It was only after much reflection on this whole experience that I really began to understand how emotional health relates to longevity, and how my journey helped redefine my perspective.

I had long subscribed to a kind of Silicon Valley approach to longevity and health, believing that it is possible to hack our biology, and hack it, and hack it, until we become these perfect little humanoids who can live to be 120 years old. I used to be all about that, constantly tinkering and experimenting with new fasting protocols or sleep gadgets to maximize my own longevity. Everything in my life needed to be optimized. And longevity was basically an engineering problem. Or so I thought.

It took five years, two stints in inpatient treatment centers, and the near loss of my marriage and my kids to change my mind. What I eventually realized, after this long and very painful journey, is that longevity is meaningless if your life sucks. Or if your relationships suck. None of it matters if your wife hates you. None of it matters if you are a shitty father, or if you are consumed by anger or addiction. Your résumé doesn’t really matter, either, when it comes time for your eulogy.

All these need to be addressed if your life is to be worth prolonging—because the most important ingredient in the whole longevity equation is the why. Why do we want to live longer? For what? For whom?

My obsession with longevity was really about my fear of dying. And something about having children was making my obsession with longevity ever more frenetic. I was running away from dying as fast as I could. Yet at the same time, ironically, I was also avoiding actually living. My tactics might have succeeded in my living longer, with optimal glucose regulation and ideal lipoprotein levels, but my strategy was unquestionably accumulating more regrets. My physical and cognitive health were great, but my emotional health was tanking.

My biggest regret is that so much of the misery that I’ve experienced, and the pain that I have inflicted on other people, could have been avoided if I had reached a better understanding of this sooner in life, preferably much sooner. The saddest part is that I wasted so much time being so detached, so miserable, and so misguided. So much time pursuing an empty goal.

But as my recovery progressed, I noticed that my preoccupation with dying began to fade away. And my quest for longevity no longer felt like a grim, desperate task; now the things I did every day felt welcome, necessary. I was enhancing my life and looking forward to the future. My journey to outlive finally had clarity, purpose, and meaning.

It brought me back to something my dear friend Ric Elias had said to me. Ric had been one of 155 passengers on the US Airways flight that emergency-landed in the Hudson River in January of 2009. As the plane was coming down, Ric and most of the other passengers were certain that they were going to die. Only the pilot’s skill and more than a little luck prevented disaster. If the plane had been going a little bit faster, it would have broken apart on impact; a few miles per hour slower, and the nose would have tipped forward and it would have sunk into the river. A handful of tiny factors like that made the difference between everyone on that plane living and many or most (or all) of them dying.

That day changed Ric’s outlook on longevity in a way that really resonates with me. All that time, I had been obsessed about longevity for the wrong reason. I was not thinking about a long, healthy life ahead; instead, I was mourning the past. I was trapped by the pain that my past had caused and was continuing to cause. I wanted to live longer, I think, only because deep down I knew I needed more runway to try to make things right. But I was only looking backward, not forward.

“I think people get old when they stop thinking about the future,” Ric told me. “If you want to find someone’s true age, listen to them. If they talk about the past and they talk about all the things that happened that they did, they’ve gotten old. If they think about their dreams, their aspirations, what they’re still looking forward to—they’re young.”

Here’s to staying young, even as we grow older.