The edge we've engineered away
Bryan Johnson, immortality, and the flattening of experience
AI disclosure. No AI was used in writing this essay. The words were entirely human-crafted by me, from end to end. Claude was consulted only for title selection, cutting redundancies, and untangling my mixed metaphors. All thoughts are mine. Read my AI policy here.
The interwebs of wellness have been roiled since Bryan Johnson (aka “the healthiest man alive”) recently announced his diagnosis with an incurable autoimmune disease. In his own words, his stomach is eating itself. But this isn’t just one biohacking extremist’s immortality quest that went sideways. It’s a celebrity-sized example of one of humanity’s primary afflictions: blind hubris in the drive to dominate nature.
His declared goal: immortality by 2039. Millions poured into advanced tests, expensive treatments, experimental supplements. The best care that money can buy. All of it oriented around how to not die. Behind the big personality that features a fixation on being forever young, there’s a longer-standing, underlying cause. His story is a symptom of a pathological obsession with wellness – a slow-growing cancer that metastasized throughout the collective while we went about life-as-normal without noticing anything awry.
Not dying is the lofty objective that he has chased along every avenue available, bypassing mechanisms of balance or moderation. And now the body’s defense system is doing damage from inside. The sophisticated program designed to defeat nature has turned against the basic nature keeping him alive.
Yet the diagnosis has barely broken his stride. There was no pivot. Not even a pause. No sign that he might consider another approach. He is so deeply invested in the ideology of immortality that nothing will stop him from proselytizing it, not even the closeness of death. If anything, he’s doubling down on his original strategy. Instead of “maybe this isn’t working,” the thought seems to be, “I will try harder.”
This dynamic is present at many registers. What have we been striving towards as improvement or optimization? Could that destination-fixation be causing destruction, despite us being utterly convinced that we’re working towards anything but our demise? When we see that our actions are not having the desired effect, we can either redouble efforts or let the interruption of information be a checkpoint to reassess.
Inner division and self-destruction
Autoimmune disease. Spiritual dismemberment. What do these have in common? Whether it is a bodily function or an instance of incarnation, there’s this thing that exists for a particular purpose. But then the aberration happens. Its form morphs and it begins to move (unknowingly) contrary to its designed intention.
This kind of distortion occurs when there’s a loss of contact with greater context. Left disconnected from the full array of sensory inputs, our in-sight deteriorates into a myopic lens on reality. A lens that overemphasizes one part or participant – while blurring the background sponsoring its existence. What happens in this state of hyperfocus is that we can no longer zoom out or zoom in. We end up witnessing unconscious acts of self-destruction, which are largely undertaken by an actor sincerely convinced of his own helpfulness.
Bryan Johnson’s adversarial relationship with his own body is well-documented. He has referred to various parts of himself that needed to be scolded, disciplined, or even fired: “Evening Bryan, you’re fired.” Because these wayward parts were getting in the way of his objective of perfect health, they had to be cut out. Is it any wonder that his parts are in-fighting amongst themselves? Or is that simply matter following the mind?
This applies at the internal, interpersonal, collective, and global levels. It works for any cosmos we can imagine and circumscribe. When we treat them as “other” and categorize the other as enemy, belief makes that version of reality self-reinforcing. Constantly being on alert, trying to manage and control every variable; this only gives us more reasons to be on alert – a requirement for maintaining the monitoring system that we’ve built.
Treating our body (or society) as something to subdue and master produces dysfunction. Whether it’s with parts of our body, or with a member of our community, it is cooperation not domination that contributes to health.
The grail of immortality as anti-life
This might be a controversial take, but I believe that pursuit of immortality is fundamentally a movement against nature. In trying to optimize health to such an extreme that it robs us of peace and presence and acceptance, we are already growing a little mental distortion inside. How much wellness can we pursue, before the pursuit itself becomes an illness? The outer limit there is certainly debatable. It shifts by degrees, along a spectrum. It probably depends on the person – their age, state of mind, circumstances, perspectives and desired outcomes.
But the grail of immortality is where it crosses a bright line for me. Trying to extend a finite life to forever is an egoic endeavor. A quest that denies life’s very nature, which is cyclical and impermanent. Of course, we want to enrich our quality of life. But is it really more time that we are after? Or is it more depth, more intimacy, more meaning in the moments we have?
I question the value of extending life indefinitely, if the sole purpose of that life is to extend itself indefinitely. Consider this: have you ever been a winner in a game that never ended?
I value efforts towards a better, richer, or even longer life. But wanting to overcome nature, wholesale – by trying to circumvent the cycles of birth, growth, decay and death – is effectively anti-life in my opinion. I see it as separation; as self-hatred; as confusion about the true source of Life.
Control and the dangerous edge
Too often we cheat ourselves out of lived experience. The obsession with self-preservation is life taking, not life giving. Control perpetuates mistrust in life. If vehicle maintenance is our sole goal, then we’ve missed the point. Keeping the vehicle in top condition effectively means parking it in the garage under wraps. Why don’t we use the vehicle well for as long as it lasts instead, knowing that a forever lease was never an option?
This bears examination beyond just biohacking. The tradeoff here: being entirely safe means being barely alive. Overweighting control, we throw out the expansion potential that comes from engaging new experiences.
Spontaneity. Surrender. Surprise. This is what we find at the edge of the known and not yet. We talk about “living on the edge” as something dangerous, but what if the edge is the only place where living can ever truly happen? To live, we need to touch the border where memory meets imagination. That’s where the juice is.
The flattening of experience
The world is becoming flat. We live in an increasingly fear-based society that manufactures safety by withdrawing from participation in physical reality. The more we let fear take the reins, the flatter our reality gets. We are constantly smoothing the edges, and engineering away risk. But without the weirdness and randomness, our experiences start to lose dimension. We still have experiences, but they are more limited. The human capacity for and curiosity towards edge-walking is necessary for the world to stay round, and to keep turning on its axis.
When care is embedded as carefulness, it makes a habit of contraction. The Chinese word for “careful” is 小心 (xiǎoxīn). These characters are written on slippery walkways all over China. The character-by-character deconstruction of this term is telling: xiǎo = small; xīn = heart. Quite literally, careful is written as “small heart.” Contracted by fear, we overly rely on prediction for self-protection. We act more like a program than a person. This shift is already starkly reflected in the current cultural moment.
Here are the birds circling now, highlighted by Bryan Johnson’s story. A doubling down on domination as a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived lack of harmony. Mistrust in the intelligence of life. Overreaching measurement and optimization. The pedestalization of safety – as higher priority than the value of experience. Or analogously, the elevation of longevity – as higher priority than cultivating depth of presence.
All these factors converge in the virtualization of life. It is tempting to blame this on AI. But this trend reflects a human patterning. We spend less time outdoors; more time on screens. We see orders of magnitude difference in this, in just one generation. It is far too easy for humans to withdraw from the 3D world and be shielded from in-person interactions. The available technology supports us into shrinking into an iteration of humanness that is a lot less willing to risk having an actual experience.
