One day, you might need help going to the bathroom, be unable to tie your own shoes, and struggle to follow a simple conversation. In other words, lose your autonomy and become dependent on other people to take care of you. Notably, this only happens to the lucky ones. The late stages of aging are somewhat surprisingly similar to becoming a child again but without all the fun. In today’s society, we rarely talk about this part of aging. We usually talk about how to postpone this part. This is where longevity enters the stage – a concept focused on optimizing yourself in the attempt to get a younger body and live as long as possible. With this blog post, I wish to take a step back and consider a few reasons why longevity has become so popular and what that says about the time we live in.
Illustration: Luci Gutiérrez from The Atlantic.
Appealing longevity
Along with related concepts like anti-aging, healthy aging, healthspan, etc., the longevity field has attracted great attention both in the scientific community and the general population. This is accompanied by tremendous investments from people such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and ChatGPT’s Sam Altman. The content of longevity does indeed sound attractive – a pill or a lifestyle that prevents aging, offering the ultimate way of self-optimization by dodging everything that rhymes with ‘getting old and fragile’. It is difficult even mentioning longevity, self-optimization, and money investments in a couple of sentences without mentioning Bryan Johnson. A guy that together with a long line of private doctors, is hunting the youngest possible version of his body. Reportingly, this includes spending about $2 million every year on a variety of treatments and tests to monitor his body functions as well as consuming >100 pills daily, all with the clear goal of stopping his biological age while letting his chronological age march on. Though Bryan Johnson is an extreme case, it does talk into a broader context of continuous self-optimization and the pursuit of a younger biological age.
Scientific judgment
With the idea of lowering biological age, a negative connotation follows, where quantifying and optimizing our age becomes the biggest goal in life. A never-ending race where achieving a biological age of 40 is substituted with a goal of a biological age of 39. This constant tuning of our bodies almost suggests that if our biological age exceeds our chronological age, it is as if we are being told we are living incorrectly and should make changes to the way we live – an odd scientific judgmenton our body. I recently came across a study where a group of researchers asked North American college students what personality traits they wanted to improve about themselves. The study was conducted with a special focus on moral and nonmoral personality goals. Interestingly, the participants had a higher desire to improve nonmoral values such as productivity and sociability rather than moral values like honesty and fairness (Sun et al. 2020). Although this study has nothing to do with longevity, it is an example of a self-centred trend like we see in the case of Bryan Johnson, where self-improvements of our body is more important than our moral values.
So, what do I want to say with this post? Not much, really. While I fully embrace the idea of living healthy as long as possible and being able to take care of ourselves, I also find it terrifying that everything about our body potentially is subject to optimization in the holy name of biological age.
Author: Kasper Tore Vinten
References
Sun, J., & Goodwin, G. P. (2020). Do People Want to Be More Moral? Psychological Science, 31(3), 243-257.
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