Once upon a time, a man decided that living a longer life was simply an engineering challenge.
He set about this task in a way he believed was best for him.
Most people, when confronted with the mortality question, buy a gym membership, cut back on the biscuits and promise themselves they’ll get more sleep.
But our man, US entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, did what only a Silicon Valley millionaire could do: he declared war.
Every morning begins with a roll call.
Not of children, or employees, or even thoughts worth having. Numbers.
Heart rate. Blood sugar. Sleep score. Body fat. Inflammation markers. Biological age. Somewhere, a dashboard flickers into life and informs him whether yesterday was a triumph or a mild disappointment.
Then come the pills.
Not one or two. Not the sort your grandmother keeps in a little plastic day-of-the-week organiser. Dozens of the things, swallowed with the determination of a man trying to win a loyalty scheme at the chemist.
Breakfast isn’t a comfortable, laid-back breakfast. It’s an industrial process.
Even sunshine, one of life’s few pleasures, has become an enemy. When the sun makes an appearance, most people welcome it for the VItamin D benefits. But Bryan reaches for an umbrella as though daylight were a personal insult.
A stroll becomes an evasive manoeuvre, darting from shade to shade with the urgency of someone avoiding a debt collector rather than a pleasant July afternoon.
And all day, every day, one question hums away in the background like a faulty fridge.
How can I live longer?
It’s an expensive hobby.
The curious thing is that the joys of life have quietly slipped out through the back door while he’s been measuring it. Every conversation is interrupted by a protocol. Every meal is an experiment. Every walk is a calculation.
There is something oddly tragic about devoting every waking hour to extending a life that increasingly resembles an administrative exercise.
Imagine arriving at the age of ninety-nine, after decades of flawless optimisation, only to realise you’ve spent most of the journey staring at graphs instead of sunsets.
The body, meanwhile, remains magnificently indifferent. It doesn’t care how many spreadsheets you’ve colour-coded or how many capsules you’ve swallowed before nine o’clock. It has been making and unmaking human beings for rather longer than Silicon Valley has been making apps.
Perhaps the point was never to squeeze another grey decade out of life.
Perhaps it was to notice the one you’re already in – preferably without carrying an umbrella on a perfectly pleasant day.
Health has become another luxury product, sold with the promise that enough money and enough discipline can exempt us from the human condition.
But the body has a wicked sense of humour. It ignores status, laughs at protocols and eventually reminds every one of us that we’re not machines waiting for an upgrade.
The goal was for Bryan Johnston to live for a long time. Yet at forty-eight, he has been diagnosed as having an Incurable Autoimmune Disease. That’s put a spanner in his longevity mission.
It would be a shame to discover, somewhere around the age of ninety-nine, that you’d never enjoyed a bacon sandwich, a few too many Margaritas watching the sun set in Bali or stepped outside your established, possibly misguided, parameters.
Graeme Dinnen
ResourcesForLife.net
Leave a Reply