What Does It Actually Mean to Live Better?

We have more advice than ever about how to improve our lives. But with so much information about what we should eat, how we should move, how long we should sleep and what we should optimise next, it is worth asking a more fundamental question. What does it actually mean to live better?

There is always something new promising to help us live better. A new study tells us something about sleep. A technology promises to help us understand our bodies more closely. A treatment changes what may be possible for a particular condition. A food we have eaten for generations is suddenly being questioned, while an ingredient most of us had never heard of becomes the thing everyone is talking about. There are new approaches to movement, mental health, recovery, relationships, ageing and almost every other part of our lives.

Some of these developments are genuinely important. Others are interesting but preliminary, and some will eventually turn out to matter far less than the attention surrounding them suggests. The difficulty is that they arrive alongside an enormous amount of advice about what we should already be doing differently.

Sleep more, but wake up early. Move more, but make sure you recover. Eat enough protein, fibre and plants, but avoid an ever-changing list of things someone somewhere has decided are bad for you. Manage your stress, nurture your relationships, find purpose, spend time outside, build better habits and, if possible, remember to enjoy your life while doing all of it.

Much of that advice can be useful. Taken together, however, living well can begin to sound like an endless project of self-improvement. So, what does it actually mean to live better?

1. We can measure more than ever before

We have become remarkably good at measuring individual parts of our lives. We can count our steps, monitor our heart rate, analyse our sleep and log our workouts. We can measure blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol and an expanding range of biomarkers. Wearables and other technologies are making information that once belonged largely in clinical settings increasingly accessible in everyday life.

There is real value in this. Knowing your blood pressure, for example, can reveal a risk you may otherwise have no reason to suspect. Understanding patterns in your sleep or activity can sometimes help you make useful changes. Better information can help people have more informed conversations with healthcare professionals and, in the right circumstances, make better decisions about their health.

But measurement is not the same thing as wellbeing.

A person can exercise consistently and still be exhausted. Someone can eat exceptionally well while living under relentless stress. A person can be successful by almost every external measure and still feel profoundly lonely. Someone can sleep for eight hours and wake up without enthusiasm for the life waiting for them.

We can be doing many of the things associated with good health and still recognise that something important is missing. That is because a life does not happen in separate categories.

2. The different parts of our lives are constantly affecting one another

Physical health affects how we feel and what we are able to do, but our mental and emotional wellbeing can also influence our physical health. The quality of our sleep can affect our mood, appetite, concentration and capacity to move. Our work can give us purpose and financial security, but it can also become a significant source of stress. Our relationships can be sources of joy, belonging and resilience, or they can contribute to distress and instability. Even the environments in which we live shape what is possible.

Advice to walk more assumes there is somewhere reasonably safe and accessible to walk. Advice to eat a varied and nutritious diet means something different depending on what food is available, affordable and practical. Telling someone to reduce stress is of limited use if the primary sources of that stress are financial insecurity, unsafe housing, caregiving responsibilities or circumstances they cannot simply breathe their way out of.

This does not mean that our individual choices are irrelevant. They matter enormously. Moving our bodies, eating nourishing food, sleeping sufficiently, seeking appropriate healthcare, maintaining relationships and developing healthier habits can all make meaningful differences. It simply means that context matters too.

The circumstances in which people are born, grow, work, live and age influence their health and their opportunities to be healthy. That is why serious conversations about wellbeing cannot reduce living well entirely to personal discipline or the quality of someone's morning routine.

Our physical, mental, emotional, social, spiritual and environmental wellbeing do not exist in separate boxes. They meet in one life.

3. Perhaps living better is not the same as perfecting ourselves

There is another tension in the modern conversation about wellbeing. The more we learn about ourselves, the easier it becomes to believe that every part of life should be improved.

There is always another habit we could build, another metric we could track, another food we could eliminate, another supplement we could consider or another routine we could adopt. Even rest can become something we feel compelled to perform correctly. At some point, the pursuit of wellbeing can become another source of pressure.

Perhaps a good life is not one in which every possible variable has been perfected. It may be one in which we have enough health and capacity to participate meaningfully in our own lives. That could mean having the energy to do work we care about while still having something left for the people we love. It could mean having a body capable of carrying us where we want to go, relationships in which we feel known, food that nourishes us without stripping eating of pleasure, and movement that supports our health while still feeling like play.

It could also mean knowing when we need help, having access to appropriate healthcare, feeling safe where we live, finding meaning in something larger than ourselves, having opportunities to remain curious and occasionally being able to do absolutely nothing productive without feeling that the day has been wasted. That will not look the same for everyone. It will not even look the same for one person throughout a lifetime.

At 18, living better might mean discovering what your body is capable of and learning habits that will serve you for decades. At 35, it might mean realising that ambition and exhaustion do not have to be synonyms. At 60, strength may increasingly be valuable because it helps preserve independence and makes it possible to continue travelling, carrying groceries, playing with grandchildren or simply getting up from the floor with confidence.

During illness, living better may have very little to do with optimisation and much more to do with effective treatment, comfort, dignity and support. During grief, a successful day may simply be one that you managed to get through. When money is tight, living better may mean greater stability rather than a new wellness routine. The answer changes because life changes.

4. Better does not always mean more

The wellness conversation often assumes that improvement comes from adding something. We need another habit, another product, another intervention or another piece of information. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the right treatment, medication, technology, exercise programme or change in behaviour can transform someone's health or quality of life. But more is not automatically better.

More exercise is not always better exercise. More supplements do not automatically create better health. More information does not necessarily produce better decisions, particularly when that information is contradictory or stripped of context. Even productivity, which is often treated as evidence that we are managing our lives well, can become destructive when it consumes everything else.

Sometimes living better involves adding something, and sometimes it involves removing something. It can mean working harder towards something that matters or recognising that something no longer deserves so much of us. It can mean seeking medical treatment, changing how we eat, moving more, sleeping longer or having a difficult conversation. It can also mean seeing friends, taking a walk, eating a meal we love, going somewhere new, playing a sport simply because it is fun or allowing ourselves to rest without turning recovery into another performance metric.

A better life should still feel like a life.

5. So, what actually helps?

There will never be a single answer, and that is part of what makes the question interesting. We know that some fundamentals matter. Preventive healthcare matters. Regular movement matters. Sleep matters. Nutrition matters. Mental health matters. Relationships and social connection matter. Our environments and economic circumstances matter. Genetics matter. Access to good healthcare matters.

But knowing that these things matter is only the beginning. The questions become much more useful when we get specific.

How much movement do we actually need, and does it all have to happen in a gym? How much protein is enough? What does good sleep look like when real life gets in the way? Which supplements are genuinely useful and which are mostly expensive promises? What should we understand about our blood pressure before there is a problem? Can a holiday actually help us recover? What does loneliness do to the body? How should women think differently about health at different stages of life? What technologies are genuinely improving healthcare, and which ones are simply producing more data? Which ideas from around the world make sense in our own lives, environments and cultures?

Those are the kinds of questions worth exploring. They are also why 63° exists.

6. This is what we want to explore at 63°

There is always something new promising to help us live better. New research, ideas, treatments, technologies, discoveries and conversations. We want to make sense of them.

We will follow the science, ask experts and look beyond the headlines. We will distinguish between what is well established, what is promising but still emerging and what simply does not have enough evidence behind it yet. We will explore health and food, movement and recovery, relationships and mental wellbeing, technology and longevity, places and experiences, and the many other things that influence how we live.

But, we also want to remain curious about the parts of living well that cannot be reduced to a number on a dashboard. There should be room here for pleasure and play, culture and community, beautiful places, interesting people, good food, movement we genuinely enjoy, new experiences and ideas that simply make life richer.

Because the purpose of learning how to live better cannot be to spend our entire lives obsessing about whether we are living correctly. The point is to live.

63° Take

Living better is not a finish line, and there is no perfect score, routine or formula waiting to be discovered.

Our health matters, but so do our relationships, environments, opportunities, minds, bodies, work, communities, pleasures and sense of meaning. These things interact constantly, and the balance between them will change as our lives change. Perhaps, then, the most useful question is not, “How do I optimise everything?” It is something more human.

What would make life meaningfully better, here and now?

We may not always arrive at the same answer. That is exactly why we intend to keep asking.

Welcome to 63°. There is a lot to explore!