Opinion: The illusion of immortality: A critical look at the quest to defy ageing
April 28, 2025
Aging is not degeneration. It’s transformation. The body records everything - injury, recovery, effort, fatigue. It’s history etched into skin and muscle.
Opinion by Shashank Sharma
History has never been kind to those who tried to outwit time. From Qin Shi Huang’s mercury elixirs to Ponce de León’s mythical fountain, every quest for immortality has ended the same way. Failure, often with irony. The bodies decay. The stories remain. That’s the legacy, not how long you lived, but what you left behind.
Every time I see Bryan Johnson and his so-called war against aging, I see another entry in that same pattern. A man with more money than time, trying to code his way past mortality. This time with better branding, subscription pills, and wearable sensors. When he came to India, he couldn’t even complete a podcast. Midway through the Nikhil Kamath's episode, he walked out, citing poor air quality and physical discomfort. We know the problems. We are fighting them. If he cared about the air quality index (AQI), he would have contributed solutions. But that wasn’t the point. He was here for branding. The moment it was secured, he exited. No discussion on problems. Just an inconvenience slapped as a statement. Our relationship with impermanence runs deeper than any metric. Through our literature, our rituals, our philosophies, we’ve long understood that change is not a threat. It is the essence of being. You don’t chase permanence when you understand purpose. You seek clarity. Johnson shows none. He treats age as a mechanical failure. Tracks calories. Logs every heartbeat. Scripts his day like maintenance on a fragile device. But entropy isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. It gives time, shape and life meaning. Money doesn’t override it. Data can’t outpace it. Fear doesn’t delay it. Aging is not degeneration. It’s transformation. The body records everything - injury, recovery, effort, fatigue. It’s history etched into skin and muscle. The Stoics saw strength in accepting impermanence. The Upanishads called it liberation. Johnson calls it a problem to solve. His version of health is hollow. Avoid pain. Avoid discomfort. Avoid unpredictability. But vitality doesn’t emerge from avoidance. It’s forged in contact, in risk, in resilience. The human body wasn’t meant for lab conditions. It was built to endure. In trying so hard to outlive time, Johnson has reduced life to numbers. His existence is now a spreadsheet. Each step, each breath, filtered, measured, optimized. But a heartbeat isn’t just a data point. It’s a drum. It says: you’re still here. Act like it. When his time runs out - and it will - no biometric dashboard will matter. What will matter is whether he lived. Not how efficiently he delayed the inevitable. I am not rejecting science. Research matters. Extending healthspan is a valid pursuit. But pretending you can out-code death is delusion. Pretending you can defeat aging without embracing change is denial. And pretending your personal discomfort is a public service is branding. Nothing more. Aging isn’t a flaw to be fixed. It’s a story. And stories are supposed to end. That’s what gives them weight. That’s what gives them meaning. |
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