“Not dying” is the worst way to live.
Bryan Johnson has a single goal: Don’t die. The 47-year-old biotech millionaire has spent the past four years of his life as the human subject of Project Blueprint, a lifelong longevity experiment. Every aspect of Johnson’s life is meticulously recorded and analyzed by a team of more than 30 doctors. Johnson takes 54 pills a day. He eats his final meal of the day at noon for optimal digestion. His diagnostics and treatments cost $2 million a year.
Johnson even used his 17-year-old son for a plasma exchange in 2023, an experiment he later admitted was not successful.
Though Johnson’s commitment to advancing longevity science — especially by publishing all of his findings online for the general public — is admirable, he unwittingly exemplifies a kind of spiritual poverty and illness into which we ourselves can also easily fall.
Johnson’s website “Don’t Die” proudly proclaims, “We are at war with death and its causes.” His project stands at the pinnacle of the 21st century’s health and wellness obsession — the same industry that brings us fad diets, IVF, and the gene-editing tool CRISPR.
Yet to be at war with death is, paradoxically, also to be at war with life. Johnson’s lifestyle allows no privacy, no spontaneity, and little time to spend on his children and other relationships. In a Jan. 7 interview with Bari Weiss on The Free Press’s “Honestly” podcast, Weiss asked Johnson about this.
“I think a lot of people will hear about what you do and think to themselves, ‘He’s spending all of his time trying to not die and missing the things that make life—life!’ What do you say to that?” Weiss said.
Johnson partially dodged the question, discounting the possibility that humanity knew what made life worth living.
“The idea that we somehow have mastered existence and that we know what the purpose of existence is, is so silly of a notion,” Johnson said.
Your god is what most occupies you, and it is clear Johnson has chosen health. Yet health makes a fickle god, liable to turn on one at any moment. No lifestyle can completely prevent the risk of cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or a thousand other natural causes — to say nothing of car accidents or natural disasters.
Johnson is only an extreme version of many health-obsessed influencers. The utter caution their lifestyles revolve around isn’t healthy at all, and often blinds them to the wealth and beauty that spring from risk. Their lives are poorer and less human for it.
This isn’t to say we should forget caution and never give our health a second thought. Absolutely, take care of your body — but do it for the right reasons. Abandon the fear and the paralyzing caution of anything even vaguely threatening to your lifespan. Do it to be able to play sports with your kids in the backyard one day; to have the energy to serve your profession, family, and community well; and to be around to see your grandchildren grow up.
Yet hold health lightly, living so as to die well, and so as to be happy even when your health does fail.
One of my favorite short stories is Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” It’s a masterpiece. As the title suggests, the story follows Ivan’s final days, as he comes to realize what makes dying so frightful is knowing he had not lived well. Finally, Ivan acknowledges his failures and discovers it is not too late to do right.
“He sought his old habitual fear of death and could not find it. Where was it? What death? There was no more fear because there was no more death,” Tolstoy writes.
Proximity to death opens Ivan to the fullness of life. We, fortunately, don’t need to wait until the very end to accept death. A life well lived, even if short, is enough.
Caroline Kurt is a junior studying English.
