Bryan Johnson, the notorious “longevity bro” who has been famously chasing immortality for the past several years, was recently diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis. “My stomach is eating itself,” he wrote on X.
As Anemona Hartocollis reports in The New York Times, it’s a stunning physiological setback for the 49-year-old Johnson, who has described himself as “the healthiest person on the planet.” And he seems to find it mildly offensive, given his obsessive focus on avoiding anything that may shorten his lifespan. “I eat whole foods,” he noted on social media after announcing the diagnosis. “I exercise every day, and I don’t do bad things.”
I find it challenging to muster much sympathy for Johnson and other longevity prophets who will eventually discover, much to their chagrin, that random cellular mischief can overpower even the most obsessively healthy lifestyle. More troubling than their hubris, though, is the degree to which their antiaging gospel has encouraged an unhealthy fixation on longevity among their countless disciples.
As Emily Retter reports in The Guardian, the global market for longevity-focused integrative medicine is estimated to reach $247.9 billion by 2030. And as more people flock to antiaging protocols, some experts are noticing a rising incidence of what’s been termed “longevity fixation syndrome.”
“While an existential fear of death is nothing new, and nor are claims to conquer mortality with elixirs or holy grails, extending your lifespan is no longer an aspiration dependent on following a disciplined diet and exercise regime alone,” Retter writes. “Nowadays, there is also an increasingly expansive menu of biohacks purported to boost health, offered at self-styled ‘longevity clinics.’ Rather than being confined to Hollywood and the uber-rich, such clinics are beginning to proliferate among the affluent mainstream.”
Sarah Boss, MD, chief clinical officer for a European network of residential treatment centers, tells Retter that she’s observed the uptick over the past couple of years. “We definitely see this [obsession around longevity] more and more, especially in wealthy people who have more access to [biohacking] and more time to spend on it,” she says. “They are trying to measure everything, day and night.”
British psychotherapist Lina Mookerjee estimates that about 75 percent of her clients show symptoms of longevity fixation syndrome. It’s a shift that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, she says. “It was an absolute step-change.”
These are typically hypervigilant, hyperactive people who are deathly afraid of dying, she explains. People like Jason Wood.
Wood’s antiaging routine involved exercising twice a day, seven days a week; eating only organic, raw, or unprocessed food while counting every calorie; and obsessively tracking everything from his heart rate and blood pressure to body fat and glucose levels. “I was living by those numbers,” he tells Retter.
He would also visit wellness clinics two or three times a month for oxygen treatments and IV drips of vitamin cocktails. The blood tests he requested every six months delivered the information that allowed him to keep a wary eye on 15 to 20 biomarkers.
Wood never deviated from his schedule or questioned his fixation until he was served hummus rather than his preordered vegetable crudites at a restaurant whose menu he had painstakingly researched. “In that moment, I just snapped,” he recalls. “I hit rock bottom, I got angry . . . I started crying, I started shaking. I just felt like I couldn’t do it anymore, like I had been crushed by all this pressure I put on myself.”
His therapist convinced him to relax his routine and quit his health apps, a shift he describes as losing his security blanket. “I was very scared and skeptical,” he says. But as he gradually began to accept his mortality, Wood was able to eventually understand why his fixation was such a difficult habit to break. He was trapped in much the same way as someone with the “clean eating” disorder orthorexia. This became clearer when he began working for the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders.
“I believe many of the underlying factors and desired outcomes which fuel orthorexia are the same for longevity fixation syndrome,” he notes. “But with the latter, there are more variables you feel like you need to control, so even more anxiety.”
Bryan Johnson may have experienced a similar epiphany when he admitted in a social media post after his gastritis diagnosis that he’s “been thinking things over and wonder if I’ve taken this whole longevity thing too far.”
He later dismissed the statement, telling Hartocollis that he was making fun of himself. “If anything, I am extremely grateful that I’ve spent the past five years working on my health,” he says. “Had I not been taking care of my health with such meticulousness, it’s possible my diagnosis would be a lot worse.”
So he may now be transitioning from his longevity obsession to a phase he calls “disease resolution,” which appears to be a similarly aspirational campaign to shift our expectations about illness. “It potentially captures what the future will be,” he says. “Right now, when someone gets sick, when they get a diagnosis, we’re not all that shocked. We just expect it.”
Perhaps someday, he adds, “we may get to the point where it’s shocking if someone falls ill.”
At least as it concerns himself, Johnson is already there.
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