Why Biohack? (Is it an Insatiable Quest for Immortality?)

Last week, I told you how I got into biohacking—and warned you of the slippery slope that goes from biohacking into obsessive optimization.

Yes, an insatiable quest for immortality can definitely go too far.

You may have noticed the surge of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and tech billionaires now engaged in what appears to be a rabid, transhumanist pursuit of immortality.

Entrepreneurs like Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil, and Tony Robbins have proposed the idea of “longevity escape velocity,” the notion that there’s someone alive today who is only aging 364 days out of 365, and may have already attained unlimited biological longevity, and biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey claims the first person who will live to 1,000 years is already alive today.

Anti-aging zealot Dave Asprey and functional medicine physician Mark Hyman claim that they’re trying to make it to at least 180 years old.

Virally popular businessman-turned-biohacker Bryan Johnson often quips polarizing lines such as, “Jesus fed bread and alcohol, impairing aging. I will feed you nutrients that awaken life.” (Bryan’s Twitter bio also reads “conquering death will be humanity’s greatest achievement”… apparently nobody told him that the same figure quoted on his profile seems to have already figured that out.)

What should we think about these modern-day Ponce de Leóns?

First, based on birth record data indicating the longest-lived modern human we know of made it to 117 years old, I consider it a bit incredulous to propose that someone currently alive is going to survive decades and decades more than that. There’s just not good science to support that we can plug up the host of biological leaks necessary to do so anytime soon.

Second, it’s nearly a full-time job for most of these folks to pursue this level of longevity. Elaborate four-to-five-hour morning routines are common—so that the red light bed, cryotherapy chamber, and sound bath can be done before the spirulina smoothie breakfast—and many modern-day anti-aging enthusiasts paradoxically spend a majority of the hours and days in all those extra years they’re trying to get huddled up cold, hungry, and libidoless inside a hyperbaric chamber, desperately grasping at the straws of immortality.

And third, Doug Wilson (the pastor of the church I attend) recently released a blog post entitled “That Hideous Strength at 10X.” Here is part of what he wrote, which is pretty relevant to this discussion:

“…man in his rebellion has either wanted to get back at the tree of life, the way Gilgamesh wanted to, or, failing that, to come up with his very own tree of life. 

And the names that we give to our own devices vary, but they all betray the lust for immortality—but always on our own terms, and never on God’s. We seek out many devices, and we call them things like the Fountain of Youth, or the Philosopher’s Stone, or Cryonics, or Young Blood Transfusions, or Brain Uploading. The point is the hot pursuit of that famous Woody Allen wish—‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.’

But because this flight from death is a frenetic and foolish one, conducted in a hatred of wisdom, the ironic result is the sentence pronounced by Lady Wisdom in Proverbs: ‘All they that hate me love death.’ They flee from death by pursuing it. 

The best they can hope for is longevity, which is not the same thing as life. Gollum lived for a long time, and being stretched that far is not the same as being filled. Pursuing extension in time without the knowledge of God is the same thing as pursuing damnation and Hell. And men labor for it, chasing after it until they are out of breath.”

That all leads to what I’m warning you about in today’s reading: there’s a fine line between biohacking the body for better health and idolizing immortality. 

There’s also a fine line between taking good care of yourself and being some orthorexic MAHA-inspired mommy who burns through the family food budget by refusing to shop anywhere but “Whole Paycheck,” or the dad who takes their kids out after the ballgame for a celebratory bowl of red-dye-40-free beet hummus.

There’s a fine line between battling a receding hairline with a little bit of better living through science and being Gollum (who actually didn’t have much hair, so maybe that’s a bad analogy).

As C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity, temperance is not total abstinence, but rather, the practice of moderation and self-control in both directions, meaning “going the right length and no further.”

Chris Kresser—an old friend of mine and a bit of a pioneer in the functional medicine space—recently wrote on his blog:

“There’s a growing cultural obsession with living longer. You see it in startup culture, where billionaires are funding moonshot longevity labs. You see it in the supplement world, where new ‘anti-aging’ stacks hit the market almost weekly. And you see it in everyday people who are trying to optimize every variable in their life with the hopes of squeezing out a few extra years.

I get it, longevity is a compelling goal. But in my view, most people fail to see the trade-offs that can come with an obsessive focus on anti-aging. I like to think of it as a triangle, with each corner representing one of three primary goals: longevity, performance, or overall health and well-being. I got this from Robb Wolf many years ago, and it stuck with me. If you push too far toward one point, you often sacrifice the others. 

Take caloric restriction as an example. There’s decent evidence that reducing caloric intake can extend lifespan in animal models, and maybe even in humans. But that comes at a cost. People who are chronically under-eating often feel cold, sluggish, irritable, and just not great day-to-day. Their performance declines, and their quality of life takes a hit. And here’s the kicker: there’s no sense in living to 100 if you’re cold and miserable the whole time because you’re following a hypocaloric diet in the name of longevity. That’s not success, that’s just a longer period of not feeling good.”

Well put, Chris.

So, where should you draw the line with your efforts to be healthier?

When does it all become, paradoxically, an unhealthy obsession?

Next week, I’ll tell you.

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Previously Published on Ben Greenfield’s Newsletter

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