Perspectives

Longevity is a multifaceted concept, taking on different shapes depending on the scientific and cultural lens through which it is viewed.

Demography observes it through numbers and curves: life expectancy, survival rates, differences by gender, class, and territory. Longevity here is a collective datum, a population movement across time.
Sociology studies it as a social fact: the impact of aging on family structures, work, welfare systems, and new forms of intergenerational cohabitation. Longevity as the transformation of social structures.
Medicine interprets it as a biological challenge: the study of cellular aging processes, biomarkers, prevention, and the treatment of chronic diseases. Longevity as the possibility of extending health and delaying frailty.
Genetics and the omic sciences search within DNA sequences and gene–environment interactions for the keys to life’s duration. Longevity as a biological code to decipher—and perhaps manipulate.
Nutrition and food science highlight the role of diets, micronutrients, intermittent fasting, and “anti-aging” molecules such as sirtuins. Longevity as the discipline of metabolism and dietary choice.
Psychology investigates the weight of resilience, optimism, stress management, and emotional bonds. Longevity as the care of mind and emotions.
Philosophy reflects on the meaning of time, on the ethics of life extension, on the relation between finitude and human project. Longevity as an existential question.
Economics and political science frame it as an issue of sustainability: pension systems, healthcare, and public policies for an aging world. Longevity as a global challenge.
Technology and biotechnology propose new frontiers: artificial intelligence, regenerative medicine, biohacking, predictive algorithms. Longevity as the promise of technical control over biological time.
Ecology and environmental sciences reveal how planetary health and human health are inseparable. Longevity as fragile co-existence with the environment, as balance between life and nature.

And finally, anthropology. The only perspective that explicitly emphasizes the cultural dimensions of longevity, reminding us that what we believe about life, health, the body, and time is never neutral: these are convictions, narratives, and beliefs shaped socially, politically, and historically. Anthropology shows us that longevity is not only the outcome of biological mechanisms or public health policies, but also a field of meaning in which cultures shape what we understand by “living long” and by “living well.”

This is why, beyond statistics and technologies, longevity always takes shape as a biographical story. It is the micro level, where each of us experiences our own duration as a possibility of choice, of orientation, of existential direction.

The real question is not how long we will live, but how we will inhabit the time that is given to us—and which beliefs will guide the way we choose to inhabit it.