Death is No Longer Inevitable
I don’t want to live forever, it sounds exhausting. Every single living being on this planet has one thingcommon: we can not escape death. But what if death was optional? This is the question posed by Bryan Johnson, the tech mogul millionaire who sold his company to PayPal for $800 million.
Rather than spending more time and money on his various other tech ventures, Johnson has been hyper-fixated on slowing down and reversing the aging process. In 2021, he started working on Project Blueprint, a multifaceted self-experimentation on anti-aging. For the past three years, Johnson has taken drastic measures and sacrifices to reverse his body's natural aging processes. He spends 2 million dollars a year on doctors and medical procedures, takes 100 pills every day, and has even undergone plasma transfusions with his teenage son.
Johnson was born 46 years ago but claims he has hundreds of biological ages throughout his body. He states that his heart is 37 years old, his lungs are 18, and that he has the skin of a 28-year-old. Overall he believes to have successfully reversed his age by 5.1 years and is now aging at a pace of .76 percent. Most of this data is collected using biomarkers and a team of over 30 health professionals.
Despite his positive findings, the internet is not convinced he has reversed anything. Most comments seem to think it’s weird to want to become 18 again and that Johnson looks older than his actual age rather than younger. But it doesn’t seem like a more youthful external appearance is his end goal.
One motivation for entering this field is that he has expressed his disappointment in the disconnect between intellectuals and their behaviors toward their bodies. He states that he sees some of the most brilliant minds on the planet treat their bodies without respect. They eat junk food, don’t sleep, and party as if their bodies are invincible. Johnson wants to spread awareness that internal health is societally beneficial for innovation and that our modern world has lost touch with that due to the fast-paced nature of this century. To combat these bad habits, he has spent copious amounts of time and money to craft the perfect diet that serves to benefit each of his organs and can now pass the fitness test of an 18-year-old.
Another factor that plays into his research is that his father, aged 71, has both cancer and heart disease and was not predicted to live much longer. To try to extend his dad’s life, Johnson has been donating his plasma. Using his own “super blood”, as he calls it, his father is now reportedly aging at the speed of a 46-year-old, a pace 25 years slower than before. Although the long-term effects are unclear, it is an impressive feat nonetheless.
Finally, through his experimentation, Johnson wants to fundamentally change what it means to be human.
Yes, it would be a technological miracle to prevent the inevitability of death, but it would also so intensely impact the nature of the human race. Overpopulation is just one of the many unintended consequences of humans having the ability to slow down or escape death. Without death, we would be fighting against the universe's natural clock. It would be going against the only thing guaranteed in life.
It may sound cynical, but death gives me purpose. The wrinkles forming on my skin remind me that my time on this planet is finite and that I need to be purposeful and intentional with my actions. If I knew I had unlimited time, it would be difficult to set goals and have desires and I would lose the “YOLO” mentality that typically drives my decisions.
Let’s imagine a world where Blueprint is successful and Johnson has cracked the code to living forever. Due to the time commitment and the expenses that go into his methods, the only people who could have access to these processes would be the top .01 percent–the powerful (usually corrupt) billionaires. A dystopian world where only the richest of people can opt out of death while the rest of us continue as normal is a chilling thing to think about.
Johnson spends countless hours of his day dedicated to Blueprint. Reversing the clock impacts every aspect of his life and I can only imagine all the things he is missing out on. Society in general is so focused on staying young forever that we only end up losing the time that we do have. As SZA says, “Half of us chasin' fountains of youth and it's in the present.” For all we know, Johnson could be wasting his entire life fighting nature in a losing battle.
Sources:
https://time.com/6315607/bryan-johnsons-quest-for-immortality/
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/trends/us-ceo-bryan-johnson-obsessed-with-age-reversal-claims-his-super-blood-slashed-fathers-age-by-25-years-11744891.html
https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/the-bryan-johnson-diet
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/trends/us-ceo-bryan-johnson-obsessed-with-age-reversal-claims-his-super-blood-slashed-fathers-age-by-25-years-11744891.html