I've seen what is likely coming, and the only changes which matter are to lifestyle - not attitude.
The conclusion might as well be the other way round: people who have health problems when getting older are more likely to have a negative attitude about getting older and will probably die at a younger age than people without health issues.
The headline is rather misleading, the study suggested that where older people are more respected in a society, they tend to live longer.
The issue with old age is the random serious illness lottery and really nothing else.
If you ride a bicycle every day, barring some injury forcing a prolonged break, you'll continue to be able to deep into old age. Anything we practice regularly we retain the ability to do. "Use it or lose it."
My fellow Americans in general tend to cease most physical activity once they get a driver's license. From that point on, it's a life of sitting in chairs of various forms, day in, day out. The body adapts to this, and by their 30s it's already non-trivial just to sit on the floor and get back up unassisted.
Don't stop playing outside, riding bicycles, running, frolicking, all the behaviors of youth - don't stop just because you're an "adult". Do this all, do it as much as possible, all of your life, until you're physically unable. This, in my opinion, is the dominant factor in aging well.
It's not a major investment on your part. Buy a few ropes, a swing and make your own in your garden or a nearby forest.
If you live in a location which prevents you from living a healthy life, perhaps you should think about moving.
As for specifically fitness as an activity, there is plenty of types of exercise that favor body weight exercises and free weights over machines. Crossfit is obviously the big trendy one, but there are many other types out there.
The local indoor playground used to have an evening where they inflated the inflatable structures a bit more and only let adults in (so no crushed kids). You can power yourself out very fast like that, especially if you bring some friends. That's the feeling I want, not a gym.
Like others have mentioned, it's fairly easy and cheap to erect some of these things at home, if you have your own property.
Honestly, I don't know how to be positive about this. Some people experience events in life that are beyond their control, that shape their attitudes. Those attitudes may be judged by a 'healthy attitude' population as 'unhealthy attitudes'.
This ostracizes a portion of the population and can lead to a negative feedback cycle for an individual, because they literally can't learn how to have a 'healthy attitude'. The best they can do likely, is be neutral (i.e. compromise).
Empathy and awareness are 'healthy' too, even if for the moment, it affects that positive feedback loop you've got in your mind. It's the minutia that don't matter, and when it comes to judgement of attitudes, it's honestly extremely difficult to differentiate between overall trends and insignificant correlative details in practice.
The person with the 'unhealthy attitude' may just be wearing a mask of someone they were heavily influenced by, and they may simply not have the resources or the 'luck' to have encountered learning otherwise. All of this can be incredibly draining and isn't your duty or obligation to 'correct', but I think that's where acceptance and tolerance come in.
My point is not everyone has to have the same style mind in order to be considered 'healthy'. People can survive (quite contently) without constantly thinking positive and having to outwardly serve as proxies to reinforce attitudes so we can all convince ourselves 'we are happy and healthy and the future will be swell'. You need all types of people in life to have the world function and improve.
Honestly sometimes I think some people can become terrified to be anything besides positive, and that limits their freedom of speech and ability to grow.
Define “work”. Manual labour? Sitting in an office? Both have negative health impacts. The sort of work that prolongs quality of life is only a subset of the work there is economic demand for. A job which is active but not strenuous, basically. Most jobs are either physically hard work or mainly sedentary, with not much in between.
On the other hand, if you found a correlation between butter exports in India and mortality rates, you probably shouldnt dig further into whether there’s a causation relationship. It fails the Occam’s Razor test missrably.
I understand that the balance between science and selling the science is hard, but it can be done, and imho they could be doing it better.
