Welcome to the ninth edition of Airplane Mode, where less is more and the WiFi is always off.

Every week, we curate 3 impactful ideas for you to stop and ponder, taking you away from the algorithm and putting you back in control of your most valuable resource: your attention.

Use this newsletter as a signal to pause, breathe, and think, helping you realign with your purpose and clear out the ‘scroll pollution’ that clouds our brains every day.

Thank you for flying with 99 Lives 🐆✈️

Anyone who knows me IRL has definitely heard me rant at least once about how stupid the way we measure age is, or how much we limit ourselves by saying things like “oh I’m too old for that”. I’ll save that rant for a later blog, but there is some new research out of Stanford to back up this idea that the way we measure age is tremendously antiquated.

This study from the Stanford School of Medicine shows that not only do we all age at different rates, even our own organs age at different rates.

Analyzing different blood protein signatures of over 44,000 people (age 40-70), scientists were able to gauge the biological age of 11 different organ systems, including the brain, heart, lungs, and kidneys. The brain’s biological age was the strongest predictor of mortality and disease risk, often providing warning up to a decade in advance.

The results showed that older brains were at a 3x risk of getting Alzheimer's compared to the average, while younger brains had a 75% decrease in risk. These numbers may seem abstract, but their implications are life-changing.

More simply put, someone with an older brain can be up to 12x more likely to develop Alzheimer’s than a person with a younger brain.

The stats were equally as striking for mortality, where an individual with an older brain is almost 5x more likely to die over a 15 year period, compared to an individual with a younger brain.

Brain health and age are measured through a variety of different factors. While this study focused on specific blood protein signatures, the volume of gray and white matter, and the creation of new neurons are also big indicators, all valuable in creating more neuroplasticity (see below).

This study has the potential to completely shift the way we see not only our own aging process, but also shift our focus away from reactive health care and more toward preventive health care.

(See the cutout below if you’re interested to learn more about neuroplasticity and the most important ways to keep your brain youthful)

Right now, more people are traveling today than at any other point in human history, with the UN World Tourism Organization estimating more than 1.5 billion tourist arrivals annually.

Even with more access to information, travel literacy still lags far behind, and this is evident in a lot of the pushback that tourists are receiving in places like Barcelona, Mallorca, and Lisbon.

American travel icon Rick Steves has a really simple concept to increase our travel literacy and awareness of our own travel behaviors, breaking down most of us into three categories: Tourist, Traveler, or Pilgrim.

Steves argues that we all fall into at least one of these categories, sometimes two, and encourages everyone to blend these roles, while minimizing how much time we spend as a tourist.

Blending these roles benefits not only ourselves but also the locals we encounter, helping enrich our journeys and broaden our perspectives, while respecting local ways of life that maintain the dignity of local populations.

Next week, we’ll dive into this idea further and the way Steves shaped my own travel culture, looking at the “argument for immersive travel as a tool of self-discovery and growth”.

Situationships have likely existed long before the term was coined, but the term started becoming popular around 2017 after an article by Cosmopolitan magazine.

For the unfamiliar, a situationship is a romantic or sexual relationship that is undefined and noncommittal, where the individuals involved are more than friends but less than committed partners. They often lack clear boundaries, labels, and exclusivity, leading to ambiguity in the relationship.

Research published in the journal Sexuality & Culture wanted to understand what factors drive people to stay in a situationship, considering the very obvious negatives and negative feelings that tend to come from them.

Researchers had expected to see that sex and fear of commitment were both key motivators in situationships, but these were not necessarily the primary reasons.

Instead, they found 7 emotional themes that drive people to stay in situationships:

Beyond these seven themes, two psychological frameworks also explain why people remain in situationships: Social Exchange Theory, which views relationships as a cost-benefit analysis, and Investment Model Theory, which focuses on commitment over satisfaction and factors like fear of starting over or ‘sunk costs’.”

The former is focused on “why we get into or stay” in different types of relationships, while the latter focuses on “why we commit”.

Despite being less satisfying than committed relationships, many remain in situationships not because they are ideal, but because they offer enough emotional return to outweigh the discomfort of uncertainty or need for validation.

Thanks for reading the ninth edition!

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