Empathy for the optimizers

Clowning on the longevity king is fun, but it ignores why people biohack in the first place.

Clowning on the longevity king is fun, but it ignores why people biohack in the first place.

Bryan Johnson, best known as the man who wants to live forever, has an incurable autoimmune disease. The internet’s most famous biohacker made the announcement on June 30th, sparking a barrage of takes.

If you’ve never heard of Johnson, the CliffsNotes are that he’s made it his personal mission to never die. That’s not hyperbole — there’s an entire Netflix documentary about how the man spends a veritable fortune turning himself into a longevity experiment with an n of 1. His protocols include over a hundred supplements, routine blood draws, wearable tracking, and some common health trends like eating a plant-based diet and following a strict sleep regimen. (Plus some less -common health hacks, like transferring plasma from his teenage son.) What Johnson has is autoimmune gastritis (AIG), a notoriously difficult condition to diagnose where the immune system attacks the cells that produce stomach acid. It results in reduced absorption of nutrients and can lead to an increased risk of stomach cancer. Normally, a celebrity or public figure announcing an incurable illness sparks a wave of sympathy. Johnson received some of that — but also sparked a schadenfreudic wave of wellness influencers preaching, “I told you so.”

“This is the guy that spends $2 million a year biohacking his way to immortality,” a wellness influencer who goes by organicbunny says in an Instagram reel while doing her hair. She goes on to characterize Johnson’s public use of Botox and GLP-1 medications as a potential cause for his diagnosis, but that’s a hypothesis based on cherry-picked studies without any real knowledge of Johnson’s actual health. “You cannot inject health into your body, and sadly this biohacker Bryan is yet another example.”

“When you are being so hypervigilant about your health, you are training your nervous system to see everything as a threat,” theorizes another TikTok influencer .

“So what can this tell us about his perfect ‘don’t die’ strategy using data, quantitative, qualitative data, the mainstream data to make decisions?” opines another TikTok influencer , pointing to Johnson’s plant-based diet and diligent sun protection practices. “I think if he doesn’t reframe the way he views health, and you know, by not eliminating key foundations such as nature and being in full-spectrum light and eating things like red meat … bad things happen, even when you’re perfect on paper.”

The reasons why people think Johnson developed an autoimmune disease range from stress and genetics to more outlandish theories — but it’s all speculation. To be fair, Johnson chronically overshares his extreme health routines and results online. In this case, he thinks the cause of his AIG is eating sugary cereals and poor diet in his youth. It’s the worst kind of Silicon Valley-bro-meets-earnestly-performative-theater-kid energy, where everything must be broadcasted or maxxed for optimal results. For example, during the Enhanced Games, he was mocked for his sun goggles and UV parasol. Recently, he also turned heads for bragging about his girlfriend’s vaginal microbiome. (I wish I were exaggerating about the latter, but alas.)

I’ve poked fun at Johnson, too. Most recently in The Verge ’s annual summer in-and-out list . But in the rush to turn Johnson’s diagnosis into content, I think wellness influencers at large are missing the big reason why anyone starts optimizing their health.

I don’t relate to most of Johnson’s longevity philosophy — I look forward to one day shedding this mortal husk, thank you very much, because knowing this is all finite makes each moment more precious. That said, Johnson’s self-described journey toward diagnosis felt eerily similar to the journey I went on over the past decade trying to handle my polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. And I suspect it’s a journey that many people have or will embark on as health and wearable tech adoption widens.

It starts small. You notice something is off, or maybe your doctor asks you to lose some weight because something in your annual physical isn’t optimal. Whatever the reason, a basic fitness tracker is bought. For some people, that’s as far as the health journey goes because the underlying issue is resolved. But for a ton of other people, the data doesn’t paint an obvious picture or the body doesn’t react in an expected way. At that point, finding the reason behind a health mystery can easily be derailed into a quest for health perfection.

In his extremely detailed post , Johnson notes that doctors shrugged at his low iron levels for years because he didn’t fit the criteria for anemia. This was despite a regimen of iron supplementation. It wasn’t until a biopsy that Johnson and his team of over 30 doctors discovered AIG. All in all, the journey took several years, much of which was spent observing his health under a near-constant microscope. It’s a narrative that anyone with a chronic illness can relate to.

For me, my HbA1C and fasting glucose levels never indicated that I was insulin resistant. My slightly elevated liver enzyme levels were attributed to my high cholesterol and other medications. Finding the appropriate treatment took lots of testing, many conversations with doctors, and frankly, a dogged determination to get an actual answer. Along the way, I turned to dozens of wearables to try and figure out why I had brain fog, why my fatigue seemed unending, why none of the conventional fueling advice for long-distance running worked, and why a hypervigilant diet and exercise program seemed to be less effective for me than everyone else I knew. But it all boils down to this existential dread — something feels off and no one can tell you why.

Some of the criticisms toward Johnson’s brand of biohacking are reasonable. You can’t fully mitigate your genetics through lifestyle changes. You can try to optimize to a point where you’re reducing your quality of life. Not to get too philosophical, but at the heart of optimization culture is the very human fear of dying. Ironically, the thing that science and data give us is a sense that there is an answer. That any health problem, provided you can measure it, can be identified and then fixed or at least improved. Sadly, this isn’t always true.

Your health is not a race with a finish line. Wearables introduce health scores to help make data digestible, but getting amazing sleep scores, cardio scores, or longevity scores is not proof that you will live a long life. We’ve all heard an anecdotal story about that friend of a friend who did everything right and still developed cancer or dropped dead in a freak accident.

It sucks, but health is a lifelong habit and doctors have been telling us the “answer” our entire lives. Eat a balanced diet, sleep well, and exercise regularly. Everything else is left to luck, genetics, and medicine. Biohacking, wearables, and health tech aren’t all bad. These are useful tools, especially if you have chronic illness or are trying to build healthier habits. But we are, as a society, in danger of forgetting the very human reason why most of us turn to these tools in the first place — and by and large, I think many of us are in danger of thinking these tools are necessary for a healthy life.

The point of using these tools is to regain balance, a combination of attention and ease that allows you to live a sustainably satisfying life. Balance is going to look different for everyone, but the key to finding it is developing discernment. That’s knowing when to ignore versus heavily interrogate wellness trends and marketing. It’s understanding that it’s perfectly normal to eat a slice of birthday cake (some glucose spikes make life worth living), but being an adult also means forcing yourself to eat more salads and go on a fart walk . It’s realizing that we’re all afraid to die, that some health optimizing is an attempt to control that fear — but that living a joyful life hinges on letting go of the notion we can control anything about death.

For me, that balance involves medications, experimenting with “common sense wearable use,” and when my health gets a bit better, a lot of running. (I’m never going to be your gal for the most quantified life, because that life was not great for my mental health.) For Bryan Johnson, according to his social platforms , it means the most Bryan Johnson response possible to his diagnosis: sequencing 1 million of his immune cells to try and find a cure for AIG. I unironically love that for him — though I think I speak for most of the internet when I say we could do without the updates about him and his girlfriend’s sex life.