Memento Vivere

The Greeks told of Tithonus, granted eternal life but not eternal youth: he aged without end, shrinking and creaking until all that remained was a cicada's rasp. It is the oldest warning in the longevity business, and it still holds. More years was never the point. Better years is.

More years was never the point. Better years is. Memento mori, ergo memento vivere — remember you must die; therefore, remember to live.

Three people who look at the same problem from different sides open with a short statement each, then argue it out.

Prof. Katarzyna Wac asks what we can actually measure, and whether the millions of data points our devices collect measure anything that matters to the person wearing them. Dr. Lukas Sveikata asks whether any of it matters medically, and whether a beautiful graph is something a clinician should act on. Robert van Pappelendam, who advises the medical-device maker Corsano Health, takes the third question: whether a physiological signal can be turned into something patients, clinicians and regulators will trust.

From there it gets harder. Could measuring your health make you less healthy? If the watch says you slept badly and you feel fine, which one is wrong? Are we measuring longevity or measuring wealth? And if we can predict a disease we cannot prevent, should we predict it at all?

This is the first evening in a series. The World Health Organization describes a life across 24 facets in four domains — physical health, psychological, social relationships, environment. A wristband reaches a handful of them. What you can still do on your own, who is around you, whether you feel safe where you live: none of that shows up in a graph, and all of it decides whether a year was worth having. Tithonus had the years. He had none of the rest.