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OpenHabitat

Your Life is at Stake

You are losing 5–10 healthy years, and living a stupider, sicker, poorer, less happy life than you should. This isn’t a comparison to the past, this is a comparison to our peers and to our potential.

  • Shorter: US healthy, non-disabled, lifespan runs ~10 years below Australia, Korea, and Japan 1 and they aren’t even optimal.
  • Stupider: Measured IQ has fallen ~1.8 points per decade across developed nations since the 1970s — the “reverse Flynn effect” — after a century of gains.2
  • Sicker: Colorectal cancer in adults under 50 has roughly doubled since the early 1990s and is now the leading cancer killer of men under 50.3 US obesity climbed from ~14% in 1980 to ~42% in 2020.4
  • Impotent: Roughly 1 in 4 men newly presenting with erectile dysfunction is under 40,5 and male sperm counts fell ~52% globally between 1973 and 2018.6
  • Poorer: US per-capita healthcare spending is roughly 4x its 1990 level in real terms.7
  • Less happy: US teen depression prevalence roughly doubled between 2005 and 2020.8

A “crazy” idea: maybe 0.5% of your brain being plastic9 makes you less smart. Maybe we can explain the majority of our health problems from the space-age pollution we receive from conception.

Perhaps, after we are 100% certain we have ruled out the foundation for biological health we can turn to social discussions about tech and education.

The World Won’t Save You

Section titled “The World Won’t Save You”

Your tap water is not designed for your health — it’s designed to not kill you… today. Your food is designed to hijack your taste buds at minimum cost, not to nourish you. Your air isn’t designed at all.

You live sandwiched between short-sighted institutions doing the minimum for your health and companies doing the maximum to hijack you. This is the post-WWII inflection we’ve been living inside since the 1970s, when subsidized industrialization turned food and consumer goods into chemistry experiments at scale.

Assume everything is poisonous, because statistically it is:

  • PFAS (“forever chemicals”) sit in the blood of ~98% of Americans10 and appear in ~45% of US tap water samples.11
  • Microplastics have been found in 100% of placentas tested,12 ~80% of human blood,13 and brain concentrations rose ~50% between 2016 and 2024 — roughly 0.5% of a modern brain is now plastic by mass.9
  • 99% of the planet breathes air exceeding WHO pollution limits.14
  • BPA is detected in ~93% of Americans over age 6.15

And it’s accelerating — global plastic production is on track to triple by 2060.16 And… plastic is just the canary. You’re inside a chemistry experiment that nobody ran safety trials for. There are ~80,000+ chemicals in US commerce and only a few hundred have been tested for health effects under the original TSCA.17 The US bans ~11 cosmetic ingredients; the EU bans 1,300+.18

From conception infants are fed plastic and chemicals through the placenta, breastmilk, and home air. They are swaddled in plastic sheets, pillows, clothes, and grow up consuming contaminated food, air, and water.

Pollution is a global challenge because we share the same fishbowl. The rocket in the US damages the ozone for Australia. The clouds of micro plastic in China rain down over the oceans polluting fish exported to the United States.

As nations and companies compete, industries take shortcuts — it’s classic Tragedy of the Commons. Each polluter captures the local benefit while the cost diffuses into the shared fishbowl, so the locally rational move is to pollute faster. A global pact not to pollute fails on game theory alone: any nation that defects wins the short run.

So no, the world isn’t going to keep you safe. It’s too busy chasing short-term nonsense.

Longevity is Excess

Section titled “Longevity is Excess”

Longevity isn’t deprivation. It’s the opposite.

A body running at the edge — thin muscle, weak heart, short sleep, stressed gut — doesn’t survive the first pneumonia, the first car accident, the first hard year at work. True longevity is biological surplus: extra muscle, extra mitochondrial capacity, extra microbial diversity, extra cognitive reserve. When something bad happens, you shrug it off.

  • Top-quartile VO2max is associated with roughly half the all-cause mortality of the bottom quartile.19
  • Sarcopenia roughly doubles ICU and post-surgical mortality.20

Think of a monopoly versus a competitor bleeding margin to stay alive. The monopoly invests, absorbs losses, compounds. The competitor optimizes one quarter at a time until it hits a wall and dies. Your body works the same way. True longevity is stockpiling surplus and spending it at peak until the day you die.

How to Live Long and Prosper

Section titled “How to Live Long and Prosper”

Your caveman biology is outgunned and outfunded by invisible space-age threats — weaponized food and omnipresent pollution.

This handbook is your way to take back control. When you create an optimal habitat, longevity, happiness, and performance become the automatic default.

This manual isn’t a bullshit hype supplement stack or magic pill — it’s the real work that makes the real difference. It’s holistic: the principles, reasoning, programs, and products you need to set up an optimal habitat for you and yours. Follow it blindly and get our results, or read the principles and adapt to your own system.

My family ages at three-quarters the pace of the average American, and we’re pushing toward 0.6x. I’ve been running experiments on myself since I was 24. At 17 I squatted over 400 lbs and trained for hours every day; at 36, as a desk jockey training 30 minutes a day, I can sprint faster than ever.

Companies and nations only do what their people buy into. Capitalism is the truest form of democracy, and you vote with dollars every day. Stop buying from polluters and abusers so they must change or die.

References

Section titled “References”

Footnotes

Section titled “Footnotes”

  1. WHO, Healthy Life Expectancy (HALE) data. ↩

  2. Bratsberg & Rogeberg, “Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused,” PNAS (2018). ↩

  3. American Cancer Society, Colorectal Cancer Facts & Figures 2023–2025. ↩

  4. CDC NHANES, adult obesity prevalence trends. ↩

  5. Capogrosso et al., “One patient out of four with a new diagnosis of erectile dysfunction is a young man,” Journal of Sexual Medicine (2013). ↩

  6. Levine et al., “Temporal trends in sperm count: a systematic review and meta-regression analysis,” Human Reproduction Update (2022). ↩

  7. CMS National Health Expenditure Accounts. ↩

  8. SAMHSA, National Survey on Drug Use and Health. ↩

  9. Nihart et al., “Bioaccumulation of microplastics in decedent human brains,” Nature Medicine (2024). ↩ ↩2

  10. CDC NHANES biomonitoring, PFAS detection in US population. ↩

  11. Smalling et al., “Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in United States tapwater,” Environment International (2023). ↩

  12. Ragusa et al., “Plasticenta: First evidence of microplastics in human placenta,” Environment International (2021). ↩

  13. Leslie et al., “Discovery and quantification of plastic particle pollution in human blood,” Environment International (2022). ↩

  14. WHO, Ambient Air Quality Database (2022). ↩

  15. CDC NHANES biomonitoring, BPA detection. ↩

  16. OECD, Global Plastics Outlook: Policy Scenarios to 2060 (2022). ↩

  17. US GAO reports on TSCA; EPA new chemical review process. ↩

  18. EU Cosmetics Regulation 1223/2009; EWG cosmetics database. ↩

  19. Mandsager et al., “Association of Cardiorespiratory Fitness With Long-term Mortality Among Adults Undergoing Exercise Treadmill Testing,” JAMA Network Open (2018). ↩

  20. Sarcopenia and surgical/ICU outcomes — see e.g. Knoedler et al., “The surgical patient of yesterday, today, and tomorrow — a time-trend analysis from 2008 to 2023 utilizing 5,555,308 cases,” International Journal of Surgery (2024); plus broader sarcopenia meta-analyses. ↩