British novelist and columnist Lionel Shriver (she’s a woman), writing vividly in the July 10, 2023 National Review about the modern quest for immortality, reminds us that there’s a difference between wanting to feel young — to have energy, to be free from pain and impairment, an ambition with which most of us would be sympathetic — and wanting to look young.
She claims that 46-year-old Tech tycoon Bryan Johnson boasts that he has the lung capacity of an 18-year-old and the skin of a man age 28. Shriver also claims he employs thirty doctors for his Project Blueprint to remain personally youthful, while getting regular transfusion of his 17-year-old son’s blood. His regime also incudes microdoses of Botox and the injection of salman-sperm DNA around the eyes. (Apparently, the son doesn’t mind the transfusions but, Shriver opines and many would agree, this seems an entirely vampirish practice.)
Shriver has obviously been thinking about the youth craze for some time. “For the Silicon Valley set, as for their neighbors in Hollywood,” she write, “appearance seems to be paramount. Especially for people so wealthy that money is meaningless, youthfulness is the preferred currency.”
She admits she, too, is vain. (and I’m also a charter member of that Vain #MeToo Movement.) But, she adds, “It’s just that a smoother complexion in middle age…is hardly one giant leap for mankind.”
Most of her essay deals fascinatingly and in considerable depth with the strikingly large tech industry working to cancel death and allow us to live forever — about which she concludes, “the vision of a species that has calcified into the same individuals forever, with no renewal, no turnover, no children, is ghastly.”
And that’s not half of the ghastliness.
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