Last Thursday, Bryan Johnson took to X and stated the obvious: “wonder if i’ve taken this whole longevity thing too far”. For years now, the tech multimillionaire-turned-longevity-guru has been ingesting more than 100 pills a day, eating his boiled vegetables and nutty pudding before 11am, sleeping early, avoiding alcohol, monitoring every organ in his body, and even getting a “young blood transfusion” from his son. He’s previously called biological death “no longer inevitable” and likened his quest for immortality to a new religion: “Don’t Die”. “The only question is: will you be an early or late adopter?” he wrote on X just last year. Then he got diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis, which seems to have caused him to rethink his ultra-strict lifestyle altogether. So, with the movement’s most tireless figurehead having second thoughts, is longevity dead?

Much of human history is a doomed tale of failed attempts at cheating death. Alexander the Great famously sought to live forever through the Fountain of Eternal Life. But Johnson and other Silicon Valley biohackers like him believe that, because they have modern technology on their side, they can avoid the fate of the Macedonian king (who died at age 32) and, well, everyone else. Their tech-powered efforts form one branch of transhumanism, a movement based on the belief that the utilisation of science and technology is morally imperative for augmenting the human condition. The language they use is similarly steeped in moral judgment. Eating too much food (or the wrong food) is, as Johnson puts it, “silly self-destructive behaviour”. Drinking alcohol, even in moderation, is heavily frowned upon. On the Don’t Die website, Johnson wrote that he recategorised any personal behaviours that increased his speed to death as “an act of violence”.

Unsurprisingly, most of the major figures in today’s longevity space are billionaires. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has invested hundreds of millions in Retro Biosciences, a biotech company hoping to “target ageing biology to extend healthy human lifespan by ten years”. Jeff Bezos is reportedly among the major funders of Altos Labs, a company hoping to find stem cell therapies to extend human life spans. Over the years, Peter Thiel has invested many millions of venture capital dollars in various biotech companies and concerns, and has even signed up to be cryogenically preserved. Longevity is a rich man’s game because most people can barely afford to live once, let alone forever.

While most people either can’t or don’t want to recieve blood transfusions from their next of kin, or eat boiled green gloop for two out of their three meals a day, modern longevity culture has already seeped into the world of wellness. It was a match made in heaven: the $6.8 trillion wellness industry has been built on selling people’s fears about ageing and decaying back to them. There’s been the “clean living” movement, which convinced people that their self-cleaning organs needed to be “cleansed” and controlled. Or the classic “anti-ageing” boom, which reframed wrinkle creams and treatments as health-focused preventative medicine for the skin. Anti-ageing rhetoric has always been mostly targeted at women, who aren’t allowed the same grace as the “silver fox” men when it comes to visibly getting older.

Even as the wellness industry is changing its tactics, this is as true today as it’s ever been. Last month, I came across a video on TikTok that concerned me (even more than usual). It was of a teenager posting about how everyone around her is planning for the future, while she is romanticising ending her life on a balcony in Italy in four years. I won’t share it here because I was once a teenager who couldn’t envision a future worth living (the one I’m now enjoying), so I know how easily these ideas spread. But the comments were filled with other young girls swearing to be “gone by 20”. This might seem like the opposite of the longevity movement, and in many ways it is, but it’s also an example of how the beauty world makes women so terrified of ageing that, if looking young forever isn’t an option, they’d rather not live at all. 

“We might be nearing the peak of human lifespan physically, but the rise of AI is bringing with it the promise of digital immortality and even the redefinition of death and memory. The issue is, however, that we are still yet to grapple with the question: What’s the purpose of life?”

The longevity movement frames reverse ageing as an almost spiritual pursuit – but, time and time again, we’ve come to learn that technological and scientific advancements are not fulfilling people’s hunger for spiritual purpose and meaning. We might be nearing the peak of human lifespan physically, but the rise of AI is bringing with it the promise of digital immortality and even the redefinition of death and memory. The issue is, however, that we are still yet to grapple with the question: What’s the purpose of life? It’s a hard question to answer when you're living paycheck to paycheck, which one in four American households are. It’s clear that the billionaire class has no interest in ensuring that everyone has resources necessary to explore these deeper questions and to pursue an enjoyable, meaningful life, rather than struggling for baseline survival. Immortality just isn't a priority for the vast majority of people alive today.

In recent years, alongside the rise of hypermasculine looksmaxxing trends, the longevity movement has made men the face of anti-ageing. Now, it’s about reverse ageing. Instead of focusing on collagen creams or facelifts, you re-​​engineer your body – making tech and “science”-led changes all through the framing of “health”. (Of course, once men are doing something it’s no longer framed as frivolous or vapid.) There is some potentially good longevity advice going around – wearing sunscreen is a great idea, and it’s likely positive that under-30-somethings are starting to think about retaining muscle and bone health. But it’s also an extremely DIY space, where young people are stacking potentially dangerous peptides that they bought online to intercept the biological hallmarks of ageing. 

Under the framing of optimisation, even the best advice (like getting a good night’s rest and lifting weights here and there) becomes a fixation – something to quantify and improve on. This, as Alexander the Great learned and likely now so has Johnson, is tiring and futile. Constantly seeking to improve your life is no real way to live. But that doesn’t mean that longevity is dead, that there won’t be another “secret” sold to us next week. It also doesn’t mean that billionaires will stop throwing their money into preventing their own death rather than the actually avoidable deaths caused by endless wars or the climate crisis. In fact, the day after Johnson posted about taking longevity “too far”, he posted about keeping his girlfriend’s period blood in his -80 °C freezer, to measure for microplastics and endocrine disruptors. Longevity will rage on – even if through another word, trend or face – until we know how to sit with death.