Don’t die. That’s the simple mission statement of Bryan Johnson, tech entrepreneur and subject of the recently released Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever.
Johnson is not alone in his mission to extend his life as long as possible. In fact, the preoccupation with longevity is everywhere. Entrepreneurs are using AI to crack the longevity code. Cities are vying to be the new “longevity hubs.” And if Don’t Die isn’t for you, there are other documentaries like Longevity Hackers and Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones for you to enjoy. So it’s no surprise that longevity is expected to dominate the well-being industry in the coming year as a global consumer trend.
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Ray Kurzweil has been talking about tech-enabled immortality for decades, including in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near and again in his 2024 book The Singularity Is Nearer. For Kurzweil, the singularity will come when humans merge with AI to become “immortal software-based humans” living in the cloud.
Most of the longevity movement is not really about immortality but rather about extending life and limiting the damaging effects of aging. Of course, we all want longevity, and doing what we can to extend how long we live is great—as long as we don’t allow that to distract us from focusing on how to live. The danger of Johnson’s obsessive approach is spending so much time trying to extend your life that you never quite get around to living it.
Indeed, keeping death close—even while pushing it as far into the future as we can—has many lessons to teach us about life. Because as one headline from The Onion puts it: “World Death Rate Holding Steady at 100%.” This punchline, that no one escapes death, can of course be confirmed by multiple scientific studies.
We are not anywhere close to conquering death. In fact, a study from the University of Illinois in Chicago last year showed that though the average lifespan has gone up, the pace of improvement is slowing and the maximum lifespan hasn’t changed as much. “We’ve now proven that modern medicine is yielding incrementally smaller improvements in longevity even though medical advances are occurring at breakneck speed,” the study’s lead author Professor Jay Olshansky says. “There’s plenty of room for improvement: for reducing risk factors, working to eliminate disparities and encouraging people to adopt healthier lifestyles—all of which can enable people to live longer and healthier.” But room for improvement in living longer is very different from delusions about eliminating death.
For William Mair, professor of molecular metabolism at Harvard Chan School of Public Health, talk about immortality or radical life extension has a clear opportunity cost. “I worry that in a world where people have limited attention spans, the people who speak with confidence and say they have already cured aging will get the microphone,” he says. “We all age and we all know someone who is suffering from an age-related condition.”
Death can help us focus our attention on living our best life, because there’s nothing that can teach us more about how to live life than death. Death is the most universal experience, yet we will do anything and everything we can to curtain it off, to avoid dealing with the only plot twist that we know for sure will be in our story’s last act. Here lies the crux of the error Johnson, Kurzweil, and their followers are making: by seeing human beings solely as material beings, they have confused an immortal soul with an immortal body. As the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Or, as the poet Hermann Hesse wrote, “You will be neurotic and a foe to life—so says your soul—if you neglect me.”
We neglect our souls by losing ourselves in endless busyness and never-ending to-do lists while never getting around to the big unspoken item that will eventually get its checkmark. We spend our days accumulating, acquiring, achieving. We relentlessly document our lives on social media to forever memorialize moments we never fully experience.
As Joanna Ebenstein writes in Memento Mori, in a world that prides itself on being able to control all aspects of life, death is the “ultimate insult.” There’s a reason why death has been a central part of spiritual traditions and philosophy throughout history. “The one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner,” Socrates says in Plato’s Phaedo, “is to practice for dying and death.”
In ancient Rome, MM—short for “Memento Mori” which means “remember death”—was carved on statues and trees. The phrase is said to go back to a tradition in Roman victory parades in which a slave would hold a crown over the head of the triumphant general or emperor while whispering “remember you will die,” lest the victor lose his sense of perspective.
For the Stoics, accepting death and keeping it close was important to organize and give meaning to daily life. As Seneca put it, “It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” In Buddhism, the transient nature of life in which “all compounded things are impermanent” is a central teaching. The “maranasati” is a Buddhist meditation that specifically focuses on the awareness of death, reminding us that beginnings and endings are natural and that death is inevitable, which can awaken our appreciation for living.
For the French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne, not thinking about death was “brutish stupidity” and overcoming our fear of death is the way to liberate ourselves. “To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us…let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it,” he wrote. “To practice death is to practice freedom.” For the existentialist German philosopher Martin Heidegger, “death opens up the question of being.” In essence, facing our mortality allows us to explore the biggest mystery: what it means to be alive.
Of course, these questions have not just been asked by late philosophers. “For the past 33 years,” said Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 2005. I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”
When we don’t allow death into our lives, we lose the clarity, perspective, and wisdom that only death can bring. That’s why psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross called death the key to the door of life: “It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you’ll live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know that you must do.”
One of the biggest problems with believing that we’re just material beings and putting all our existential eggs in that basket is that it can diminish our appreciation of the joy, mystery, poetry and love that make life—however much we have of it—worth living.
In his book AI Superpowers, AI pioneer Kai-Fu Lee writes about how he once lived his life according to the same operating principles as the technology he was building. “I came to view my own life as a kind of an optimization algorithm with clear goals: maximize personal influence and minimize anything that doesn’t contribute to that goal,” he writes. After being diagnosed with stage IV lymphoma, Lee went on an inner journey to reexamine his life. One person whose wisdom he sought out was a Buddhist priest, Master Hsing Yun, who told him: “Kai-Fu, humans aren’t meant to think this way. This constant calculating, this quantification of everything, it eats away at what’s really inside of us, and what exists between us. It suffocates the one thing that gives us true life: love.”
That’s the true singularity. Love is what gives life meaning and makes it worth living. No matter what we believe about God or the afterlife, we have a fundamental need to connect — with ourselves, with others, and with something larger than ourselves. And love is both the pathway to that connection and the payoff. When we see life purely in material and empirical terms, we lose access to other dimensions of life—the parts beyond reason and rationality. And what an arid and limited existence that is.
So yes, let’s do what we can to lead a long life. But accepting that our life on earth will come to an end will make us more alive to it. In a post on X, Bryan Johnson wrote that “The coolest question in existence right now is exploring if we are the first generation to not die.”
It might be a cool question, but we know the answer: there’s zero scientific evidence that we’re going to be the first generation to not die. But what about a cooler question: how can we live a good life? For that, death is the ultimate bio hack.
