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.
Like others have mentioned, it's fairly easy and cheap to erect some of these things at home, if you have your own property.
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.
