On Bryan Johnson's obsessive quest to bring science fiction to real life
Cards on the table: I fully agree that death is bad. Zero stars, don't recommend. I'll be among the cheering crowd if medical technology somehow succeeds at solving all diseases and making it possible for us to live thousands or millions of years—emphasis on if. So far I've found no reasons to expect that über-rich tech bro Bryan Johnson will succeed at outrunning his own body and unlocking the secret to immortality. The current state of scientific progress simply isn't there yet. However, his Netflix infomercial documentary Don't Die, which you shouldn't for a second believe isn't part of his meticulously curated regimen of 24/7 self-branding, does something more interesting than expositing on the state of the art of the study of aging. Where he aimed at portraying himself as a bold pioneer opening up the next frontier of human history, what actually comes off is a tragic character study whose inadvertent revelations reach beyond the power of his obvious control over the narrative.
That's right, people: I'm taking the message from the enemy of death and applying Death of the Author to it. Irony engines, engage!
You can easily guess my verdict on Don't Die by the fact that it presents itself as a true story from real life but this is a science fiction blog. Johnson's self-imposed mission to eliminate death is, in the most literal sense, science fiction: his goal is unfeasible in this century, no matter how vehemently he persists in preaching the gospel of eternal youth. It's been a while since fellow anti-death prophet Raymond Kurzweil made one of his eyebrow-raising predictions about extending human life to infinity by digital means, and until actual results are shown, we should remain no less skeptical of Bryan Johnson's promise to achieve the same by chemical means. (And no, his massive abs don't count as "results." At a decade older, Jason Statham looks just as ripped and far less stressed.) We won't know for certain whether those numbers on the chart of Johnson's biomarkers mean something until he enters actual old age.
While we wait for the big news, he's hard to tell apart from other enthusiasts of extreme body modification, such as Henry Damon, Michel Praddo, or Dennis Avner, whom I don't recommend you look up. However, those guys tend to describe their transformations in terms of artistic self-expression. Despite his habit of posing half-nude for Instagram, Bryan Johnson doesn't appear to be motivated by an aesthetic ideal, or at least doesn't claim to be. His grueling routine of over a hundred pills, brutal weightlifting, sessions of artificial light, a set of diet restrictions that can only be described as sadistic, and the occasional injection of plasma from his son (because why try to live forever if you can't go full vampire) don't add up to an enjoyable life. The documentary even recognizes the incongruity of spending so much of his waking hours working so hard to buy himself more days of life... which he ends up not living because he's too busy trying not to die. If this were a form of artistic self-expression, its message would be legible as a cry for help. Could Johnson be staging an elaborate performance project, a vociferous statement on the commercialization of healthcare and the fundamental inequality that lets him fly outside of US jurisdiction to receive super-illegal genetic therapies for a sum that could buy years' worth of deworming pills for Third World kids? Or is he instead the world's worst case of orthorexia? Is he like French artist Orlan, who uses her own body as the shapeable material of her work, or is he like Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who spent his old age desperately seeking an alchemist who could brew the elixir of eternal life?
Regardless of whatever useful scientific advance may eventually result from this, the one thing that is clear about Johnson is that he's a businessman, and he's learned very well how to sell his product. At the start of the documentary, the camera quickly scans over a long list of the blood tests he takes regularly, conspicuously stopping at the exact position where his testosterone levels would appear right in the center of the frame. In a later scene, text on the screen summarizes his progress according to various medical parameters, the unmissable last of which is the quality of his erections. Johnson knows exactly the demographic of insecure young men that his message is likely to attract. He ought to know; he's been there.
Johnson lets us glimpse bits of his psychology when he starts recounting his youth in the Mormon church, his way too early marriage, his first business successes and the soul-draining rhythm of nonstop work that it took to become a multimillionaire. He describes a period of suicidal depression around his 30s, when he realized that he didn't know in what direction he wanted to go with his life. He did end up leaving the Mormon church, but he seems to have never noticed how the particularly twisted Mormon version of patriarchal expectations must have contributed to his mental breakdown. Like many people with depression, he correctly identified that he shouldn't listen when his mind was telling him that he had to die. Unlike probably everyone else with depression, he took that insight too far, and decided to stop listening to his mind about anything. When he describes how he built an inflexible algorithm that makes all life decisions for him, his evident relief is hard to empathize with. It's like hearing Victor Frankenstein tell the happy story of how all his worries went away after he gave himself a lobotomy.
The way Johnson puts it, "Removing my mind has been the best thing I've ever done in my life." Such an admission comes from a man who claims to be working to help people stop behaving self-destructively, a profoundly troubled man who hears his son tell him during casual conversation that he's disconnected from his own emotions and still doesn't get the hint. That fateful step of surrendering his agency to impersonal laws, of ceasing to make his own choices (which for all purposes is equivalent to ceasing to be a person) is the key to the whole puzzle. Johnson developed his self-hatred to its logical conclusion: in the contest against natural death, his winning move was to snatch its victim first. Time can no longer annihilate him, not because he hardened his body against all harm, but because he preemptively severed that body from consciousness before nature could do it. That's how he finally ensured that he won't die: by the standards of humanism, he has already commited suicide.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
