked the writers across the rest of their lives. Nuns who expressed more positive emotions in their writings lived on average about 10 years longer than the others. The essays were written in their twenties. The lifespans they predicted unfolded over the next sixty years.
Newer work supports the same direction. The National Institute on Aging summarized recent findings by noting that optimism is a modifiable characteristic that can be changed with interventions like writing exercises and therapy, and that improving optimism may extend lifespan. Other research has linked high optimism to "exceptional longevity," defined as surviving past 85.
There is a plausible mechanism behind these numbers. Chronic stress, hostility, and loneliness keep the autonomic nervous system in a state of low-grade activation. Over decades, that activation taxes the cardiovascular and immune systems. Joy, by contrast, appears to undo some of that activation. The takeaway is unfashionable but real: the things you do in your youth that feel good, that feel like wasting time, that feel like too much fun, are not necessarily debts against your future self. Some of them are deposits.
Relationships are the long game, and you start building them early
The longest-running study of adult life ever conducted is the Harvard Study of Adult Development, now in its eighth decade. Its conclusion is striking in its simplicity. Positive relationships keep us happier, healthier, and help us live longer, more reliably than career achievement, money, exercise, or diet.
The participants were enrolled as undergraduates in 1938. The friendships, romantic patterns, and family dynamics they were forming in their late teens and twenties were not warm-ups for the relationships that would matter later. They were the relationships that would matter later, or at least the templates for them. The study's findings on midlife are telling: satisfaction with relationships at age 50 was a better predictor of physical health than cholesterol levels.
Loneliness, conversely, behaves like a cardiovascular risk factor. The study's directors have repeatedly compared its mortality impact to that of smoking. The implication for a young person is direct. The hours spent with friends, the awkward early relationships, the late nights and shared meals, the slow accumulation of people who know your stories: this is not unserious work. It is, statistically, among the most serious work you will ever do.
Movement tracks forward
Physical activity in youth has a similarly long shadow. A large cohort study of more than 315,000 participants found that maintaining physical activity from adolescence into later adulthood was associated with 29% to 36% lower risk for all-cause mortality. Crucially, the activity does not have to be punishing. Sport, dance, hiking, pickup games, and recreational movement all count.
A separate longitudinal study following Finnish children from age 9 onward concluded that persistent participation in sport in particular increases the probability of a higher level of physical activity in later life. In other words, the bodies that played as kids tend to keep playing as adults. The habit of movement is itself heritable across the timeline of a single life.
This reframes the gym in a useful way. The young person who joins a recreational soccer league for fun is not merely staying fit. They are constructing a fifty-year habit while it is still cheap to construct.
The synthesis: a well-lived youth is already aging well
Pull these threads together and a pattern emerges. The components of a graceful old age, that is, robust biology, warm relationships, an active body, and an emotionally rich inner life, are not separate from the components of an enjoyable youth. They are the same components, observed on different timelines.
The young person who travels with friends, falls in love badly and well, picks up a sport because their housemate plays it, laughs often, sleeps enough, and treats their body as a friend rather than an opponent is not delaying adulthood. They are quietly building the person they will be at 80. The key to healthy aging is relationships, relationships, relationships, in the words of George Vaillant, who directed the Harvard study for decades. The corollary is gentler than the cultural script suggests. Enjoying your youth is not a guilty pleasure to be repaid later. It is, when done with some attention to the people and habits you are building, the most credible plan for aging gracefully that the evidence currently supports.
So go to the party. Take the trip. Join the team. Call the friend back. The science is on your side.
SOURCES
1. Kankaanpaa, A., et al. (2022). The role of adolescent lifestyle habits in biological aging: A prospective twin study. eLife.
2. Mineo, L. (2017). Good genes are nice, but joy is better. Harvard Gazette.
3. Waldinger, R., & Schulz, M. (2023). An 85-year Harvard study found the No. 1 thing that makes us happy. CNBC.
4. Hart, J. (2023). Harvard Study of Adult Development: Human Connection is Key to Health and Well-Being. Mary Ann Liebert.
5. University of Minnesota Extension. Positive emotions and longevity.
6. National Institute on Aging (2022). Optimism linked to longevity and well-being in two recent studies.
7. Saint-Maurice, P. F., et al. (2019). Association of leisure-time physical activity across the adult life course with all-cause and cause-specific mortality. JAMA Network Open.
8. Telama, R., et al. (1997). Physical activity in childhood and adolescence as predictor of physical activity in young adulthood. American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
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