Feb. 16, 2025 | Demir Antay

Mix Longevity with Deep Work

Why the future is play and not work? And by play I mean health habits not going out and drinking yourself to numbness.

I used to think that the key to success, status or even gaining recognition from your own family was just working long hours and wearing that as a badge of honor.

It is very weird that we mix love with prestige and think that we need to work 100-hour weeks for what? To be accepted at a dining table?

New Digital Age Workhours.

In small pockets of the internet, it is already accepted that as knowledge workers we cannot do more than 4 hours of work every single day.

Your cognitive resources and the flow state of work are only around 3-4 hours.

So why are we killing ourselves over a desk when we know the output of our work is not tied to the input of the hours in this day and age, especially with the innovation of AI?

The old age of commerce still lingers

That header above, “the old age of commerce still lingers” is the reason for this I believe.

Where for the past 500 years as a species our survival has been dependent on hard rigid social structures and a work equation based on input equals output.

That meant that if you wanted to get ahead in life because you started behind with your parent's mistakes, you had to work 100-hour work weeks just to catch up because your output was tied to it.
And especially health was secondary.

The main focus was “work”.

But this has changed, everybody can feel the shift of a new age that we are entering, the age of technology and science.

Whereas the new knowledge worker “magicians” our output is heavily tied to a low/small amount of input.

Well, that begs another question tho.

If our output is tied to a small amount of actions within a day what do we do for the rest of the day?

What do we do for the rest of the day?

When I first started to practice the idea that my output might be tied to a low amount of input I had a dilemma.

I had all this time in my day. I had time and freedom for the first time.

However, the experience was not freeing at all. I felt more stuck because our brain wants a filling and a challenge in our day.

You cannot just sit still in a chair, or just look at a wall.

It is literally torture, think about it we want to do nothing and relax because we have all these work hours but the minute we get the relaxation after the second day when our mind and body reset, we are back at the chase of something.

Because if you don’t have monk levels of discipline you will be bored out of your mind.

That's what happened to me.

And even worse the problem is that your identity is so tied back to how old things were done you view any habit that is considered “play” or “health” based you don’t wanna do them.

The problem is that there is no other avenue to fill your day with.

As humans, if we are not seeking wealth we are either seeking health or relationships as status.

That’s what we are wired for, so even though I am gonna get into the relationship habits that I am trying to build in later on writing.

In this writing, I want to focus on health habits that I would like to put into my own life so that I don’t get bored out of my mind.

Putting longevity habits in my schedule.

• So first and foremost, I am only dedicating 4.5-5 hours every day to my work. That is it.
  I am selectively jailing that time because I do not want to break it. I do three 90-minute deep work sessions and each of them has a different task that can move my business forward.
  I do it first thing in the morning so that it is out of the way.
  So that I have time to allocate to more important things like health and longevity.
• I am also trying to change my identity from trying to be more healthy to someone who is a “biohacker”, or “longevity athlete”.
  I know that this is a silly way to say you wanna become more healthy but tying your identity to the person you want to be is the biggest habit builder out there.
  I will get into more of this later on but just know that identity change and habits go hand in hand.
• I am also mixing my deep work hours (three 90-minute blocks) with longevity habits to one big protocol that I do in the morning so that I don’t have to push myself and use willpower every single day to achieve work results and health.
  One big protocol and once you finish you go about the rest of your day.
• My current protocol (which I am gonna go into more detail about later on) is I wake up (I track my sleep because it is the number one habit for longevity) and once I wake up, I have a 1 hour morning routine filled with longevity habits than I start my deep work sessions, and towards the end I finalize my protocol with my one-meal-a-day diet.
• I am following K-boges, Bryan Jhonson, and Dr. Andrew Huberman heavily to build my longevity habits and identity, you can check them out if you would like to as well.

Anyway, this is it for this writing.

I hope it wasn’t all over the place because the main idea was that you don’t have to be a martyr for your laptop.

Work is here to sustain our basic needs and creativity.

So with the rest of our time, instead of spending it on social media, we can dedicate ourselves to longevity habits.

Thank you for reading, have a nice day.

Demir