Nobody Mention Death!
One man is spending millions to reverse ageing. What does that reveal?
My Spanish tutor, the clever, funny, and altogether likeable Elena, told me the other week about a man named Bryan Johnson who has spent a staggering sum of money attempting to reverse ageing. So the story goes, he was fat and unhappy from spending all his time working (and making a tonne of money doing it) and decided it was time to whip himself into shape. He hired a team of doctors and embarked on a strict régime of skincare, restrictive dieting, supplementation and, for a time, the transfusion of blood from his son to himself. I know: utterly bonkers.
We have to give it to Bryan, though: he looks great for his age. A bit odd, perhaps — there is something vaguely inhuman about his appearance — but still great. Ripped, too. Yet there is surely something just a little unsettling not just about the whole blood transfusion thing but about such an extreme expression of death-denial — of such aggression (and expense) in running in the opposite direction to the grave.
We have to give it to Bryan, though: he looks great for his age.
Is our Mr Greene just a fruitcake? Or does his condition reflect something wider and deeper, something ‘cultural’? After all, he is hardly the first tech bro to concern himself (overly, in my view) with the avoidance of dying. Peter Thiel and others have sought to channel their inner vampire, spending lavishly on cryogenics and other nascent forms of ostensibly life-extending technology. If you are so deeply unsatisfied with your life that you feel the need to extend it, who is to say that you will not spend whatever time you gain in doing so unsatisfied? Why not — you know, live now?
Perhaps they hope that in the intervening period, they will learn how to live. Though it seems to me that there is something about Mr Johnson and his ilk that speaks to a cultural phenomenon—something to do with the primacy of bodily pleasure over a sense of meaning or purpose, worship of the cult of youth and the dismissal of older folk (partly due to advances in technology) from the cultural conversation (if not, oddly enough, from the political one: look at the U.S.), a somewhat voyeuristic obsession with what takes place on college campuses … All this would seem to point to a slight cultural unease with the fact of getting old and at some point kicking the bucket and accepting our coat from what T.S. Eliot called the snickering ‘eternal Footman’.
It seems to me that there is something about Mr Johnson and his ilk that speaks to a cultural phenomenon.
Do not get the impression that I am in some way to immune to this. I, too, care overly about my appearance, especially when en femme; but that I have many (many) failings does not impeach this idea. ‘Do as I say and not as I do’, and all that. And I am quite sure this aversion to death is unhealthy, as well as ahistorical. Most cultures have embraced mortality as part of life. In Evelyn Waugh’s exquisite novel Brideshead Revisited (which was both invoked and vandalised by the comically awful film Saltburn), the beautiful and doomed Sebastian Flyte keeps a skull in a bed of roses on the desk in his rooms at Oxford. ‘Et in Arcadia ego,’ reads the inscription. ‘Even in Arcadia am I.’
And that ‘I’ is, of course, Death, which makes Sebastian’s flamboyant centrepiece a memento mori (‘remember you will die’). The skull serves as a reminder that no one escapes death, that we are all bound by our mortality, that — as the Italians say — when the chess-game is over, both the pawns and the kings go back in the box. For the time being, this remains the case, and surely ought to; for if life did not end it would have no sense of urgency, no poignancy, none of the beauty that springs from its fragility. ‘It is dearness only that gives everything its value’, writes Thomas Paine in his The American Crisis. The brilliant Mary Midgley, who conceived of the notion of ‘nothing buttery,’ argued that reducing complex phenomena to nothing but their elements (eg, love is nothing but chemical reactions in the brain) misses the point. Facts and meanings are different. Thus reducing living to how long we are literally alive hopelessly misses the essence of living meaningfully. Life is, in other words, a qualitative thing; and though the quantity and quality of live are not wholly divorced, an excessive attention on the quantitative aspect undermines the qualitative.
The skull serves as a reminder that no one escapes death, that we are all bound by our mortality.
Spinoza saw death not as the opposite of life but as its completion. Indeed, we are dying from the moment we are born. Thus while we are living, we are also dying. We are always gradually ceasing to exist. Accepting this reality can lead to a more fulfilled and authentic life, one that is not fixated on the impossible task of cheating death but on making the most of the time we have and seeing things in their proper proportion. Heidegger’s notion of ‘Das Sein zum Tode’ (‘Being-toward-death’) suggests that authentic living comes from acknowledging our finite nature. Two of the great Roman Stoics, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, exhorted us to contemplate death. The Buddha, too. In Hamlet, the main character’s musings on the death of his father is the mainspring from which profound reflections on existence, purpose, and the nature of reality come. ‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal,’ says Christ in Matthew 6:19–21, ‘But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.’ In other words: do not waste your time on trivial earthly matters, but direct your attention to higher, more meaningful things.
So Mr Johnson, it seems to me, is not an eccentric, but a reflection of something common: fear—a fear of ageing, of losing our beauty, of dying, of shuffling off this mortal coil. And such fear, like all fear, warps our values and our priorities, and draws us in towards ourselves and away from those around us, stripping us of the sense of proportion that allows us to treat life—as paradoxical as it may sound—both with an appropriate lightness and an appropriate gravity. To live, in the end, is to know that we will die, to accept that we will die, and to make the most of the time we have left.
