Born in Time to Live
“I was marching into an early grave,” says Bryan Johnson in his Netflix documentary, Don’t Die. Before he dedicated his life to defying death, Johson was a sleep-deprived, out-of-shape, tech CEO contemplating suicide. He was also a Mormon. Then he sold his company, Braintree, for $800 million, got divorced, renounced religion, and built an algorithm that he boasts can “take better care of me than I can of myself.” Under its direction, he sleeps 8 hours and thirty-four minutes every night. He exercises daily, eats only fruits, vegetables, and seeds, and works with longevity consultants who constantly measure his biomarkers. This results in over 200 daily “longevity interventions”–ranging from collagen shots to blood transfusions from his teenage son–all because he believes he can escape his own mortality.
For most of his life, Johnson let Mormonism determine his judgement; now, he lets machine learning. AI has become his externalized reason center. To him, algorithms aren’t just a tool. They’re a moral and cognitive proxy that Johnson trusts more than his own mind. His theological shift is striking. Divine grace no longer delivers his path to salvation– data optimization does. To Johnson, metrics like testosterone levels, UV damage, and biological age carry moral and existential weight. His sense of self has become synonymous with his physiological performance. It’s a model of human-machine symbiosis that redefines biology and ontology.
In 2023, Johnson traveled to Próspera, a regulatory gray zone in Honduras (yes, Próspera is a Network State). In this “startup” city, he underwent an experimental gene therapy. The treatment, Follistatin, can aid muscle growth. Due to its off-target genetic effects and unknown long-term outcomes, the FDA has not approved the therapy for anti-aging use. His use of unregulated gene therapy reflects our contemporary emphasis on individual bio-sovereignty and market-driven science. It also promotes a vision of biology in which the human genome isn’t a fixed inheritance but a design space. When biology becomes editable code, it complicates long-standing theological notions of selfhood. What remains of personhood when we inject our bodies with synthetic substances, alter our genetics, and distribute a once-coherent self across digital systems? What happens to our sense of moral responsibility when algorithms dictate our most intimate decisions?
Johnson’s son is named Talmage. His Instagram bio reads: “Born too late to explore Earth, too soon to explore space, right on time for Don’t Die.” Behind the irony lies sadness—dislocation from a world that’s ending while he waits for a new one to emerge. His father’s vision gestures toward that new world: posthuman, algorithmic, synthetic. A world where immortality isn’t spiritual but biological. Like so many of us, Johnson wants to be free from the self that chooses poorly and causes its own suffering. Yet by trying to defy death, Johnson’s at risk for losing something else: his fallibility and finitude, and his capacity to find meaning within them. The relevant question isn’t whether his approach to evading death is philosophically consistent or ethically sound, but whether it satisfies a deeper human desire for meaning. Can an analogue self designed by code and governed by machines still be a self in the fullest sense—a moral agent, a bearer of dignity, a participant in love and community?
As AI and biotechnology embed themselves in our bodies and beliefs, that question is no longer just scientific—it’s salvific. Who or what saves us? From what? In an age of increasing technological mediation, our widespread criticism of Johnson highlights cultural anxiety about our own relationships with machines. It’s reductive to simply condemn Johnson’s techno-optimism; his story is also one of survival, of clawing one’s way out of despair by building a new framework when the old one has failed. His algorithm may be flawed, but it gives him a sense of structure and hope. Johnson’s life surely includes a larger bank account balance, earlier wake up time, and more red light therapy than the average human. But in the end, his relationship with AI isn’t that different from our own.
Some people might say that, for better or worse, Johnson’s showing us where we’re headed: a future where humans fully relinquish our agency to machines. But there is still time to resist the narrative of algorithmic inevitability. We are not obligated to accept a future in which AI dictates the terms of a good life, nor a life in which longevity becomes our highest aim.
Much of the discourse today leans toward extremes. One extreme is biohacking, concerned with extending life at any cost. But to what end? Another is a pervasive fatalism that has prescribed to the inevitability of an AI takeover, as if humans have already relinquished all of our agency. But neither story is fixed.
In an email with sex trafficker and power broker Jeffrey Epstein, longevity expert Dr. Peter Attia joked, “pussy is, indeed, low carb.” In focusing so intensely on the future—on optimization, transcendence, and escape—we risk making the same grave mistake Attia did: neglecting the present. Forgetting to be a good person today.
A meaningful life is not something deferred until we become posthuman, nor something guaranteed by technological progress. It is shaped here: in the quality of our attention, our choices, and our relationships, however finite they may be. There is still room—right now—to live well.
Work Cited
Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations: The Annotated Edition. Translated and edited by Robin Waterfield. New York: Basic Books, 2021.
Guerrero, Jean. “This California Millionaire Is Peddling Eternal Life. Why Do People Believe Him?” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2024. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-02-05/california-bryan-johnson-longevity-wellness-anti-aging.
Johnson, Bryan. “The Combination of Human and Artificial Intelligence Will Define Humanity’s Future.” TechCrunch, October 12, 2016. https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/12/the-combination-of-human-and-artificial-intelligence-will-define-humanitys-future/.
Johnson, Talmage (@talmagejohnson_). Instagram. Accessed May 5, 2025. https://www.instagram.com/talmagejohnson_/.
Royle, Orianna Rosa. “How Did Bryan Johnson Make His Money?” Fortune, February 1, 2023. https://fortune.com/2023/02/01/how-did-bryan-johnson-make-his-money/.
Smith, Chris, director. Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever. Los Gatos, CA: Netflix, 2025. Streaming video.