Kate Emery: Meet the man who really does want to live forever (but his daily routine looks pretty grim)

Bryan Johnson has done us all a favour in talking so publicly about his plan to defy death. Johnson is the face — OK, maybe the abs — of the kind of experimental anti-ageing science that only the very rich have the time and money to pursue because they’re not also busy worrying about how to invent time travel to get from school drop-off to work on time; or why a punnet of raspberries now costs more than an SUV. The tech billionaire became famous with an approach to holding back the sands of time that puts the hard in hardcore. At one point it included a tri-generational blood plasma transfer between himself, his 17-year-old son, and his 70-year-old dad — and that’s not even the weirdest bit. Now Johnson has put it all out there in a Netflix documentary, Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever, and we should all be grateful he has. Not because the documentary is particularly gripping — it’s fine — but because it asks us each to consider this question: “what price would I pay to extend my life?” It’s a good time to ask this question, given predictions generation beta could be the first to live a significantly longer lifespan than what is now viable. It’s also comes as Australia’s life expectancy drops for the first time in decades. But before you call your son and dad up for an emergency plasma transfusion, the drop in life expectancy is probably entirely down to the number of people who died from COVID-19. Far more alarming, if you want something to worry about, is that, according to a study published last month, Australia has one of the biggest “healthspan-lifespan gaps” in the world. We have a big gap between the number of years we live, and the number of those lived in good health — second only to the US out of 183 World Health Organisation member countries. Back to Johnson, who wants to “neutralise ageing”, not so much because he’s an ageing narcissist but because, at least according to him, he wants to spend “multiple lifetimes” with his son. There are far worse things a very rich man can do with his life than turn it into a science experiment that may benefit humanity. While Elon Musk is just one set of steel dentures away from going full Bond villain, Johnson spends his days experimenting with cutting-edge science to test the limits of what is possible. But it looks pretty grim. Johnson’s day starts at 4.30am with 54 pills and an electrode in his ear to stimulate “my autonomic nervous system”. It ends at 8.30pm with a night-time routine of melatonin, tongue scraping, toothbrushing, and an average of eight hours and 34 minutes of sleep a night. Highlights of those waking hours include gene therapy, penis shockwave therapy (I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound great) and something called high-frequency electromagnetic stimulation. All meals have to be eaten before 11am, and none of those meals include a cold wine or a hot chip. To steal a dad joke, you won’t live forever, it’ll just feel like it. Because while Johnson says he’s happier than ever, and spends much of the documentary looking like an advertisement for his own regimen — by which I mean: super jacked — it’s hard to avoid feeling none of this looks very fun. Is a world without burgers and beers worth living? Can a life that doesn’t involve the occasional late night putting the world to rights truly be said to have been well-lived? Life must be measured in quality, not quantity. Anyone who has spent time in a nursing home knows that. Eating well and exercising can hugely improve the quality of our later years. But unless Johnson uncovers an anti-ageing regimen that’s accessible to those of us without a $US400 million net worth, most of us will have to find the sweet spot between going into old age as healthy as possible and enjoying the life we have, in the knowledge that we could be hit by a bus tomorrow. Without access to red-light therapy, daily MRIs and bowel imaging, the rest of us are left reading food packet ingredient lists, counting our steps, and digesting endless, sometimes-contradictory, studies telling us which ingredient will kill us or turn us into a superhero this week. Johnson’s experiment may prove useful in the science of longevity. But even if it doesn’t, he has given us all a valuable lesson: that life cannot be measured just in years but in how we spend them. Whether that includes gene therapy, blood transfusions and, sure, whatever that penis thing is, is up to us.