WHO WANTS TO LIVE FOREVER?
Inside humanity's Holy Grail search to postpone death indefinitely
It's 11 a.m., which means tech tycoon Bryan Johnson has already consumed his three daily meals, including dinner, and will fast until 6 a.m. tomorrow.
By day's end, he will have ingested more than 100 pills, mostly supplements. He will stop drinking water to ensure a solid night of slumber, which averages eight hours 39 minutes. Johnson, who lives in Los Angeles, is the founder of Blueprint, an “experiment to explore the future of being human.” He is also its principal product, spending US$2 million annually to slow the process of aging in his body, continually monitoring a “few hundred” biomarkers. Johnson maintains an exacting daily “anti-aging” exercise regimen while investigating more ways to improve his body.
“I've been doing a lot of male reproductive organ rejuvenation,” he shared. “I'm getting my penis injected so that they can measure arterial flow.”
With eight per cent body fat, Johnson has a chronological age of 46. His biological age, contains multitudes: “My left ear is 64, my heart is 37, my diaphragm is 18, and my cardiovascular capacity is in the top 1.5 per cent of 18-yearolds.”
Johnson's axiom: “Don't die. This is the first time in the history of the human race where we can say with a straight face, `Don't die.'”
Unlike many other longevity enthusiasts, Johnson does not promote supplements or a paid subscription program, though he markets his own olive oil (two 25-ounce bottles for $60), which constitutes 15 per cent of his daily caloric intake.
“Aging is a disease, one that is treatable,” said nutritionist and longevity wellness authority Serena Poon, 47, on the phone from the United Arab Emirates.
Poon and business partner David Sinclair, a Harvard geneticist and co-author of the best-selling Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To, were on a global tour spreading the word of a longer, healthier life.
Last year, Poon and Sinclair signed with entertainment goliath WME. They've launched a wellness company and a skin care line, and they co-host longevity programming on Youtube and Instagram while exploring several media opportunities. On her website, Poon promotes supplements ($32.95 to $91.95) and ritual cleansing aids.
We live in the gold-and-gene rush of Longevity Inc., an industry marketing the decathlon of wellness that Bank of America labelled “ammortality” and projected will reach $600 billion by 2025. Instead of a Fountain of Youth, we have a Mt. Olympus of supplements. Metformin, resveratrol and rapamycin are promoted as transformational wonders in slowing aging. In the pursuit of a longer and healthier life, nutrition, exercise, sleep, a swarm of biomarkers, emotional well-being and social engagement — basically everything — are areas for improvement and constant monitoring, a life meted out in metrics, often for a price.
Longevity has become many things. It's a vast, accelerated area of research for scientists and tech moguls, the Holy Grail of biohacking and potential El Dorado of biotech wealth. An area of infotainment: a pole vault onto the bestseller list, a buzzword of podcasts hosted by Sinclair, Peter Attia and Andrew Huberman (whose science-based program often deals with the subject) — scientists and doctors with exquisite academic pedigrees who sometimes interview each other. A lodestar for diets, do-this-don'tdo-that newsletters and lifestyle coaches. A branding opportunity for emollients, olive oil, trademarked wellness programs and more supplements.
In the longevity world, time is a fungible concept. Aging's something to be battled and slain. A burgeoning apothecary of serums and humectants is marketed as “anti-aging,” whatever that is. Longevity coaches promote programs capable of “reversing aging.”
Which, when you pause to consider, is a chronological impossibility.
Longevity inspires international travel to Blue Zones, the five identified global regions where residents live longer lives that have fuelled a product line, a shelf of books by Dan Buettner and the recent Netflix docuseries Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones.
There are longevity coaches like Nicole Marcione, 48, who writes a newsletter, hosts a podcast and conducts private coaching of her Sexysmart Aging: Blending the Science of Longevity with the Art of Sensual Living course, $5,000 for 12 weeks. Marcione said “the dream is to be very healthy and independent until three days before you drop dead at 100 years old.”
Many share that dream. But living to 100, even 120, may not equal a better life, especially if a fitter body isn't accompanied by agency, hope or sharp cognition. There are ethical concerns as to whether it's responsible to desire a century of life in a time of climate crisis, an expanding global population and an epidemic of loneliness, particularly if our partners and peers may not be there to share it. To some critics, the financial and time investments in a longer life — or, more precisely, the hope of a longer life — suggest an extended exercise in narcissism, so many more years of Me Time.
A burgeoning cohort of old people has attendant societal and economic costs to younger generations. An unwillingness to move on, to yield the floor, potentially prevents fresh talent and opportunity from blossoming.
“The reality is that you're adding time at the end of your life. You're not getting two decades of being in your 20s,” said Ezekiel J. Emanuel, an oncologist and the vice provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania. “We're really bad judges of our abilities and our own limitations.”
Emanuel wrote the 2014 Atlantic essay Why I Hope to Die at 75, which argues that our prime years of productivity are well behind us by the time we're senior citizens and that “this manic desperation to endlessly extend life is misguided and potentially destructive.”
The imperative to live a long life is, “to some degree, we have this built into our system, survival of the fittest, survive to reproduce,” said Emanuel, one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act. “These people tend to be a little egotistical, that the world is not going to be able to live without them. There's this element that they're very special people who ought to live a long time.”
Now 66, Emanuel still champions these sentiments.
“This obsession with physical activity now for maybe an increased chance later on that you're going to be more physically fit is questionable. There are no guarantees,” he said. “You could come down with a cancer, Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis or lord knows what.”
Our quest for a longer, healthier life is rooted in several factors, including fear. Never underestimate the human condition — that we alone among animals are aware of our inevitable demise — as a formidable motivator and economic engine.
There's a desire to reverse pervasive ageism, to reimagine and redefine what people's later years might look like.
“Younger generations will view us differently. They won't see us as `old,'” Olshansky said. “I'm far more productive now than many kids.”
Valter Longo, director of the University of Southern California's Longevity Institute and author of the best-selling Longevity Diet: Slow Aging, Fight Disease, Optimize Weight, encourages fasting, restricting calories and skipping one daily meal, though never breakfast. Huberman and Sinclair extol the benefits of cold water immersion (shower, bath, lake) to improve body and brain health. Many longevity authorities eschew alcohol and view sugar as abominable, dairy as problematic and bread as verboten. Everyone advocates better sleep. Attia suggests sleeping in a room cooled to around 65 F.
A highly regimented life can make pleasure seem like an afterthought — unless your idea of pleasure is a highly regimented life and rigorous exercise.
The key to being healthier needn't be complicated or expensive, said Olshansky, who has studied longevity for about four decades. It comes down to five words: “Exercise more and eat less.” Then again, he noted, “you could be coached on all of that and still die at the same age.”
Compared with our ancestors and other species, many of us will enjoy a wealth of years. Is it greedy to strive for more?
“A 150-year life is still a mortal life,” said Ryan Mcannally-linz, 39, who co-wrote the best-selling Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, named for the popular Yale course that he teaches with fellow divinity professors Miroslav Volf and Matthew Croasmun. “The pursuit of longevity can go awry if it is, in effect, a denial, an unwillingness to face the fact of mortality, to wrestle with its implications of how we can and ought to live.”
The pursuit of longevity risks becoming a full-time occupation, worrying about the future instead of living in the now.
“If you somehow end up living to 85, fully physically functioning and mentally functioning, that's great, too,” Emanuel said. “But that's not the goal. The goal isn't to live a long time. The goal is to live a meaningful life.”
The dream is to be very healthy and independent until three days before you drop dead at 100 years old.