Is there a way to change the lifespan of particles in vex after the popnet? I can do f@life += 1 and I see the life attribute update but the particles still die at the end of their old lifespan

That's because it's the popnet that kills the particles according to their life while in the popnet.

If your adjusting ‘life’ after in vex, the popnet no longer sees that to make changes. Although you yourself can delete the particles yourself, or whatever else you might want to do by specifying the conditions for any attribute like ‘life’, ‘age’, etc.

You can put a pop wrangle node within the popnet itself too, if you want to do some vex adjustments to ‘life’.

D'oh! yeah that makes sense. I'm doing a longer lifespan and adjusting that shorter downstream which works fine