The longevity boom is measuring the wrong thing

A FEW years ago a man in his late 60s came to see me – not as a patient, since I am a researcher and not a physician, but because he had heard I studied ageing and he wanted to show me his numbers.

He had the grip strength of a man 20 years younger, a resting heart rate an athlete would envy, and a report declaring his body a decade younger than his chronological age.

He laid the printouts on my desk with great care. Then he mentioned, almost in passing, that he no longer knew what he was keeping all this health for: His wife had died. His children lived abroad. He woke each morning, did his exercises, took his supplements, and waited for a day that did not especially need him.

I have spent two decades measuring ageing – building and validating the kinds of indices that tell how well or badly a person is growing old.

I think about that man often because he had won – comprehensively – the game the entire longevity industry is now urging everyone to play.

But he was among the most desolate people I had met.

We are now living through an extraordinary enthusiasm for measuring how fast we age. For a few hundred dollars, a mail-order kit will read the chemical tags on your DNA and assign ages to your heart, lungs and brain. Devotees feed the results to chatbots that prescribe the next peptide, the next panel, the next scan.

The global longevity market is a multi-billion-dollar industry, growing on a simple, seductive promise: If we can measure ageing precisely enough, we can manage it – and doing so will make a long life good.

Singapore has caught the “biohacking” fever with particular intensity. The affluent now pay five-figure sums for longevity memberships and personalised “transformation” plans. Clinics here offer the full menu: DNA-based biological-age tests, bone-density scans, AI-read diagnostics.

Tellingly, a growing share of the clientele are not the old but optimisers in their 30s, tracking their visceral fat and cortisol.

At every price point, the same promise is presented: Measure the body precisely enough, and you can manage its decline.

There is a deeper irony here, one that a nation counting the cost of ageing cannot miss. The people fuelling this boom – the affluent, the already-fit, the 30-something optimisers – have the least left to gain, chasing the last few per cent near the ceiling of health.

The largest gains in healthy years and the real savings from illnesses prevented lie at the other end of the social gradient – among the frail and financially vulnerable, where a modest intervention still goes a long way.

The market sends its resources precisely where they yield the least.

The questions that matter

Let me say plainly what is true, because I build these instruments and believe in them. Chronological age is a blunt tool; people of the same age differ enormously in health and resilience, and capturing that difference biologically is a genuine scientific prize.

But the current enthusiasm has outrun the science. An algorithm trained to predict the number of birthdays you have had does not thereby reveal which processes are driving your decline. A biological-age score, as a major 2026 synthesis underscores, predicts without explaining.

The honest frontier is harder and far more interesting than a number on an app.

For the next 10 years, the real question is not whether we can measure ageing, or even nudge it. It is whether we can work out which biological processes are actually driving ageing in a particular person, at a specific point in their life – and whether changing those processes would make a real difference to how healthy and able they stay.

That is a frontier worth every dollar we can give it. But suppose we win it. Suppose that within a generation we can read a person’s ageing with precision and slow it where it matters. It would still be biology.

It can keep a body able, yet it cannot tell that body what the ability is for, or what the person is worth on the day the ability finally goes.

The fitter we make the body, the more nakedly it hands us back the questions biology was never built to answer.

The evidence from my field is consistent. What makes a long life bearable is not a low biological age. It is purpose, belonging, and the sense that one’s life still matters to someone.

None of that is read by a clock or sold for a fee, and the measurement culture can actively corrode it.

A recent report in The New York Times followed two sisters who tested their biological ages and found the kit became a “ledger” of their lives, delivering not clarity, but feelings they could not quantify.

A poorer score and sad-face icons on the health report tipped the disciplined, health-conscious sister into a “private vortex of grief”, wondering where her regime had gone awry.

The deepest human goods run on the opposite logic to the ledger: They are conferred, not achieved; granted before anything is accomplished. A grandchild does not love you more for a younger liver.

Singapore, which will soon count one in four citizens over 65, has built some of the most advanced ageing infrastructure in the world.

Yet the research suggests that the societies that age best are not the ones with the best biomarkers. They are the ones that keep their old people needed, connected and seen.

The hardest problem of a long life is not metabolic. It is whether, at 90, there is still anyone for whom your being alive makes a difference.

We have spent a fortune learning to measure how fast we age. We have spent almost nothing on the only questions that finally decide whether a long life is a gift or a sentence: what the added years are for, and what a person is worth when the measuring stops.

That is the frontier that matters now. It will not yield to a blood test – and it is the one we are leaving unfunded.

The writer is a gerontologist at the Singapore University of Social Sciences, where he researches and teaches healthy ageing, frailty and dementia. He is editing a forthcoming volume, Ageing Well Together: Faith, Science and Community for an Asian Ageing Society.