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It’s Men’s Health Week at Playboy and we’re exploring the increasingly DIY state of men’s healthcare. From the peptides ruling Hollywood to the Reddit forums replacing doctors, men are taking their health into their own hands. Here’s what you need to know.
A word appears almost ad nauseum in the tweets of venture capitalist and noted biohacker Bryan Johnson: immortality. Such a word harkens images of toga-clad gods and goddesses, but to Johnson, the notion is not foreign, ancient or even unreachable. In fact, many of his social media posts argue that humans are closer than ever to the end of human death, summed up by his two-word philosophy, “Don’t die.” He even named his website, where he hawks supplements, pills and a concierge — a “fully managed longevity medicine program” — Immortals.
“We are the first generation of humans who can say with a straight face, we may overcome physical death in the coming decades. The speed of progress creates a burden of proof for anyone who would deny this,” Johnson, who made hundreds of millions when he acquired and then sold Venmo more than a decade ago, wrote on X on June 19. “We are experiencing an identity metamorphosis as a species; transitioning from one that is powerless in the face of death to one that is defiant against its cruelty.”
Johnson isn’t the only rich guy obsessed with living forever. Recently, a hot mic caught an exchange between the world’s two most powerful autocrats, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian president Vladimir Putin, making small talk of organ transplants and living forever. Among a certain set of uber-wealthy, powerful people, death is the next thing to conquer. But in their dogged pursuit of control over one of the last certainties, the longevity-obsessed seem to have lost sight of the central question: should we actually try to live forever?
“I think they might have entirely missed the point of what life is about,” Carlo Legat, a philosopher and professor of care ethics at the University of Humanistic Studies in the Netherlands, tells Playboy. “Life is about quality and not about quantity.”
Twenty years ago, before Bryan Johnson became a billionaire or became synonymous with anti-aging, Legat co-wrote a paper alongside Martien A M Pijnenburg called “Who wants to live forever? Three arguments against the extending the human lifespan” in the Journal of Medical Ethics. They argued that it’s unethical to extend your lifespan when there’s such a vast difference in the lifespans between people in developed countries and those that are underdeveloped; that extending human lifespan ruptures social connection; and that death is what gives human life meaning.
The kind of focus and obsession that people like Johnson develop in trying to live forever, Legat says, means enduring a certain loneliness, both in real-time and in the imagined, very long future when your peers have likely died. “The more deeply you’re connected to other people, the more meaningful your life is,” Legat says. It also means that you don’t confront your own mortality in the way we’re meant to—a difficult, but essential experience that Legat argues may have borne our deepest traditions.
“Could the wisdom of the spiritual traditions be inspired by the fact that human beings have to cope with their mortality, and seek an escape in transcendence?” Legat wrote at the time.
Of course, spiritual and mythological traditions have plenty of stories and verses related to the mortality of humankind. As early as Genesis 6:3, the Bible says that people will not live past 120 years old, while Psalms 90:10 reminds us that most humans are meant to live just about 70 to 80 years. Even going back to Greek mythology, while a handful of humans did achieve immortality, often as a reward for heroism or as part of their marriage to a divine being, looking to achieve everlasting life came with severe consequences. While most people know Sisyphus as the man with the burdensome boulder, his earlier stories include the fact that he tried to cheat death, even imprisoning Hades and stopping death worldwide for a short spell, which angered the gods, who wanted nothing more than to watch humans fight and kill one another.
These stories reiterate the fact that, in almost every human tradition, death and life are seen as inseparable. In fact, Legat says that part of the biohacking trend seems to be an inability to see them as intertwined. Part of maturing, Legat contends, is seeing death as inevitable.
“You might frame it as breaking a record,” he says, “But I might frame it as being afraid to die.”
What is the opposite of fear of death? Of course, there’s acceptance, but there’s even a name for what Legat is approaching: gerotranscendence. Developed by sociologist Lars Tornstam, gerotranscendence asserts that, as we age, we lose sight of the materialistic minutiae of youth and come to a greater wisdom. Its four main tenets include an emphasis on connection and togetherness, a sense of universal awareness, becoming less self-occupied and less interest in wealth with an uptick in time spent in solitude.
Legat says that, as a professor, this manifests as a desire to make space for the incoming generation and to give them room, rather than take space for himself.
“I feel a younger generation wanting to take my place, and that’s fine. That’s natural. It’s good,” he says. “It’s also good when I make space.” Part of aging, he adds, is people seeing that “they’ve had their primetime” and allowing people to have their own.
Not making room for a new generation, and thus a new set of ideas, puts into focus why extending one’s lifespan may be so attractive to people such as Jinping and Putin, as if life — or perhaps, more accurately, death — were something to be conquered, a new frontier or challenge to be surmounted.
While biohacking certainly has appeal to people who have amassed extreme amounts of political power, it has also proved popular for the masses, as well. Johnson’s evangelism has attracted many people who are more interested in their health than ever before. His YouTube has more than 2 million subscribers and his videos regularly reach over a million views.
Many of his videos espouse tips related to his biohacking ethos, including one that shares his “11 Health Essentials” to help you live past 120. At least one of the tips is eating olive oil; an affiliate link in the description links back to his own brand of olive oil, which retails for $39 for a 25 oz bottle. Johnson’s Blueprint (the codename for his project to live forever) features many items for sale, including daily supplements, nut mixes and shampoo. An at-home sauna retails for just under $13,000, while a mattress will have you forking over $3,000.
Johnson’s extensive list of supplements and wares makes sense, given that most of what a person needs to stay healthy is not what he can offer.
“When you’re selling longevity, what is there to sell? Supplements,” board-certified surgeon Dr. Pablo Prichard, who is also the host of NBC’s Forever Young, tells Playboy. “You can’t sell somebody exercise. They have to do that themselves. You can’t sell somebody stress relief.”
It’s those unsellable aspects of health that are actually the most beneficial towards longevity, according to Prichard. In fact, when it comes to what might extend your life, Prichard says supplements are at the “bottom of the list” behind exercise, relieving stress, sleep, limiting toxins such as cigarette smoking or alcohol, health monitoring tests such as colonoscopies and preventative steps such as using sunscreen.
“Bryan Johnson has referred to himself as a ‘rejuvenation athlete,’” Prichard says. “But we don’t have to become a longevity or rejuvenation athlete. There are different habits that we can create that give us the majority of the benefit with a small amount of time to devote to this.”
Prichard emphasized that, rather than trying to extend our lifespans, we should be trying to extend our healthspans, or the number of healthy years that we have.
“I would rather have fewer better years than many bad years,” he said. “Who wants to live to be 150 or 200 if you’re going to be frail for the last 50 years?”
Similarly, Avery Zenker, a registered dietitian, says that focusing on healthspan, as opposed to lifespan, might be a more worthwhile pursuit. While a focus on lifespan focuses on optimization, tracking and testing, thinking about healthspan, by contrast, could boost your overall health.
“When we think about our health and wellbeing, we’re thinking about the foundations, which makes up the biggest portion of health and longevity,” Zenker said. “Lifemaxxing is really more about those tiny optimizations at the end of that, which don’t make up the bulk of the impact.”
Zenker pointed to the 80/20 health rule — which says that 80% of the results can come from just 20% of the effort of staying healthy — as being much more central to both healthspan and lifespan than supplements or optimization.
While Zenker is dubious about the overall effects of biohacking, she does think that Johnson’s emphasis on sleep is important and sees that the current emphasis on longevity shows that Americans are much more concerned about their health, which she sees as a net positive.
For Legat, there is also a huge difference between caring about your health and focusing on lifespan optimization. Whether it be preventative or taking medication for chronic conditions such as diabetes, he sees those as fundamentally different than biohacking.
“If you take medication, you are saving your life,” he said. “You’re trying to raise the level of functioning to the level of the average human being, a kind of repair.” He added, “The idea is that you can participate in society, contribute to society, you can enjoy life, give and take.”
Legat, too, would like to see a shift away from lifespan and one towards healthspan. However, for him, it’s not individual, but collective healthspan that he sees as a priority, especially through a human rights framework.
“What if we just say everybody has a right for 70 healthy years of being alive?” he asked, which he put in opposition to individuals trying to live past 100.
Such an understanding, he said, would emphasize the fact that all humans are connected and that one individual’s biohacking shouldn’t take precedence over everyone getting to live longer.
“To become very special, to live longer than other people,” he said, “To put a lot of energy into this is very, I would say, egotistic or self-centered.”
