Early within the Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Needs to Dwell Endlessly, anti-aging skilled Dr. Andrew Steele mentioned one thing that introduced me up quick: “We’re all so used to watching our associates and kin and pets age and die, we predict that it’s one way or the other pure and one way or the other good.”
We do?
Certain, it’s truthful to say that there’s a consensus on the naturalness of loss of life. It’s a part of the life cycle of each human and animal: We’re born, we reside, we die. However “good”? That’s not precisely a standard sentiment. Even these of us who imagine that loss of life is the door by which we should go to succeed in God don’t normally maintain that loss of life is inherently good.
The plain parallels to vampirism and so forth by no means appear to happen to any of them.
However Bryan Johnson, the tech billionaire who’s the main focus of Don’t Die, takes his personal anti-death perspective to undreamed-of heights. Johnson has gained fame in recent times for the Blueprint Protocol, a strenuous program of food regimen, train, and medical care designed to take years off his life—actually. Because the documentary reveals in exhaustive element, Johnson spends hours every day measuring out vegetable parts, swallowing tablets, and pumping iron, with the end result that, reportedly, he’s lowered his organic age by about 5 years.
The tip purpose, as is made clear within the movie’s title, is to defeat loss of life.
The documentary is basically sympathetic to Johnson and his purpose—who doesn’t wish to face down humankind’s oldest and worst enemy, in any case? Who amongst us, if we had billions of {dollars}, wouldn’t at the very least take into account plowing these {dollars} into discovering a strategy to keep right here on Earth so long as potential? What higher use may there be for all that cash than defeating loss of life?
So the movie smooths over Johnson’s eccentricities and softens facets of his story that are inclined to get a harsher remedy from the press. That story you might have heard about Johnson siphoning blood, and later plasma, from his teenage son to assist himself keep younger? Don’t Die presents this weird follow as just a few good old style household bonding. Johnson; his father, Richard; and his son, Talmage, all take part within the plasma-sharing ritual, which is introduced not simply as a part of Bryan’s de-aging plan, but additionally as a strategy to strive boosting Richard’s fading psychological talents. “Bryan informed me that this might be somebody doing one thing for his or her liked one which mattered,” Richard recounts.
The plain parallels to vampirism and so forth by no means appear to happen to any of them.
That’s not, I imagine, an accident. As with that novel concept talked about above that loss of life is dangerous, Johnson and his associates appear to suppose and act as in the event that they’re inventing the world as they go alongside. Maybe it’s not shocking, then, that Johnson talks—solely half-jokingly—about inventing his personal faith, in tandem along with his quest for immortality.
Born into the LDS religion, Johnson practiced it properly into maturity, till, he says, “With the depth of what life was delivering up, I felt like [the church’s] solutions, the one actuality I knew, didn’t make sense anymore.” Racked with suicidal melancholy, he left his religion, bought his firm, divorced his spouse, and “discovered energy and liberation in doing Blueprint.”
. . . what could be the purpose of dwelling ceaselessly with no thoughts or soul, two important components of our humanity?
It’s not placing it too strongly to say that Johnson’s new faith is the worship of the physique. It’s fairly clear simply from the pictures we’re seeing onscreen—the obsessive train, the cautious consideration to look, the scene the place his son walks in on him getting photographed bare. But when that weren’t sufficient, he comes proper out and says it.
“I didn’t need an afterlife, I didn’t need this life, I didn’t need consciousness in any respect,” Johnson recollects of his depressive interval.
My thoughts was like a vicious storm, telling me to actually kill myself, and it grew to become clear to me that the thoughts shouldn’t be a dependable supply of judgment. I wanted a unique approach of being. . . . After I give my physique authority, it doesn’t commit this self-destructive hurt. My coronary heart doesn’t ship these stinging insults. My lungs don’t do it both. My kidney doesn’t both. Eradicating my thoughts has been the perfect factor I’ve ever completed in my life.
I’m not downplaying the seriousness of Johnson’s melancholy once I say that it is a relatively drastic case of child and bathwater. His concepts strike me, although, as being on par with those that need us to outsource our writing, our artwork, and our pondering usually to synthetic intelligence. In each circumstances, our God-given minds and inventive talents are devalued, our actions made mechanical and devoid of which means.
There’s additionally the matter of the extraordinary self-focus that Johnson’s routine requires: a self-focus that, he admits, makes him a poor romantic prospect and an individual with out a lot companionship usually, except for his employees and Talmage, earlier than the latter goes off to varsity. (Johnson’s different kids weren’t interviewed for the movie, and the standing of his relationship with them is unclear.) He does attempt to argue that Blueprint could possibly be tailored to assist everybody on the earth, however the stab at altruism within the midst of a documentary all about his hyperfocus on his personal biology shouldn’t be terribly convincing—particularly when you think about his station in life. Apologies for the generalization, but when, particularly after the previous few months, you really imagine that tech billionaires as a category have the general public’s finest pursuits at coronary heart, I’ve a chainsaw to promote you.
In addition to, there’s motive to ask whether or not Johnson’s efforts would possibly really be backfiring on him.
However above all, Johnson’s try to defeat loss of life neglects to take note of the very nature of actuality. As I mentioned earlier, nobody is significantly arguing that loss of life is an effective factor. C. S. Lewis, in his ebook Miracles, aptly describes it as “the triumph of Devil, the punishment of the Fall, and the final enemy,” and reminds us that Christ Himself “detested this penal obscenity not lower than we do, however extra.”
“However,” Lewis goes on, “solely he who loses his life will reserve it. We’re baptised into the loss of life of Christ, and it’s the treatment for the Fall.”
Johnson’s faith falls aside as a result of it fails to understand these final truths. Together with the thoughts, it devalues the soul when it elevates the physique above all else. And what could be the purpose of dwelling ceaselessly with no thoughts or soul, two important components of our humanity? I hate the considered dying too, but when the choice is to pour all my assets and all my vitality into creating an immortal physique on the expense of the whole lot else—properly, once more, that brings up the unsavory concept of vampirism, a soulless type of life that may do nothing however parody actual life. It’s a tough truth to face, and Don’t Die by no means fairly will get round to going through it, however plainly the one immortality obtainable to us is the sort that we acquire by accepting our widespread mortality. In different phrases, solely by loss of life can we discover true life.
