JEFF CHILDERS TAKES A WELL DESERVED VICTORY LAP

Today’s final “I told you so” moment appeared courtesy of science. According to a new, major, peer-reviewed Harvard scientific study: reading C&C might literally add years to your life. Here’s the tweet from Sahil Bloom summarizing the findings,

https://x.com/SahilBloom/status/2025620263128142080

and here’s the study, titled “Optimism is associated with exceptional longevity in 2 epidemiologic cohorts of men and women.”

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1900712116

A massive study out of Harvard and Boston University, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, followed over 70,000 people for up to 30 years and found that the most optimistic people live 11% to 15% longer than pessimists. They also have 50% to 70% greater odds of living to 85.

These astonishingly strong results held even after controlling for diet, exercise, smoking, alcohol use, chronic diseases, depression, and socioeconomic status. In other words, it’s not just that optimists happen to eat better or exercise more. All by itself, the expectation that good things will happen independently extends your life.

If a drug produced a 50-70% improvement in your odds of reaching 85, Pfizer would charge forty thousand dollars a dose and the FDA would fast-track it. And people would pay for it. But C&C is 85% free! And even a C&C supporter subscription is nothing compared to what people would pay for that remedy. Just saying.

Back when I started this blog in 2020, I made a big bet. The bet was that everything would be okay. Not because I had inside information. Not because I was ignoring the data. But because the data, if you read it honestly, kept pointing in the same direction: toward optimism. And now I want to take just a moment —not to gloat (much), but to remember— because we optimists turned out to be right about everything.

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We were right that covid wouldn’t kill 2% of the population. We were right that lockdowns wouldn’t stop the virus and would devastate everything else. We were right that school closures would damage a generation of children for a disease that barely affected them.

We were right that natural immunity was real, durable, and at least as good as vaccine-induced immunity — a position that got you banned from social media in 2021 and published in The Lancet by 2023. We were right that the vaccines didn’t stop transmission — something Pfizer eventually admitted it had never even tested for.

We were right that masking children was pointless and cruel. We were right that “two weeks to flatten the curve” was a lie. We were right that the virus almost certainly came from a lab — another “conspiracy theory” that eventually became the U.S. government’s official assessment. We were right that VAERS signals were worth investigating, not dismissing. We were right that the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” was a political slogan, not an epidemiological fact. We were right that the “experts” who demanded our obedience were often wrong, conflicted, or both.

And we were right about the most important thing of all: that the American people would finally figure it out. That the truth would surface. That the institutions demanding blind trust would eventually have to answer for what they did. It took longer than any of us wanted. But it happened. It is happening.

So when Harvard publishes a study showing that optimism adds 11 to 15 percent to your lifespan, I don’t take that as news. I take it as confirmation. This blog has been a longevity program since day one. We just didn’t know there was a 30-year-long clinical trial underway to back it up.

So— you’re welcome! It has been my great pleasure to serve you. Now let’s keep the project going— optimistically, relentlessly, and now with peer-reviewed actuarial prospects.

……

I would add …it’s probably a good thing Pessimists die younger…who want’s to live longer in misery anyhow ?