What could Bryan Johnson teach us about dying?
Death remains one of the great certainties of life.
Written by Nicholas Agar.
No philosopher has ever reflected on death with as much data about the state of his own body as Bryan Johnson.
Johnson made a fortune selling his online payment business to PayPal, enabling him to invest an estimated $2 million annually on medical monitoring, supplements and outlandish interventions. He hopes these can enable him to make good on “Don’t Die”, the brand he chose for both his philosophy and his business. Over 7.5 million people follow him and his efforts to radically extend life (across various social media platforms). Some followers become customers of his anti-aging business “Project Blueprint” and get priority access to his latest death hacks. Surely what works for him will work for them too.
A recent medical misfortune invites Johnson to reconsider his claim to be “the healthiest person on the planet”. He has been diagnosed with Auto-Immune Gastritis (AIG). An estimated 2 to 5% of people have AIG and it can be managed. But it is bad news for his plan to live forever and the business built on “Don’t Die”.
Some online critics attribute Johnson’s AIG to the extremity of his biohacks, which include travelling to Honduras to be genetically modified, plasma transfusions, and experiments with immune-altering chemotherapy. Johnson responds to these doubters that his condition “would be much worse … had I not taken care of my body”.
Whether or not Johnson’s interventions contributed to his condition is a medical question. More interesting to me is the philosophical question it raises.
No longer the healthiest, Johnson can still claim to be “the most measured human” in history. Perhaps his next contribution should be to the philosophy of mortality, rather than the science of longevity. All of his data about himself places him in a unique position to add philosophical insight into the processes of aging and dying.
No one has observed the aging of a single human body with Johnson’s dedication. That puts him in a privileged position to reflect on mortality itself.
Philosophers from Søren Kierkegaard to Martin Heidegger argued that death is not the problem but a misguided relationship to it can be. Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode) suggests that our lives improve when we stop treating mortality as a problem awaiting a solution, and recognise it as the condition that gives authenticity and meaning to our lives.
It is hard to imagine the shock of Johnson’s AIG diagnosis turning him into a Heideggerian philosopher. But something that could be bad news for his super-longevity business could prompt him to explore the philosophical applications of his unprecedented store of data on his own aging body. Among the philosophical questions he might address, once he accepts that every human life has an end, concerns what to do with the extraordinary resources that remain at the disposal of some.
When Andrew Carnegie sold Carnegie Steel in 1901, he became one of the richest people in history. He enjoyed the perks of immense wealth. Some of Carnegie’s excesses are reminiscent of today’s billionaires’ use of Venice as a wedding venue. He liked booking entire ocean liners to take him and his friends to Scotland.
Yet he seems to have accepted that mortality imposes a deadline on every life. Carnegie thought that moral obligations came with that deadline. He argued in his 1889 essay The Gospel of Wealth that great fortunes should be regarded as held in trust for the benefit of society. We should ask why his most famous injunction seems more striking today than when it was originally proposed: “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”
Carnegie chose institutional immortality over biological immortality. He now lives on vicariously through the good works of Carnegie Mellon University and Carnegie Institution for Science.
Extreme wealth now seems to promise experiences that Carnegie could scarcely have imagined—the possibility of colonizing other planets and the hope that aging itself might become optional. Proselytisers of the Gospel of Wealth among today’s tech elite should welcome reminders of the gap between fantasy and reality that come from an unexpected medical diagnosis.
Carnegie sought a form of immortality that biology could never provide—institutions that would outlive him and continue serving future generations. Johnson’s diagnosis is a reminder that the dream of defeating death remains uncertain. Suppose his remarkable experiment ultimately teaches us less about escaping mortality and more about living wisely in its shadow. That may turn out to be his most enduring contribution.
Nicholas Agar is a New Zealand professor of ethics at the University of Waikato and the author of Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement.
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I never thought about death, until I was dying. Let me elaborate. Little less than a couple years ago, I was completely healthy (as far as I knew, no co-morbidities that old folk get) when I had a massive MI. Complete blockage of the to the left main ventricular artery. Heart stoppage usually happens and then relatives make arrangements sort of incident. I was not that lucky. While waiting for ambulance, then being worked on, I remained completely conscious. I simply thought, “When will I pass out and this will all be over?” Never happened (obviously). However, as I remember there was no fear of death—pain and discomfort—yes. Within an hour or so, I was in the emergency OR and the blockage removed. Two days later, I was discharged. Go and sin no more. 😇
As I think about the incident, I wonder if my MI event was of such a surprise that I had no time to think of the end of mortality or whether I had the blessing of not being very fearful of death. I guess I’ll see if—no, when, this occurs again.
Reading today’s missive, I can’t help thinking of the old refrain, “…a coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one…”. OK, coward is a bit of a pejorative, but the word “fearful” can be substituted without loss of meaning in this case.
Beautiful article. I was thinking about the irony of his diagnosis and hoping that it helps him to perhaps take a spiritual route to immortality instead of a bio-hacking one. After all, we are 93% stardust.