SPIRITUAL LONGEVITY

I was late to school on my first day at Punahou. This was, as you can imagine, a literal nightmare for a shy 7th grade boy. I remember the emptiness of the Team Space, as most of the other students were already in homeroom to start the day. When I met Coach Ken I was self conscious and sweaty, having run all the way across campus. He was my homeroom teacher, and, ultimately, the most impactful mentor of my young life. 

Coach Ken pulled me aside. I thought I was in trouble. The topic of this conversation, however, was of me trying out for the middle school water polo team. I was tall. This was good for water polo, he said. I did try out for water polo. That very day. This ultimately began a series of events that led me to play water polo at Stanford University, coach my own team at Miami Country Day School, and continue to play today at the New York Athletic Club. 

From the get go, Coach Ken instilled in me a love for this sport that has only grown. I remember streaming Olympic water polo from my iPhone in orchestra, hiding it behind my stand during rehersals. Today, I use my second work monitor to watch my friends play professional water polo abroad while taking in Zoom meetings. 

Note: If my employer reads this, this is 100% a fabrication to prove a point. I would never not be completely focused while working from home. 

For anyone who has interacted with Coach Ken, you could easily name the tenets of which he lives his life, and of which he inspires others to live theirs. Mind. Body. Spirit. To live a meaningful and healthy life one must cultivate these three things. By ignoring a single piece, we compromise a part of ourselves. All three aspects require training, care, and attention. 

For a kid, these are mostly just words, but thankfully Coach Ken made us live them each day. What were we doing to support our body? Were we eating healthy? Were we lifting weights? You only have one body, after all. Were we swimming? What about the mind? Did we study for that exam? Did we watch the film from our last game? Did we watch the film from the Olympics? Do we remember the plays? And do you love this? Did you enjoy meeting the alumni? How did it feel to finish that tough workout? Did you know that you were capable of all this? 

While I was perhaps too young to truly absorb the importance of this, Coach Ken created an environment in which they were inescapable. Everything that we did, every question he asked, every conversation we had, every workout, film session, speech, community service – everything, involved the nourishment of the mind, the body, and the spirit. 

I write this to you from my apartment in New York. It’s Spring, I hope. There was rain falling lightly outside my window yesterday, but today is sunny, albeit cold. It may very well be that I am thirty, and that is why I have spent more time thinking about mind, body, and spirit. I have newfound fat that sits on my hips, my work makes me question the meaning of life (in a bad way), and I am watching from my phone, in real time, as our country goes to war for Israel. My mind, body, and spirit have never felt more vulnerable. 

Hitting thirty is a mortality check. Habits that could once be ignored with little consequence, now show their side effects immediately. It is no longer sustainable to eat sleeves of Oreos (I once did this nightly). I am visibly heavier after drinking four beers. Tweaking my back two weeks in a row showed me that it is no longer sustainable to ignore working out my core (I hated doing abs and often skipped them for water breaks). There are changes that I now must make in order to live a healthy life – in order to sustain this life. Really, this is about longevity. 

There is a longevity craze amongst this world’s elites. Our tech billionaires, in their eyes, have evolved from humans to gods. Their time on earth is and will always be too short to carry out their vision and, therefore, they must come up with ways to live forever. Mark Zuckercorn and Jeff Bozos are jacked, Larry “The Colonizer” Ellison looks better now than he did fifteen years ago when he purchased an entire Hawaiian Island. Even Elon Musk (no insult required) is working tirelessly to upload the human consciousness to a computer. The wealthiest people in the world are prioritizing longevity of both the body and the mind. 

These people – wannabe Gods – are investing billions of dollars into living forever and this mindset is trickling down. Social Media is flooded with longevity hacks. Fitness influencers, health influencers, RFK Jr., Fart Maxxers, Podcasters who think they are scientists, Trad Wives, Clavicular… The list goes on and on… All of whom are here to sell us the dream that the 1% has spent so much of their wealth buying. The algorithm follows the money. 

This is not to say that health and education are not important. As I mentioned earlier, the mind and the body are key tenets of life. I care more about eating fiber now than ever before, thanks to the Reels that Cindy sends me. I have a whole series of kettlebell workouts saved on my Instagram from a ripped middle-aged man. I follow numerous BookTok accounts and build entire reading lists from them. There is an immense wealth of resources available to cultivate the mind and the body. 

Why, however, do I feel so beaten down? Why is it that my cortisol spikes daily? Why can’t I use the bathroom without my phone? Now that I think about it, why can’t I do anything without my phone? Why do doomscroll when I wake up in the morning? Why does my head feel like there is static inside of it? Why do I feel sadness, not to be confused with depression, so often? 

For all of the leaps in science and technology over the past twenty years, what has actually come of it? Our greatest minds – literally the best minds our world can offer – have been stolen from us, captured by immensely high salaries. Our greatest minds have been captured and their only job is to make us more addicted to our phones, more addicted to gambling, and to build AI “tools” to outsource the jobs of working people. Maybe, just maybe, these companies started with less insidious missions: to connect us, to cure cancer (allegedly), etc. This is not the case anymore. Capitalism has removed the ability for these companies to stop extracting value from the consumers. 

I’ve been thinking more and more about the future. Again, I think that this has something to do with turning thirty. But this is not sustainable. These feelings of dread and pain. This addiction that grips me stronger than anything I have felt before. I spent years addicted to nicotine in my late teens and twenties and have since been nicotine free for the past eight years. My phone addiction completely dwarfs my nicotine addiction. It’s not even close. In twenty years, will I be on my phone scrolling before bed? Will I stop reading books and simply watch YouTube summaries? Will I work with humans at all? My development team at work is already shrinking. When Cindy starts her practice, will we need to hire a receptionist? Can’t voice AI do this already? What comes of the would-be receptionist? 

This fear I have of the future is not whether I can maintain my body or my mind. I believe that this is doable. I know how to work out, I know what to eat and what not to eat, I know that I love to read and that I am a curious person. But what about the spirit, the third pillar of life? The idea of spiritual longevity is, in my opinion, overlooked. How do we maintain this inner spirit when everything around us is designed to make us feel numb? 

Whatever the solution, it will require work. An end to phone addiction will never come by waiting. Chasing small dopamine hits is an unending and perilous battle. Working dead end jobs, being molded by corporate America, writing AI memos to be summarized by AI to be responded back to with AI to be summarized again in AI. It’s a fight, a literal fight, to push back on these forces. I think of it as a rip current. You never swim against a rip current. You will never win. The ocean is too strong. Instead, you swim sideways, parallel to shore, until the current no longer pulls you out towards sea. Then, you swim to the beach. It’s an escape, not a fight. Perhaps this is a solution. 

Children seem like an answer. I could pour myself into another creature, a creature that is a literal piece of myself, the embodiment of hope. This would, without a doubt, bring meaning to my life and cultivate my spirit. But there must be more than this. My mom, she is a mother but she is also more than a mother. She is a human being. She was once childless. She was once a child. Her spirit has always existed with or without children. There must be other ways to cultivate spirit. 

Surfing is also an obvious solution. Being connected to a greater power, to nature, to storm systems thousands of miles away, to be completely focused on the moment – this feeds the spirit. Surfing strengthens the body as well. In fact, a strong and flexible body is critical to surfing later in life. Without a healthy body, we could lose an entire source of spiritual fulfillment. I need to stretch more and I need to strengthen my core. I need to prioritize surf trips and buy a new wetsuit so that I can surf in New York during the winter. Surfing will be critical to my spiritual longevity. It also doesn’t happen easily. 

I think of my friends. I think of my partner, Cindy. Of my family. My mentors. My professors. My teammates. These countless connections push energy from person to person, creating an entire web of community to not only rely on, but to be propped up by. I have friends on Instagram that I share memes with. It’s almost daily at this point. Not to get too deep, but these friends I share memes with, I call and FaceTime the least. There is a chasm that is being carved out by social media. 

When my grandfather died, I spent some time looking through his old photographs. Countless photos involved dinner parties, camping trips, fishing trips, all with friends, friends I recognized from dinner parties growing up, friends that babysat me, friends that attended my own graduations. I fear that I am losing my ability to bring people together the same way that my family had done in the past. Being a part of a greater whole, as I am experiencing now by playing water polo once again, nourishes the innermost part of me. 

In my grandparent’s home, there is a living room with high ceilings and tall glass windows. Two chairs sit near the corner with a small table between them. In those chairs one can look out into the Nu’uanu Valley and watch rain roll in. I imagine myself sitting in one of those chairs next to Cindy, we are drinking tea and reading, the light from the nearby lamp is orange and soft. I imagine writing down some ideas in my notebook, or possibly writing her a poem before dinner. These are the things I dream of now. I dream of surfing and of coaching youth water polo and of coming home to my partner and reading together in the evening, perhaps sharing a meal with some friends afterwards. These are the things that feed my spirit. This is what I want my future to include.

But if there is one thing that I’ve learned from years with Coach Ken is that saying these things is not enough. It requires work – hard work – to strengthen, fortify, and nourish these aspects of life. It requires mindfulness. Intention. One must eat healthy and work out. One must be curious and empathetic and eager to learn new things. One must build habits that enrich the spirit. 

Perhaps the world will have ended in thirty years. I genuinely see this as a possibility. But in the case that the world has not ended, I hope that I have done the things necessary to be freed from my phone addiction and to continue to create things with my mind and my hands and that I have most of my old friends with me and some new ones too. None of this will come without working, laser focused, towards it. This will not be a reality without prioritizing spiritual longevity. There are too many people, too many brilliant, brilliant people, working every single day to destroy this dream and to extract even more value from my attention span. And they will, unless I start working now.

—

It’s not hopeless. Truly. In fact, I am hopeful. Just last night I ate dinner with a dear friend who I hadn’t seen in over six years. My first poem is being published in Fronds, an environmental justice literary journal from Stanford University. And earlier this week I finished the first draft of my book during a manic, late night episode that lasted into the grayness of early morning.

There is still so much out there and I want to grab hold of it.