In this respect, it turns out that birthdays are extremely healthy— those who have the most of them tend to live the longest.

That's quite a cheeky aphorism. I love it.

I think that OP meant to ask "is it possible your perception has changed with age/experience, rather than with your methods?"

Yes :-) But as I get older I notice there is very little difference between doing something for years and converging my perception to believe what i have been doing was worthwhile.

So i should choose carefully.

I have also noticed that whatever defaults i left childhood with are ridiculously hard to change.

It is true though, that the longer you live, the longer your life expectancy.

Indeed and yet, paradoxically, living longer is quite literally what's killing you¹...

1: Cells have two ultimate fates: they either fail to resist cancer or, if they succeed, eventually die of doing it, sort of wear-and-tear, i.e. "ageing" as we call it. Lookup telomeres and cancer. Therein lies the recent hype/hope of increasing human life expectancy by a lot, perhaps orders of magnitude.