This is an excellent article on the folly of destroying this life in a vain quest for immortality. From Good Citizen at thegoodcitizen.com:
“Telomeres calling Rubber Face, come in Rubber Face….are you there Rubber Face, do you copy?”
“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
— G.K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy (1908)
Silicon Souls
There’s something uncanny about them—that dry, sterile glow that no LED panel or nutrient infusion can fix. They don’t look younger. They look embalmed. Preserved. Like someone tried to 3D-print a face from memory and halfway through ran out of all the natural wrinkly descriptives that visually define the trying of a man’s soul and so instead filled them in with elastomeres and polymeres.
Bryan Johnson, Silicon Valley’s poster boy for techno-immortality, spends over $2 million a year trying not to die. His daily life is a spreadsheet of sacrifice: 100+ pills, a 2,250-calorie vegan diet with no joy or necessary healthy animal fats, biometric tracking, blood tests, morning workouts timed to the minute, shockwave therapy to the groin, and plasma infusions from his teenage replicant son—all in service of the belief that aging is optional if you just “optimize” hard enough. His body is a lab. His mind, a dashboard. His meals are sterile bowls of mechanized goo-gruel designed to feed mitochondria that power a silicon soul.
None of this is farce or pasquinade, but beneath the protocol, we have our punchline: all those millions of dollars and mitochondrial energy obsessing over a singular arrogant mantra and objective—Don’t Die—and yet he looks like a haunted wax figure and smiles like he’s waiting for software to load.
This isn’t defying death or transcending anything—it’s transhumanist cosplay, and Bryan Johnson isn’t alone. The more they try to cheat death, the more the desperation leaks through the cracks. What emerges is a new class of humans: sculpted, measured, joyless—with no concept of humanity outside of cellular efficiency. They may indeed live longer, with wealth and riches beyond the ordinary “lesser” humans’ comprehension, but in the end, will they possess the wisdom and self-reflection to ask: How have I lived?
We remember the example of Howard Hughes.
Gifted, technically brilliant, wealthy, yet deficient and powerless in certain areas – hence ended his days paranoid, existing in a darkened room with his excess bodily fluids stored in jars and undoubtedly controlled by his servants.
The devil seems to have numerous ways to lure us in so that he can destroy us.