“Project Blueprint” is an initiative by tech multi-millionaire Bryan Johnson aimed at reversing his own ageing process. To this end, Johnson obsessively monitors his health statistics, avoids the sun, eats the same “optimised” slurry of vegetables and nuts every meal of every day, and takes handfuls of vitamins and supplements, as well as conducting a number of “experiments” on himself. One of these experiments involved infusing himself a full litre of his son’s blood, although he stopped doing that because it didn’t seem to have any health benefit.

Johnson is not alone among the mega wealthy trying to bend reality. Ageing and death are the last frontier for people whose unimaginable riches mean they encounter very few other limitations. Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel have invested heavily and speculatively into longevity. Other seemingly intractable problems — like the climate change and pollution that risk making the planet uninhabitable — also have a billionaire-style response: they build bunkers in New Zealand and explore the possibilities of terraforming other planets.

These experiments into survival sometimes have rhetorical gestures towards altruism. In 2018, for example, Elon Musk said that it was vital for humans to colonise Mars because “if there’s a third world war we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilisation somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages.” But these ambitious projects only serve to alienate the wealthy from the world they’ve created, confusing their own imaginations with actual science. All the while wasting resources and making the world worse for the rest of us.

In his book, Zeroism, Johnson makes a case for the thin altruism of his own life-extension project. What he’s doing is provide information about his experiments in health and wellness for free — insights that anyone who can completely arrange their daily life around optimising their biological age could use! And yet, he says defensively, media coverage of his protocol — and certainly the comments sections of coverage — has been a derisive “tsunami of hate”. He has been subject to name-calling., he laments: “narcissist”, “vampire”, “Patrick Bateman” and “Dorian Gray”. Many of the critiques have centred on his appearance.

Johnson says his message has been confused. “I have never said that I am pursuing immortality.” He holds, however, only a minutely different opinion: “death may no longer be inevitable.” And he brands those many haters who are sceptical of this suggestion as “helpless” “death defenders”.

Johnson began his experiments into longevity after observing it was as though he were many different people. During the day, he experienced himself as a good father, someone who exercised, someone who worked hard. But in the evening, he was the Bryan who became morose and exhausted, reeling from the loss of his Mormon faith. Under stress, he was vulnerable to the temptation of brownies. One day, he just decided to “fire” “Evening Bryan”, a plot not unlike Apple TV’s Severance. He just wouldn’t be sad or weak-willed anymore.

Instead of giving in to human cravings, Johnson would instead design a life around the idea of an “autonomous self”. He would build automated systems to optimise his body, health, and mind, in the manner analogous to an aeroplane on autopilot or the methodical improvements of software updates.

The reason Johnson is so optimistic about the upper limits of the human body is the advent of artificial intelligence — which, he believes along with other transhumanists such as Hans Moravec or Ray Kurzweil, will eventually converge into “superintelligence”. This feels a bold claim for a technology that cannot render human hands or make decisions without amplifying marginalisation. It is made bolder by the fact that Johnson does not articulate what “superintelligence” means or what it would look like. This is the point, he says: to be “future literate” you have to navigate uncertainty. You don’t know what technological innovation is on the horizon that will change everything. So, it apparently follows that anything you can imagine becomes a reasonable hypothesis.

Superintelligence doesn’t (and could not) determine Johnson’s health journey, although the language he uses suggests otherwise. He describes using “an algorithm that takes better care of me that I can care for myself” and to which he outsources his decisions: instead of choosing what to eat for breakfast, he consumes his optimised slurry. He and his “team” he spends $2 million a year employing determine this “algorithm” by tracking the status of hundreds of biomarkers through his body and the effects of different interventions on those biomarkers.

What Johnson describes is not in fact an example of AI or any kind of technical algorithm. He is simply using human skills and his own discernment to design a rigid routine for himself, which he then follows. He is not really engaging in science, either. His experiments are “n=1”, which means that Johnson and his team do not have the sample size of study participants necessary to make general findings of what improves wellbeing. Because he is trying out so many interventions at once, it would be difficult to know what parts of the “algorithm” have which effect. Johnson does not seem perturbed by the lack of generalisability — he promotes his protocol as if it is true for everyone, as though he is the “guinea pig” (his words) the rest of us can learn from.

The routine feels positive to Johnson, and no doubt brings about positive health effects, like adequate nutrition and rest. But he also uses it to police his own behaviour, preventing himself from “eating too much food or junk food, not exercising, smoking, excessive drinking, drugs, staying up past our bedtimes, pornography, excessive social media, and dozens more” apparently life-shortening activities.

I want to resist giving an armchair psychological reading of Johnson’s conclusions, since such commentary seems to bother him. Instead, I will be critical of the implication here, that desire and pleasurable activities are punished through health consequences and earlier-than-necessary death. It’s a Protestant ethic (that fun will send you to hell) with a health and wellness twist (that fun will make you die) and gestures to the technological to make it seem less moralistic and more science-y.

But what we do know about human mortality complicates his narrative that lifestyle choices will be punished. Some biomarkers, particularly metabolic ones (like lower levels of glucose and cholesterol) have been linked to longevity. But it isn’t always clear what the causal relationships are (does aging cause particular biomarkers to change, or does change of biomarkers cause more age-related issues?). It’s also not always clear that these indicators of health are outcomes of lifestyle choices — genetic and epigenetic factors also play a role in longevity. As does luck — after all, the leading cause of death for those in the US in their forties, like Johnson, is unintentional injuries like car accidents and falls. His experiments may also be actively dangerous. Johnson has recently stopped taking rapamycin, an immunosuppressing drug used predominantly in organ donor recipients — because of increased infections and abnormal biomarker readings.

Most likely, Johnson will live a much longer life than most people. But probably not because of his laser-focus on his lifestyle. Rather, because he is wealthy. The social determinants of health — socioeconomic status, access to employment and education, access to autonomy, social inclusion, leading a relatively low-stress existence that isn’t marked by violence or poverty — are powerful predictors of longevity. Health in all countries in the world follows a similar social gradient: the lower your socioeconomic status, the more health problems you will have.

In this reality — the reality we actually live in, today — the ethics of spending $2 million per year on your personal science experiment, for increasingly marginal health benefits, are clearly bad. When Johnson claims that “death defenders” are “helpless”, he unwittingly gets to the point. The majority of the world does not have the cash to pay a team of doctors so that they may live. If you want to extend human life, you need to think about climate and environment policies, free healthcare and schooling, good jobs, income redistribution and an end to armed conflicts and genocides.

It appears that there is a level of wealth that few people achieve which allows them to live more fantastically. Reality isn’t marred by the opening hours of the post office, or figuring out how to pay for your bills, or even to budget for the things that sound cool. Wealth takes you away from Earth — in some cases, literally. It takes you away from the here-and-now of daily problems and the plausible solutions we could implement with our current resources and knowledge. It must be strange to live in such a way, where what you imagine could be true — immortality, interplanetary exploration, survival through the apocalypse — becomes more urgent and real than what is true.

Image: Anonymous Veronese painter, Two Angels (detail)