Early within the Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Needs to Reside Ceaselessly, anti-aging skilled Dr. Andrew Steele stated one thing that introduced me up brief: “We’re all so used to watching our mates 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 honest to say that there’s a consensus on the naturalness of dying. It’s a part of the life cycle of each human and animal: We’re born, we stay, we die. However “good”? That’s not precisely a typical sentiment. Even these of us who imagine that dying is the door by which we should go to succeed in God don’t often maintain that dying is inherently good.
The apparent 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 target 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 eating 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 objective, as is made clear within the movie’s title, is to defeat dying.
The documentary is essentially sympathetic to Johnson and his objective—who doesn’t wish to face down humankind’s oldest and worst enemy, in spite of everything? Who amongst us, if we had billions of {dollars}, wouldn’t not less than take into account plowing these {dollars} into discovering a approach to keep right here on Earth so long as doable? What higher use might there be for all that cash than defeating dying?
So the movie smooths over Johnson’s eccentricities and softens features of his story that are inclined to get a harsher therapy 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 in addition as a approach to attempt boosting Richard’s fading psychological skills. “Bryan advised me that this is able to be somebody doing one thing for his or her liked one which mattered,” Richard recounts.
The apparent 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 thought talked about above that dying is unhealthy, 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 despair, he left his religion, offered his firm, divorced his spouse, and “discovered power and liberation in doing Blueprint.”
. . . what could be the purpose of residing ceaselessly with out a thoughts or soul, two important elements 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 photographs 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 remembers of his depressive interval.
My thoughts was like a vicious storm, telling me to actually kill myself, and it turned clear to me that the thoughts is just not a dependable supply of judgment. I wanted a distinct means 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 accomplished in my life.
I’m not downplaying the seriousness of Johnson’s despair after 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 normally to synthetic intelligence. In each instances, our God-given minds and inventive skills are devalued, our actions made mechanical and devoid of that means.
There’s additionally the matter of the extreme 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 normally, apart from his workers and Talmage, earlier than the latter goes off to varsity. (Johnson’s different youngsters weren’t interviewed for the movie, and the standing of his relationship with them is unclear.) He does attempt to argue that Blueprint may very well be tailored to assist everybody on this planet, however the stab at altruism within the midst of a documentary all about his hyperfocus on his personal biology is just not terribly convincing—particularly when you think about his station in life. Apologies for the generalization, but when, particularly after the previous few months, you actually 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 may truly be backfiring on him.
However above all, Johnson’s try to defeat dying neglects to take note of the very nature of actuality. As I stated earlier, nobody is severely arguing that dying is an effective factor. C. S. Lewis, in his guide 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.”
“Then again,” Lewis goes on, “solely he who loses his life will reserve it. We’re baptised into the dying 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 residing ceaselessly with out a thoughts or soul, two important elements of our humanity? I hate the considered dying too, but when the choice is to pour all my sources and all my power into creating an immortal physique on the expense of every little thing else—properly, once more, that brings up the unsavory thought 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 dealing with it, however plainly the one immortality accessible to us is the type that we achieve by accepting our frequent mortality. In different phrases, solely by dying can we discover true life.
