Just Don't Die
What a millionaire's quest for immortality reveals about our health industry
Live long and prosper. By now you may have heard rumblings about the sun deprived multimillionaire who steals blood from his son, in a desperate attempt to live forever.
While its these life-extending therapies and rich/poor divide that make most of the headlines, longevity, at least the Don’t Die flavor of longevity, has surprisingly little to do with living beyond natural limits. It seems less about extending life directly and more about stopping the acceleration of aging—reducing the self-inflicted harm that makes us die sooner. The therapies, supplements and drugs that actually extend lifespans are at the very bleeding edge, and seem to be taken by a small minority of even the most pro-tech Don’t Die followers, most of which are simply concerned with things like sleep, diet and exercise.
It’s easy to get the wrong idea about Bryan Johnson and his movement, but to dismiss it risks missing all of the accompanying trends which make longevity the massive movement it is quickly becoming, or missing the ways in which it now shapes our culture, spirituality, and politics.
Bryan Johnson joins an ever growing list of figures calling attention to an uncomfortable fact: Americans’ health is in dire shape. It is now becoming trendy for folks to be extremely worried about what they’re eating, breathing, and micro-plasticking themselves with, to the point that “longevity” is suddenly mainstream. It’s easy to recognize the same trends that once contributed to the environmental movement now fueling MAHA—the RFK Jr. Make America Healthy Again movement which garnered the enthusiasm of so many podcast-bros.
Though once reserved for a leftist, “crunchy”, gluten-free elite, the right has managed to reclaim health with the help of tech-bros and have largely rebranded it as “longevity”.1 The culture wars have transcended social media and made their way into farmers markets and organic food stores, where communist baristas now share the cereal aisle with unvaccinated gym bros.
This is the cultural backdrop in which we discover longevity in Netflix’s Don’t Die documentary, and while health/food skepticism may seem like an extremely recent movement (like, 2020 recent), the underlying trends have been in motion for years now.
I remember speaking to an endocrinologist about Coca-Cola in 2015, who asked me to imagine living 30,000 years ago, eating what I could find, usually fruits and weak animals. Each fruit was a blessing, a memorable explosion of flavor and energy. In some ways, it was the highlight of your month, if it happened at all. Now imagine that with every can of coke, you fry this part of your brain, consuming a lifetime's worth of fruits. This “paleo” vision of the world asserts that our bodies are constantly overstimulated, in a permanent state of unnatural shock. While our minds have rapidly adapted to industrialization, our bodies and biology could only adapt as fast as evolution, on a significantly slower timeframe.
I’m not sure whether that’s scientifically accurate, but it too is part of the very broad longevity movement, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the techno-utopist injecting the latest stem cell therapy into his body. The vastness of this movement hints at how widespread the rejection of modern food and health has become.
Perhaps the longevity movement resonates so broadly because we can all recognize the very simple truth at its core—people feel like shit. Worse, this seems to be by design, a deliberate intention of our food industry to keep us weak and addicted.
We can all recognize that at the very least, eating and finding food that doesn’t poison you is unbelievably complicated, as we desperately try to avoid ultra-processed foods and seed oils and carcinogens while being bombarded with microplastics.
In comes Bryan Johnson, with Blueprint, to help us find a way out of the noise.
It would be easy to ridicule Bryan Johnson as the overly funded marketing attempt to profit off this general malaise, as having put his finger on the pulse of American suffering, and now sells us the solution by way of entertainment and supplements.
The question which Netflix only briefly investigates, but appears to be on everyone’s minds is simple: could Bryan Johnson be the next big con artist?
In fairness, the documentary does a good job of providing context around his upbringing, giving the impression that a few hundred years ago, Johnson likely would have become a monk, in a half-disguised attempt to repent for his previously opulent and bourgeois lifestyle. Don't Die is just a different kind of modern monasticism, which has become his raison d'être. Today, longevity’s Pontifex Maximus spends his time publishing results online, for free, and has extensively tested Chocolate, Blueberries, Matcha and more.
He has also promised a consortium on microplastics in his interview with The Free Press, to help eradicate them from our food supply.
It’s hard to criticize a man who provides such a valuable public good, even if he does at times present himself as both the objective judge and salesman of the health industry. Still, I feel that one would have to stretch an overly-intellectualized and cynical argument quite far to make the case that Blueprint is not, on net, a useful service.
But not all criticism of longevity is focused on Bryan Johnson, much of it revolves instead around his cult-like following. There’s a mid-wit argument that longevity is simply the final step in our postmodern obsession with the Self. In a social media world, the Self becomes both consumer and producer of reality—omnipotent, and godlike, so the Self must last forever.2 In some ways, this makes longevity seem like the modern pinnacle of both narcissism and atheism. But narcissism in society spans further, and is much older, than the longevity movement. Longevity is not substantively different from the Athlete seeking a legacy as the GOAT, or a scientist’s desire to find the breakthrough in her field. The desire for medals, fame, and money. We only find it easy to criticize such desires when it manifests physically. If the object we glorify is spiritual or intangible, it is a noble human pursuit, if it is our physical bodies, it is superficial and narcissistic.
We’re told, unironically, by television hosts in full makeup and stage lighting, that this behavior is “vapid”. If only we could be as effortlessly cool and natural and in the moment, as say, show business.
Our longing for the eternal is instead deeply human, making those who attack longevity on the basis of hubris entirely hypocritical.
The arguments against longevity being superficial are perhaps themselves quite superficial, having more to do with the aesthetics of an immortality seeking billionaire, than the actual content and data being published.
You’d think after reading these anti-longevity attacks that much of society would prefer to Just Die the instant old age rears its ugly head, which might as well be now. If you’re going to die anyways, why put any work into living? You’ll die sooner, but at least you won’t be seen as arrogant, God forbid.
They remind you that it’s important to only consume poison in moderation, as an excess of anything is bad. Does Don’t Die mean not drinking alcohol? A good cigar? Is life without a bit of wine even a life worth living? For many, this is a real question.
No matter how unlucky you may or may not end up being, there is most surely an optimal way to live, with the highest expected return in terms of lifespan and vitality. Misfortune, and the odds of being “that unlucky cancer patient”, does not change the optimal behavior worth striving for. The worst part is that the alternative is poisonous. Rather than strive for perfection, people indulge in poisons because life is short, never considering that life may be short because of these poisons.
Beyond hypocrisy, longevity also showcases a certain darkness. Learning about the herculean efforts of our more disciplined peers provokes in us the horrible desire to see their efforts tragically rendered useless by a freak justice from the universe, which justifies our own laziness and lack of agency. As if those who dared to be better than us should be struck down for their hubris, and reminded that they are only temporarily better than the couch potatoes who share their fate. We watch them, secretly hoping in the most sociopathic part of our Twitter wired brains that they get hit by a car, or that lightning may strike down their anti-UV umbrellas.
All of this to say, longevity brings out a wide spectrum of cope from society. Beyond the cope is the realization that we are poisoning ourselves, in a large scale assisted suicide, one pop-tart at a time, and that while longevity may appear extreme, maybe the situation truly is dire, and requires an extreme reaction. Maybe we are going to die, and maybe that’s a scary proposition which most of us cannot handle without some framework to find meaning in death. In a postmodern world, many turn to Don’t Die as such a framework.
If we can no longer find meaning in death, then we can at least carry on, looking for meaning in life. In that sense Don’t Die is a rationalist wager. There may or may not be anything to death, but there definitely is something in life and it should be as long and as good as possible, until we step into the great unknown.
The New York Times actually has a great piece on this (I am just as shocked as you are).
On the surface, it seems like the increasingly popular longevity movement thrives in a male loneliness epidemic. The myth of the cowboy, silently enduring the conditions of the West, an outlaw too strong yet disagreeable for society, has morphed into the myth of the gym bro, an over-optimized Patrick Bateman who endures modern life and is the outcast of an overly feminized culture.