Don't Not Die

Bryan Johnson isn't the future.

I don’t wish death on Bryan Johnson. About that, he and I are agreed. But I wouldn’t wish the kind of life he’s living on him either, nor on my worst enemy. The man is spending millions every year to keep from dying, and he looks like a wreck. Gaunt, drained, frozen in a Botox half-smile—the kind of look you’d expect from an aggressively calibrated life.

Most recently, Johnson appeared on Bari Weiss’s Honestly podcast and murmured eerily about a common AI trope: “I think the irony is that we told stories of God creating us, and I think the reality is that we are creating God.”

Since not a single major religion proposes that God is anything like a supercomputer, I struggle to imagine what sorts of spiritual longings Johnson thinks GPT-1000 is going to satisfy or replace. But really this is just primitive Babel-tier tech worship, not even informed enough to rise to the level of error. If you want a history of Johnson’s kind of thinking in the modern world, an illustration of its failures, and a route to a better way forward, boy have I got a book for you.

But I won’t spend too much time here fulminating against Bryan Johnson-ism. If you’re fulminating, you’re already losing. In reality, I have a suspicion that most normal people’s attention is drawn to Johnson in the way it would be drawn to a circus freak, an extreme curiosity—not an aspirational model. You don’t need an elaborate treatise to explain why he’s wrong. You can see why he’s wrong, just by looking at him.

You can see it in the hospital-white, air-filtered room where he “perfects” his sleep. You can feel it in the cloistered restrictions drawing ever-tighter around him, frightening him out of one small pleasure after another. It’s ironic that Johnson invites his detractors to meet him in “the debate of what is a virtuous and honorable life,” since of course that’s where he’s weakest.

It’s not only because wisdom traditions throughout history have agreed that “as is a play, so is life: what matters is not how long the action lasts, but how good the acting is.” It’s also because any fool can see that whatever a virtuous and honorable life is, Bryan Johnson’s ain’t it. No quantity of professions to the contrary or dorm-room philosophizing is all that convincing when the man’s soul is seeping out through his skin in front of you.

Sometimes my students will tell me that you can’t judge people’s lifestyles this way, because happiness is subjective. It’s an easy mistake to make: our experience of joy is intensely personal, and personality profiles do differ, so you might assume that the good life is a matter of purely individual preference. If the heroin addict says he’s happy in his squalid abjection, how can we say he’s wrong?

I usually answer this with another question: have you, personally, ever been in a situation that you thought made you happy, but then you got out of it and realized you were actually miserable? The answer’s always yes. We’ve all been there: you think your drinking isn’t a problem until you stop and you realize what a dark cloud it was over your life. You don’t fully realize how much you hate your job until you quit.

The fact that this sort of thing can happen raises the startling possibility that we can be wrong about our own happiness, that there’s some absolute standard of real happiness and it’s different from what we just happen to be getting pleasure out of right now. Which is why, long ago, the best minds alive reviewed the possible sources of true happiness and concluded that the surest one is not longevity but moral virtue.

It’s certainly the case that the technology to extend and improve our physical existence is going to keep getting better. But that will only make the old question more acute: what kind of life is worth living? That’s what real people are reckoning with right now, not how to suck the most vitality out of their children’s blood plasma.

“By indulging a limitless desire for a supposedly limitless quantity,” wrote Wendell Berry, “one gives up all the things that are most desirable.” It’s because our machines are getting so powerful that the most important questions of our era are the ones machines can’t answer. I too want to live forever—but only if I can find the kind of life that never gets old. And behold another ancient mystery: to get that kind of life, we are all of us going to have to be willing to die.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer