"Using things tested by time is called the Lindy Way of Living

Mr. Skallas about mouthwash: “Everyone tells you to do it. Your breath is clean, it feels like the right thing to do,” he said during a Zoom call from Deauville, France, where he moved from New York City last fall to ride out the pandemic. “And then you read about higher cancer rates for people who used it, and how it destroys good and bad bacteria, and you go, ‘You’re right, there was no mouthwash back then.’”
“Back then” is the ancient world, from which Mr. Skallas draws an inexhaustible supply of practical lessons.
“No breakfast,” he said. “Breakfast was unknown in early history, Rome, Byzantium, ancient Greece, breakfast wasn’t really a thing.”

“The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!”
Mr. Taleb argued that the Lindy Effect helps explain why so many seemingly earthshaking new developments end up forgotten or disproved. For example, many scientists have spent the last decade in a state of alarm about the “replication” crisis: that many findings turn out not to hold up when other scientists repeat the studies.
Inaccurate science, in other words, is constantly being published. The Lindy-conscious consumer of scientific data will take seriously only information that has held up over a period of time.

“The only effective judge of things is time.”

“Lindy exists chiefly for your protection, for risk/survival strategies in the modern world,” with its constant onslaught of “new products, new academic disciplines, new books, new technologies, new foods, new living arrangements, new ‘theories’ on life, new postures.”
Lindy is not Luddism: Mr. Skallas is an avid social media user, after all. Rather, he scours the ancient world for applicable nuggets of what he calls “useful tradition,” using the Lindy Effect’s heuristic of older is better as a “bulwark against consumerism,” to sift through the “tons of products coming out every day.”
“When I’m at the store, I think about it,” he said. “It’s a new way of looking at skepticism of modern commercial life.”
Mr. Skallas endorses practices with a basis in antiquity, like intermittent fasting, which appears across religious traditions and has demonstrable health benefits (though also detractors). “Your body gets stronger through stressors, and it gets stronger through the lack of food,” he said.
He follows a diet drawn from Greek Orthodox tradition, alternating between veganism and pescatarianism (today some call this serial cycling). A tweet from his account @LindyDiet laid out further specifics: “Fast 2 times a week (vegan or abstain from food) and a month straight 2 times a year.”
Somewhat akin to the advocates of the paleo diet, Mr. Skallas recommends avoiding eating any foods or beverages invented in the past 500 years. This means no Beyond Beef, Monster Energy or Go-Gurt but yes to mutton, hot cross buns and the like.
“Coffee is relatively new,” he said, acknowledging the arbitrariness of the cutoff. “It’s 400 years old, but that’s 400 years of pretty good filtering, and it’s probably not bad for you.” Tea merits his highest compliment: It’s a “deep Lindy” beverage, with thousands of years of provenance.

Mr. Skallas eschews modern exercise machines, urging his readers in a newsletter post to stick with simple weight lifting, citing Milos of Croton, the mythical Greek bodybuilder who lifted a calf daily until he could hoist the adult bull.
“Bodybuilding culture is some grotesque subculture that is a product of modernity,” he wrote. “Working out isn’t about the muscles, but about the other systems in your body, interconnected to each other.”
Likewise he is skeptical of yoga, given that the form practiced by most Americans today was invented in the 20th century. “Is Yoga good or bad for you? I have no idea,” he wrote. “Lindy doesn’t say ‘don’t do it,’ it says ‘we don’t know what’s going to happen.’”

Video games? “Not Lindy.”
Nightclubs? “Lindy. In fact, deep Lindy.”
Sleek midcentury modernism? “Anytime you get away from fractal patterns and ornate details, it’s not Lindy.”
Yet the persistence of behaviors across millenniums makes the lessons of antiquity potent. “Human nature doesn’t change,” he said. The ancients “really did study the person and how people act, and some of it is quite good.”
Therapy, for example, is something he believes in, but not because he holds stock in the theories of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud; rather, he argued, therapy works because the therapist embodies the deep Lindy role of a sympathetic friend in the alienating modern world.
Of course, the Lindy effect doesn’t work in every domain; if you are diagnosed with cancer, seek chemotherapy, Mr. Skallas said, rather than relying on Roman medical practices. He thinks Lindy is more useful when it comes to skepticism of industrial-age consumables, like mouthwash or processed seed oils, and faddish social science, like the debunked Myers-Briggs test.
And ancient practices can provide powerful inchoate benefits to their practitioners, even when the exact cause and effect may be unclear at the time. In his newsletter, Mr. Skallas cited the 2016 book “The Secret Of Our Success,” by Joseph Heinrich, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard.
Mr. Heinrich researched the history of manioc, a bitter root domesticated in South America, which can be toxic if not prepared properly. In the Amazon, “Indigenous Tukanoans use a multistep, multiday processing technique that involves scraping, grating, and finally washing the roots,” to remove cyanide.
After the Portuguese transported manioc to West Africa in the 17th century, the root spread rapidly, but the proper processing techniques did not. “Even after hundreds of years, chronic cyanide poisoning remains a serious health problem in Africa,” Mr. Heinrich writes.

His most significant coinage may be “Lindy walk,” which he came up with last year, seeking an escape from the quarantine doldrums.
“That just basically means a stroll,” he said. “But it’s also in a lot of ancient cultures, a heavy tradition of walking, right? There’s the Sabbath stroll. In Greek, it’s called Volta. There’s an Italian version of it. It’s just walking for the sake of walking.”
In a newsletter post, Mr. Skallas cited Greek walkers “from Diogenes wandering the world looking for an honest man to Thales stumbling into a pit while lost in thought.”
A Lindy walk isn’t just a beeline from Point A to Point B; there should be no set destination, with turns made at random to stimulate the mind. “An interesting thing happened when I walked. I had thoughts popping into my head,” Mr. Skallas wrote. “Waves of ideas would come through. I wasn’t ‘trying’ to think or even come up with an idea. It would just appear. Like magic.”"