Not long ago, Bari Weiss asked Bryan Johnson, the focus of the newly released Netflix documentary “Don’t Die,” a question that most people would find nonsensical: “Do you think that you’re going to die?”
“No,” Johnson replied.
Both Johnson and Weiss seem to hold back smiles at his response. But then Johnson grew serious.
“Really?” Weiss asked.
“Yeah,” Johnson said. His sincerity is convincing enough, yet despite his conviction, I can’t help but wonder if he has already lost “the fire of life,” as described in Willa Cather’s 1918 novel “My Ántonia.”
Near the end of that book, the narrator sees his childhood friend, Ántonia, for the first time in decades. At first, he is surprised to see the decay of her body — the leathery skin, the missing teeth and all the other physical costs that come with time, and with bearing and rearing 10 children in that point in history.
And yet, when their eyes meet, Ántonia’s appearance suddenly seems meaningless: “I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered — about her teeth, for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Ántonia had not lost the fire of life.”
This passage, written more than 100 years ago, shows a world quite different from the one we now experience — one that may grow even more foreign with advancements in artificial intelligence. From the people who promote transhumanism — the merging of human beings with technology — to Johnson’s “Don’t Die” movement, there is a sense these days that the miraculous human body just isn’t good enough, and that aging is not a gift but a disease.
This perception of aging and death bleeds far beyond scientism alone and into our social fabric. One need only spend five minutes on Instagram to see that many treat the “disease” of aging with plastic while forfeiting the “fire of life” for likes.
The late philosopher Roger Scruton wrote that “modern medicine has prolonged the average lifespan beyond anything that would have been anticipated a century ago — and naturally there arises the thought that maybe it could, in principle, prolong it forever, offering each of us a medical victory over death.”
This view continues to grow, not just with the ethos promoted by Johnson, or the multitude of cosmetic procedures available to forestall or conceal evidence of aging, but also in the practice of cryonics, the deep-freezing of human remains (and even pets) with the hope of reanimation in the future.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with wanting to improve the lifespan of human beings, particularly if longevity science improves our health along the way. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are among the billionaires investing in research with the goal of extending human life indefinitely. It’s unclear if they are also looking into what the other costs of immortality are. Thankfully, philosophy has.
“A life prolonged by the elixir of immortality,” Scruton warned, “would be a life from which the things that we most value — love, adventure, novelty, courage, benevolence, compassion — would inexorably leach away.”
Like Cather’s fiction, Scruton reminds us that the wrinkles of life and death itself are the “envelope in which a life is contained,” and that by incorporating death as an essential part of our lives, we “overcome its fearful quality” and “achieve a kind of serenity in action that takes full cognizance of our mortality.”
Lost in the pursuit of immortality is the understanding that the true value of life comes not in the erasure of wrinkles and other indignities of old age, but in the depth of who we become as we approach what Homer called the inescapable “dark veil of night.” The experience of old age and the acceptance of death does more than complete the circle of life — it creates the full human being. It is the oxygen of death that allows the fire of life to burn within us at all.
“The main point, it seems to me,” Scruton concluded, “is to maintain a life of active risk and affection, while helping the body along the path of decay, remembering always that the value of life does not consist in its length but in its depth.”
The consequences of acting and preaching and living against this reality will produce untold consequences of social, emotional, interpersonal and familial disconnect, because you cannot live according to a story so deeply disconnected from everything that is real, so disconnected from the fire of life itself.
Johnson says he has never been more “fulfilled, alive or purpose driven in life” and that his quest will “uplift humanity to our next evolutionary potential.” It’s worth noting that he has not yet turned 50, and none of us know what will happen in terms of aging and lifespan as artificial intelligence evolves. What we can know, however, as Scruton and Cather remind us, is that the fire of life burns at every stage of existence, perhaps even when we die — and it’s the rich depth of life that ultimately matters, not its mere length.