Bryan Johnson plans to put off death for as long as possible by giving up worldly pleasures such as alcohol, cigarettes, late bedtimes and potato chips.Courtesy of Netflix/Netflix
The Cult of Fitness column by Alex Cyr dives into the wonderful, weird world of fitness trends and why they endure.
Here are a few things that make a successful cult: Grandiose goals, devoted members and a collective distaste for the status quo.
The new Don’t Die movement – which comprises more than 11,000 supporters who plan to cheat death by foregoing worldly pleasures such as alcohol, cigarettes, late bedtimes and potato chips – has all three. The goal, according to Don’t Die’s online oath, is living as healthily as possible to build “towards an infinite horizon, and fighting for the freedom to exist as long as one chooses.”
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It’s an ideology for those more concerned with being here for a long time rather than a good time. And at its centre is a fourth and crucially important part of a thriving cult: an influential leader. At the helm of Don’t Die is multi-millionaire Bryan Johnson, the world’s top biohacker who, at 48, is trying to live forever.
In case you missed the Netflix documentary on Johnson, the book he wrote on the movement or my piece on my day at his Don’t Die Summit earlier this year in New York City, let me catch you up. Johnson, guided by a team of 30 medical professionals, has eliminated aging accelerators including smoking, alcohol and poor sleep from his life, while adopting a strict diet, exercise regime and red light therapy practice. That’s in addition to the blood transfusions, hormone therapy and facial fat injections to stave off Father Time.
Johnson’s one-man science experiment has morphed into a full-blown ideology, or, as he calls it, a religion.Courtesy of Netflix/Netflix
His extreme lifestyle precludes him from doing normal human things such as dating, traditional partying and being in India (the air quality just didn’t cut it). In exchange, his way of life has granted him – by his team’s measurement – the biological health of a young adult, and a pace of aging that is nearly half of normal.
Johnson’s weird, one-man science experiment has morphed into a full-blown ideology, or, as he calls it, a religion. He now has a social media follower base across several platforms of more than four million, which includes fervent superfans, curious onlookers and downright haters. His previous lives as a devout Mormon, and then a founder and chief executive of Braintree (a company he sold to PayPal in 2013 for US$800-million) have clearly helped Johnson blossom into a gifted frontman.
He has full plans to change the world, and is already at work: He has hinted at an initiative to test the nutritional value of popular processed foods and lay bare the results to challenge companies to produce healthier snacks. Johnson wants to grow this diverse “army” to a billion. He’s even considering selling its adjacent wellness company, Blueprint.
“Here’s the truth: my secret plan is for Don’t Die to become the world’s most influential ideology by 2027,” he wrote on X in January. “Our existence depends upon it … It’s a fight against our self-destructive tendencies and the systems that enable them.”
So, yeah, he has created a cult around making proper health choices, and it’s all so … Gen-Z. In the Church of Johnson, health is the highest virtue, biometric data is the grand judge and junk food is the devil. It’s easy to see how following Johnson’s regime could quickly descend into a totalitarian approach to physical wellness for the rest of us mere mortals, and make us feel bad about ourselves the next time we eat just about anything from a 7-Eleven.
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Some people also criticize Johnson’s gonzo brand of N=1 science, calling it unrealistic and reckless in how it influences his followers to make snap judgments on everything from macadamia nuts and shiitake mushrooms to gene therapy and the psychoactive drug ketamine.
Successful cults tend to have a fifth thing in common, often rooted underneath a pile of nonsense: a point. Even the catastrophically deadly People’s Temple was founded on the desire for progressive ideals in postwar U.S.
Johnson’s point is that we suck at aging. Three-quarters of Canadians aged 65 or older have a chronic disease such as hypertension, diabetes or cancer. All of our ailments have made drug expenditure in Canada go from $55 billion to $84 billion in the last 12 years. Meanwhile, almost three-quarters of American adults are overweight or obese.
On some level, we know all of this. And yet, most of us have grown up on processed and fast foods and still eat them. One in four Canadians are chronically sleep-deprived, and only half of us exercise enough. Now, our health care system is too burdened to make meaningful waves in preventative medicine, so they play catch up and treat the sick, as the rest of us wait for it to be our turn.
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But when a middle-aged man with glowing skin and chiselled abs exposes that dissonance to millions daily, it strikes a deep chord with those afraid of death, and grates on those who just don’t want to accept that he might be right, and that his constant reminders of our own self-destruction are deeply uncomfortable.
Like him or not, Johnson is creating a new category of health aspiration, somewhere between the safe but slow mainstream and a scattered web of hopeful but unproven holistic treatments. At the very least, his propensity to measure everything he ingests is a refreshing alternative to the multitude of influencers claiming that we should pop Advil like candy, or cure our cancers with apple cider vinegar.
A lack of time, energy, desire, money, or all four will probably preclude the majority of us from becoming Don’t Die diehards, anyway. We can just keep taking it all in with a grain of salt – unless, of course, you have high blood pressure.
