Early in the Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, anti-aging expert Dr. Andrew Steele said something that brought me up short: “We’re all so used to watching our friends and relatives and pets age and die, we think that it’s somehow natural and somehow good.”
We do?
Sure, it’s fair to say that there’s a consensus on the naturalness of death. It’s part of the life cycle of every human and animal: We’re born, we live, we die. But “good”? That’s not exactly a common sentiment. Even those of us who believe that death is the door through which we must pass to reach God don’t usually hold that death is inherently good.
The obvious parallels to vampirism and so forth never seem to occur to any of them.
But Bryan Johnson, the tech billionaire who’s the focus of Don’t Die, takes his own anti-death attitude to undreamed-of heights. Johnson has gained fame in recent years for the Blueprint Protocol, a strenuous program of diet, exercise, and medical care designed to take years off his life—literally. As the documentary shows in exhaustive detail, Johnson spends hours each day measuring out vegetable portions, swallowing pills, and pumping iron, with the result that, reportedly, he’s lowered his biological age by about five years.
The end goal, as is made clear in the film’s title, is to defeat death.
The documentary is largely sympathetic to Johnson and his goal—who doesn’t want to face down humankind’s oldest and worst enemy, after all? Who amongst us, if we had billions of dollars, wouldn’t at least consider plowing those dollars into finding a way to stay here on Earth as long as possible? What better use could there be for all that money than defeating death?
So the film smooths over Johnson’s eccentricities and softens aspects of his story that tend to get a harsher treatment from the press. That tale you may have heard about Johnson siphoning blood, and later plasma, from his teenage son to help himself stay young? Don’t Die presents this bizarre practice as just some good old-fashioned family bonding. Johnson; his father, Richard; and his son, Talmage, all participate in the plasma-sharing ritual, which is presented not just as part of Bryan’s de-aging plan, but also as a way to try boosting Richard’s fading mental abilities. “Bryan told me that this would be someone doing something for their loved one that mattered,” Richard recounts.
The obvious parallels to vampirism and so forth never seem to occur to any of them.
That’s not, I believe, an accident. As with that novel idea mentioned above that death is bad, Johnson and his associates seem to think and act as if they’re inventing the world as they go along. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that Johnson talks—only half-jokingly—about inventing his own religion, in tandem with his quest for immortality.
Born into the LDS faith, Johnson practiced it well into adulthood, until, he says, “With the intensity of what life was delivering up, I felt like [the church’s] answers, the only reality I knew, didn’t make sense anymore.” Racked with suicidal depression, he left his faith, sold his company, divorced his wife, and “found strength and liberation in doing Blueprint.”
. . . what would be the point of living forever without a mind or soul, two essential ingredients of our humanity?
It’s not putting it too strongly to say that Johnson’s new religion is the worship of the body. It’s pretty clear just from the images we’re seeing onscreen—the obsessive exercise, the careful attention to appearance, the scene where his son walks in on him getting photographed naked. But if that weren’t enough, he comes right out and says it.
“I didn’t want an afterlife, I didn’t want this life, I didn’t want consciousness at all,” Johnson recalls of his depressive period.
My mind was like a vicious storm, telling me to literally kill myself, and it became clear to me that the mind is not a reliable source of judgment. I needed a different way of being. . . . When I give my body authority, it doesn’t commit this self-destructive harm. My heart doesn’t deliver these stinging insults. My lungs don’t do it either. My kidney doesn’t either. Removing my mind has been the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.
I’m not downplaying the seriousness of Johnson’s depression when I say that this is a rather drastic case of baby and bathwater. His ideas strike me, though, as being on par with those who want us to outsource our writing, our art, and our thinking in general to artificial intelligence. In both cases, our God-given minds and creative abilities are devalued, our actions made mechanical and devoid of meaning.
There’s also the matter of the intense self-focus that Johnson’s regimen requires: a self-focus that, he admits, makes him a poor romantic prospect and a person without much companionship in general, aside from his staff and Talmage, before the latter goes off to college. (Johnson’s other children were not interviewed for the film, and the status of his relationship with them is unclear.) He does try to argue that Blueprint could be adapted to help everyone in the world, but the stab at altruism in the midst of a documentary all about his hyperfocus on his own biology is not terribly convincing—especially when you consider his station in life.. Apologies for the generalization, but if, especially after the last few months, you truly believe that tech billionaires as a class have the public’s best interests at heart, I have a chainsaw to sell you.
But above all, Johnson’s attempt to defeat death neglects to take into account the very nature of reality. As I said earlier, no one is seriously arguing that death is a good thing. C. S. Lewis, in his book Miracles, aptly describes it as “the triumph of Satan, the punishment of the Fall, and the last enemy,” and reminds us that Christ Himself “detested this penal obscenity not less than we do but more.
“On the other hand,” Lewis goes on, “only he who loses his life will save it. We are baptised into the death of Christ, and it is the remedy for the Fall.”
Johnson’s religion falls apart because it fails to grasp these ultimate truths. Along with the mind, it devalues the soul when it elevates the body above all else. And what would be the point of living forever without a mind or soul, two essential ingredients of our humanity? I hate the thought of dying too, but if the alternative is to pour all my resources and all my energy into creating an immortal body at the expense of everything else—well, again, that brings up the unsavory idea of vampirism, a soulless form of life that can do nothing but parody real life. It’s a hard fact to face, and Don’t Die never quite gets around to facing it, but it seems that the only immortality available to us is the kind that we gain through accepting our common mortality. In other words, only through death can we find true life.
