So you want to live forever? Excellent. You’ve come to the right place. Here at Gilgamesh-Makropulos Limited, we know a thing or two about immortality. First, we need to track your metrics: biological age versus chronological age, average number of erections per night, metabolic health, maximal oxygen consumption, heart rate variability, stool volume and colour and salivary flow rate. Sound good? My assistant will fetch the paperwork.
This might seem like the beginning of a potboiler sci-fi rip-off. But it’s actually closer to our reality than Bernard Williams would have liked. While we still haven’t achieved immortality, the cult of ‘longevity’ has become something of a gold rush in recent years. It is estimated that there are more than 700 biotech companies specialising in the extension of human life. From 2021 to 2023, a staggering $18 billion was funnelled into longevity research. Today, the market is valued at around $30 billion.
That has led to an entire catalogue of treatments claiming to help us live longer: red light therapy for cell turnover, vitamin injections, the ‘brain-boosting’ medical dye methylene blue (supposedly endorsed by US Health Secretary RFK Jr) and even cryonics, the preservation of legally dead bodies in the hope we can bring them back at a later date. Back to what, I dread to think.
But how far can we really push our lifespans? Do any of these injections, wonder drugs or paid plans from wellness gurus promising flawless skin and (in the case of the ‘world’s most measured human’ Bryan Johnson) rock-hard erections actually work?
Saul Newman, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Institute of Population Ageing, would say no. Newman’s new book, Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science, shoots a Scythian arrow through much of what we know about longevity or de-ageing if you’re vain. Many will already be aware of ‘Blue Zones’: five regions in the world where people are reported to live longer, healthier lives, often exceeding the age of 100. Newman is sceptical. He claims that these Blue Zones have less to do with sagacious lifestyles and more to do with poor record-keeping and pension fraud.
In 2010, it was revealed that Tokyo’s oldest man, Sogen Kato, had actually been dead for 30 years. When officials went to congratulate him on his 111th birthday, they found his mummified corpse lying in a forgotten room on the first floor of his family’s home. Relatives had left him there to rot while they cashed in on his pension. That same year, it was discovered that 82 per cent of all centenarians in Japan were either missing or dead. I wonder how many of those centenarians were from the province of Okinawa, Japan’s very own Blue Zone.
Even if a quack doctor could add five years to your life, what would be the point? You’ve wasted the past 30 in a perpetual state of health anxiety
In his new book, Newman denounces much of the pseudoscience surrounding longevity trends: injections of the ‘regenerative’ co-enzyme NAD+, parabiosis (look it up; it’s grim), organ transplants and other ghoulish rituals that claim to prolong our lives. Newman also points out that many authors in the longevity sphere fail to declare their conflicting interests before publishing their papers. Who would have thunk it?
If a person is gullible enough to fall for these ‘geromedicines’, then that is their own problem. What I’m more concerned with is the troubling rise of ‘longevity fixation syndrome’: the unofficial term for an anxiety-driven obsession with living for longer. And it’s not just vampiric billionaires who suffer from it. Any one of us could ‘catch’ this syndrome. What starts as the purchase of a watch measuring fitness metrics can soon spiral into an unhealthy obsession with one’s diet, sleep, BMI or resting heart rate. Next thing you know, you’re injecting your face with bat semen on Harley Street because some nutty plutocrat said it was a good idea on Instagram.
There’s a sad irony for those obsessed with longevity. In their pursuit of extended life, they’re squandering the very thing they’re paying to gain: time. While they’re spending £3,000 a month for a quack doctor to ‘de-age’ their heart, the rest of the world is outside, living. And even if that quack doctor could add five years to your life, what would be the point? You’ve wasted the past 30 in a perpetual state of health anxiety.
When my father was unexpectedly diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2022, he was given 18 months to live. In the end, he got only four. Apart from the smoking (hence the lung cancer) my father was incredibly health-conscious. This wasn’t because he wanted to feel healthy; it was because he wanted to live for longer. On his deathbed, I asked him if he had any regrets. He said: ‘I wish I’d known that I didn’t always have to be here. I wish I’d known that I could have gone away more, seen more… that work could have waited.’ Then he said, quietly: ‘I just thought I’d have more time.’
How many in the cult of longevity will be murmuring the same regrets when their time comes? They have become so obsessed with extending their lives that they’ve forgotten what it means to be living. And as much as they want to say otherwise, they can’t cheat death. No one can. Why would we want to? As Wallace Stevens once wrote: ‘Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams / And our desires.’ It’s high time the cult of longevity remembered that.
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