A Faith with no Soul: Don’t Die Misses Life’s That means

Early within the Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Needs to Stay Perpetually, anti-aging professional Dr. Andrew Steele mentioned one thing that introduced me up quick: “We’re all so used to watching our mates and kin and pets age and die, we predict that it’s one way or the other pure and one way or the other good.”

We do?

Certain, it’s honest to say that there’s a consensus on the naturalness of dying. It’s a part of the life cycle of each human and animal: We’re born, we reside, we die. However “good”? That’s not precisely a standard sentiment. Even these of us who imagine that dying is the door by way of which we should go to succeed in God don’t normally  maintain that dying is inherently good.

However Bryan Johnson, the tech billionaire who’s the main target of Don’t Die, takes his personal anti-death angle to undreamed-of heights. Johnson has gained fame lately for the Blueprint Protocol, a strenuous program of food plan, train, and medical care designed to take years off his life—actually. Because the documentary reveals in exhaustive element, Johnson spends hours every day measuring out vegetable parts, swallowing tablets, and pumping iron, with the end result that, reportedly, he’s lowered his organic age by about 5 years.

The top objective, as is made clear within the movie’s title, is to defeat dying.

The documentary is basically sympathetic to Johnson and his objective—who doesn’t need to face down humankind’s oldest and worst enemy, in spite of everything? Who amongst us, if we had billions of {dollars}, wouldn’t at the very least take into account plowing these {dollars} into discovering a method to keep right here on Earth so long as attainable? What higher use might there be for all that cash than defeating dying?

So the movie smooths over Johnson’s eccentricities and softens features of his story that are inclined to get a harsher therapy from the press. That story you could have heard about Johnson siphoning blood, and later plasma, from his teenage son to assist himself keep younger? Don’t Die presents this weird follow as just a few good old style household bonding. Johnson; his father, Richard; and his son, Talmage, all take part within the plasma-sharing ritual, which is introduced not simply as a part of Bryan’s de-aging plan, but additionally as a method to strive boosting Richard’s fading psychological skills. “Bryan informed me that this may be somebody doing one thing for his or her liked one which mattered,” Richard recounts.

The plain parallels to vampirism and so forth by no means appear to happen to any of them.

That’s not, I imagine, an accident. As with that novel thought talked about above that dying is unhealthy, Johnson and his associates appear to assume and act as in the event that they’re inventing the world as they go alongside. Maybe it’s not stunning, then, that Johnson talks—solely half-jokingly—about inventing his personal faith, in tandem together with his quest for immortality.

Born into the LDS religion, Johnson practiced it nicely into maturity, till, he says, “With the depth of what life was delivering up, I felt like [the church’s] solutions, the one actuality I knew, didn’t make sense anymore.” Racked with suicidal despair, he left his religion, offered his firm, divorced his spouse, and “discovered power and liberation in doing Blueprint.”

It’s not placing it too strongly to say that Johnson’s new faith is the worship of the physique. It’s fairly clear simply from the photographs we’re seeing onscreen—the obsessive train, the cautious consideration to look, the scene the place his son walks in on him getting photographed bare. But when that weren’t sufficient, he comes proper out and says it.  

“I didn’t need an afterlife, I didn’t need this life, I didn’t need consciousness in any respect,” Johnson remembers of his depressive interval.

My thoughts was like a vicious storm, telling me to actually kill myself, and it turned clear to me that the thoughts just isn’t a dependable supply of judgment. I wanted a special means of being. . . . Once I give my physique authority, it doesn’t commit this self-destructive hurt. My coronary heart doesn’t ship these stinging insults. My lungs don’t do it both. My kidney doesn’t both. Eradicating my thoughts has been the most effective factor I’ve ever completed in my life.

I’m not downplaying the seriousness of Johnson’s despair after I say that this can be a quite drastic case of child and bathwater. His concepts strike me, although, as being on par with those that need us to outsource our writing, our artwork, and our considering typically to synthetic intelligence. In each circumstances, our God-given minds and inventive skills are devalued, our actions made mechanical and devoid of which means.  

There’s additionally the matter of the extreme self-focus that Johnson’s routine requires: a self-focus that, he admits, makes him a poor romantic prospect and an individual with out a lot companionship typically, except for his workers and Talmage, earlier than the latter goes off to varsity. (Johnson’s different youngsters weren’t interviewed for the movie, and the standing of his relationship with them is unclear.) He does attempt to argue that Blueprint could possibly be tailored to assist everybody on this planet, however the stab at altruism within the midst of a documentary all about his hyperfocus on his personal biology just isn’t terribly convincing—particularly when you think about his station in life. Apologies for the generalization, but when, particularly after the previous couple of months, you really imagine that tech billionaires as a category have the general public’s finest pursuits at coronary heart, I’ve a chainsaw to promote you.

Moreover, there’s purpose to ask whether or not Johnson’s efforts may really be backfiring on him.

However above all, Johnson’s try and defeat dying neglects to consider the very nature of actuality. As I mentioned earlier, nobody is severely arguing that dying is an efficient factor. C. S. Lewis, in his e book Miracles, aptly describes it as “the triumph of Devil, the punishment of the Fall, and the final enemy,” and reminds us that Christ Himself “detested this penal obscenity not lower than we do, however extra.”

“Alternatively,” Lewis goes on, “solely he who loses his life will put it aside. We’re baptised into the dying of Christ, and it’s the treatment for the Fall.”

Johnson’s faith falls aside as a result of it fails to understand these final truths. Together with the thoughts, it devalues the soul when it elevates the physique above all else. And what can be the purpose of residing endlessly with no thoughts or soul, two important components of our humanity? I hate the considered dying too, but when the choice is to pour all my assets and all my vitality into creating an immortal physique on the expense of every thing else—nicely, once more, that brings up the unsavory thought of vampirism, a soulless type of life that may do nothing however parody actual life. It’s a tough truth to face, and Don’t Die by no means fairly will get round to dealing with it, however evidently the one immortality accessible to us is the type that we acquire by way of accepting our frequent mortality. In different phrases, solely by way of dying can we discover true life.