A Sick Man in a Sick World
A recent Netflix documentary, Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, depicts the life and lifestyle of Bryan Johnson—a former tech entrepreneur and centimillionaire who has made it his goal to extend his life as far as possible. “We are building towards an infinite horizon,” reads the cover page of his organization’s website. “We are at war with death and its causes.”
Throughout the documentary (and the associated book), Johnson outlines his “Blueprint” protocol, a rigorous daily schedule of exercise, diet, supplements and medications, and other wellness habits. At exactly 5:25 every morning, for instance, Johnson consumes an eight-ounce drink consisting of exactly eleven grams of collagen protein, 2.5 grams of creatine, one-half teaspoon of prebiotic galactooligosaccharides, and one teaspoon of inulin. Later, at 11 a.m., Johnson takes an “Rx Snack” consisting of a precise allotment of eight different supplements. At 7:30 p.m., Johnson allows himself an indulgent thirty minutes for “social time with friends and family” before spending the next thirty minutes on his face-wash routine. At 8:30 p.m., Johnson heads to bed and his day is complete.
Losing Our Grip on Health
It is a great irony that the more some things are brought into focus, the more they become disfigured. While this phenomenon is not true of all things, it applies to the critical dimensions of those that matter most. When one is passionately in love, one (ideally) does not overanalyze the reasons for that love. To do so would be to corrupt something at the heart of the easygoingness of love. When an artist is in a “flow state” of his work, he does not sit back and reflect on every next step, as this would inhibit the creative process. When one listens to a great piece of music for the sake of enjoying and appreciating it, it would be wrong to spend time dissecting the piece for its specific structures and substructures. For many human experiences like these, further attempts to grasp them result in, paradoxically, letting them slip through one’s fingers. When those things have been raised from the level of subconscious appreciation to conscious apprehension, it means they have died.
Bodily health is one of those things. As Hans-Georg Gadamer writes in his book The Enigma of Health, when we are healthy, we rarely focus directly on the physical functioning of our bodies—“health does not actually present itself to us.” Consider your immediate experience reading this article—are you actively thinking about the strength of your neck or the strain of your eyes? Probably not. Rather, it is states of disease that tell us that something is out of order and that often, incidentally, remind us that the body is present at all. When we have pain in our back or eyes, these parts of our body are made “conscious” to us, even consciously opposed to the goal we were pursuing (e.g., reading an article). Gadamer writes that “it is illness and not health which ‘objectifies’ itself, which confronts us as something opposed to us, and which forces itself on us.” When one has brought physical health under the microscope, one has necessarily lost one of its most essential (if enigmatic) characteristics, and therefore one has, in a way, fundamentally transformed the thing being investigated.
At best, an instrumental view of the body is temporarily adopted to help identify how we can restore what Gadamer refers to as the body’s “inner accord”—a state in which the inner workings of the body are no longer present to our perception. It is bad practice to continually survey the healthy body. Rather, we should pursue bodily health because, in the words of Karl Barth, it provides “strength for human life.” Health is, for Barth, the constellation of “capability, vigor, and freedom” that enables us to engage with and successfully carry out the demands and joys of everyday living—working, feasting, dancing, caring for others.
Likewise, John Paul II wrote extensively about how, within the Christian faith, the body is ultimately for love. To pursue optimal bodily health for its own sake is to risk a kind of neuroticism that cannot help but tend toward control of the body, just as it does not make sense to merely appreciate the aesthetic quality of a good meal that is, in fact, made to be consumed. I think this is what Wendell Berry implied when he wrote that, “From our constant and increasing concerns about health, you can tell how seriously diseased we are.”
If it is the case that we should primarily attend to our bodies when we experience disease, then Bryan Johnson is, contrary to his entire project, the sickest man alive. It is as if his body is always sick, always deficient. His body is constantly present to him, and therefore constantly under his medicinal control.
Health and the Body in a Technocratic World
Many basic assumptions create the world that nurtures a Bryan Johnson figure, but for the sake of this essay, I’d like to emphasize just one. A society-wide obsession with physical health—the condition required for Johnson’s project—is often the product, as Berry routinely reminds us, of a highly technocratic world.
How is this so? Our technocratic society can separate us from the relationships that are most essential to our flourishing, and with them, the means for learning about, healing, and strengthening our bodies. In Berry’s words, such a world attempts to “separate us as far as possible from the sources of life (material, social, and spiritual), to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to sell them to us at the highest profit.” Without the opportunities to strengthen (and enjoy) our health through the daily activities of life, health becomes an object one must purchase directly in the marketplace (e.g., gym memberships, nutritional supplements) and at the cost of abandoning other activities: time with friends and family, hobbies, etc.
It is not an accident that every time I see Johnson’s image online, he’s also trying to sell me something of his making—lifestyle plans, nutritional supplements, etc. (His “Longevity Mix” sells for $46.55 per pouch.) The whole purpose of Johnson’s project is, in fact, to make health a product of some sophisticated set of technological interventions. When health is pursued for its own sake (and then marketed as a commodity), it becomes divorced from whatever meaning it acquired before and captive to an industry that attempts to profit from the good itself. The commodification of health further contributes to what is often an unhealthy (and expensive) culture of body modification to fit a proscribed cultural image (often overly sexualized) of “the healthy body” (i.e., what Johnson looks like). Indeed, when one can buy health, health itself becomes associated with everything else one can buy: power, prestige, influence, control.
When we presume that good health is primarily the product of technological intervention, every disease is ultimately a problem of limited funds and resources to access that intervention—the fundamental assumption of Johnson’s project. The fact that the United States spends more per capita on health than any other industrialized country and yet has some of the worst health rankings is a sobering reminder of the limits to this claim.
Johnson’s lifestyle is, unfortunately, just an extreme version of the mindset that traps many of us; it is a lifestyle adopted by everyone who seeks to transcend their human frailty one 5 a.m. workout at a time. It is the lifestyle of every new mother who thinks she must return to the exact bodily form (weight, shape, etc.) she maintained before giving birth. It is the lifestyle of every retiree who desperately pushes back the aging process through a constellation of supplements and medical interventions.
An Integrated Alternative
In contrast to Johnson’s pursuit of physical health as an absolute good, a genuinely healthy approach might involve pursuing primary goods like community, relationship, and religion, while enjoying physical health as a side effect. Under this framework, health is best pursued on the way to something that is desired for its own sake, like the enjoyment of other people’s company, meaningful work, joyful recreation, and religious worship.
Consider the witness of those communities that have naturally achieved longevity—Dan Buettner’s so-called “BlueZones.” As Buettner identified among many of the BlueZone communities, “they’re not on diets, they’re not on exercise programs, they don’t take supplements; they don’t pursue health; … it ensues by setting up your surroundings the right way.” In the healthiest communities, healthy outcomes are the product of behaviors that do not seek physical health as the primary goal—often they are activities, whether necessary or purely recreational, that are done for some other reason or for their own sake. In Buettner’s words, securing health in the long run often involves the development of practices by which, for example, we can “be active without having to think about it,” contributing to the “unconscious” quality of good health Berry and Gadamer defend.
Following Berry’s critique, it is not for nothing that so many of the BlueZone communities are primarily based on traditions from a premodern era. The world of technocracy is, in almost every way, antithetical to the world that produces BlueZone characteristics. It replaces belonging with production. It eliminates the opportunity for natural movement. It separates families from each other and disintegrates social cohesion. It atrophies our ability to discern “enough” and limit our consumption (food-related and otherwise). It tends toward a culture of excessive productivity without room for rest, and it increasingly divorces us from the land in a way that challenges our ability to access healthy food.
Thus, Johnson’s project is only possible in a technocratic world. In that world, the body has become an individual project to optimize, much like everything else. It is no surprise, then, that Johnson’s protocols read so much like the owner’s manual of a car or the regulatory handbook for a bureaucracy. Through an expenditure of millions of dollars, Johnson created his own video-game-like world in which he is the master of his life, and he has defined the rules of that life in a way that perfectly encourages the kind of behavior he wants. To hell with what consequences that behavior has for his family or his friends (should they dare ask for more than thirty minutes of his time). Who cares whether the excessive time he spends optimizing his health takes away from time for prayer or contemplation, or whether those millions of dollars could have been better used for charitable giving. In this world, no one matters except Bryan Johnson. Or rather, Johnson’s body. Indeed, it is hard to say what the health of Johnson’s body is for besides simply more health for Johnson’s body. Such a tautology flows from a world cut off from the possibility of a transcendent other that would shatter the foundation of this artificial reality.
The real work of healing consists, therefore, not in closing off the body as a personal project but in opening our body to healthy relationships we can have with each other, our environment, and ultimately the highest vocations of love and worship. In doing so, we remind ourselves that our bodies are not our own, and therefore not an instrument of our own control.
Ultimately, one day Bryan Johnson will die. And I wish for him, as I wish for anyone, that his death will be a peaceful one, perhaps a peace that his body did not know in this life.
Image licensed via Adobe Stock.