What Bryan Johnson and Longevity Science Reveal about Human Nature
Imagine walking through a forest and coming across a dead fox. If you set up a camera and filmed what happens next, over the course of days and then weeks, what you'd see is a slow, quiet unraveling. Millions of insects descend on it. Microorganisms colonize the tissue. Fungi thread through what remains. The fox is taken apart, piece by piece, and absorbed into its surroundings. Its nutrients seep into the soil, into root systems, into the bodies of a thousand smaller creatures.
At some point, the boundary between fox and forest becomes impossible to draw. The animal has become the environment.
Now run that footage in reverse. The soil pulls apart. Matter reconverges from the roots and the leaf litter and the teeming ground. Tissue reassembles into sinew and fur and bone. A fox rises up out of the forest floor, fully formed, and hops away.
That reversed footage is, in a very real sense, what biological life is. Life is the process of holding your separateness from your environment. Of maintaining your boundaries, your internal order, against a natural backdrop that is constantly and quietly working to absorb you back into itself. Every living thing on this planet, from a single-celled organism to a blue whale, is engaged in this same basic project: resisting dissolution.
This broadsweeping biology is worth contemplating in relation to modern longevity science. Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur who submits to dozens of daily medical procedures, swallows over a hundred supplements a day, and has built what amounts to a full-time clinical operation around the project of not aging, has become the face of the movement. All of it is done in service of a larger goal, stated without irony: Don’t Die.
What does this really mean, at its core? Ultimately, this is about defying physics itself; about rising up against the natural forces around us and resisting their pull. And ultimately, over hundreds of thousands of years, this is the very story of our species.
Life as a (Temporary) Resistance of Disorder
In 1944, nearly a decade after proposing his baffling thought experiment, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger asked a deceptively simple question: what is life, from the perspective of physics? His answer was striking, and it resonates directly with the image of the fox on the forest floor.
Everything in the universe tends toward disorder. This is the second law of thermodynamics, and it is among the most fundamental laws we know. We see it everywhere and it works the same wherever we look. Ink disperses in water. Rocks erode on the beach. Hot coffee cools to room temperature. Organized matter is intrinsically improbable and unstable over the long run. The default direction of the universe is dispersion. Things fall apart.
Living organisms are the exception, at least temporarily. What Schrödinger recognized is that living things exist in a state of continuous defiance of this law. Every heartbeat is a small act of resistance against the tide of dissolution. Every breath, every cell that repairs itself, every wound that heals is the organism pulling order from its surroundings and using it to hold its own structure together for a little while longer.
Life, Schrödinger argued, is a local, temporary reversal of the second law of thermodynamics. A pocket of order in a universe trending everywhere and always toward disorder.
And death? Death is the inevitable moment that reversal ends. It's when the organism finally loses its ability to resist.
The resistance of these forces is ultimately the fight of every living organism. For the individual creature, ourselves included, this is biology itself - a means of locally reversing entropy.
What makes humans unique though, is how we contend with this fight across time, passing down the tools of resisting disorder from one generation to the next. This broader fight is ultimately against external disorder, writ large. And our weapon of choice? Technology.
Technology as a Means of Imposing Order on Disorder
For the vast majority of human history, we were completely at the mercy of the natural world. Small bands of us wandered from place to place, trying to find a survivable existence. Lightning struck our shelters. Storms destroyed what little we'd built. Invisible forces took our loved ones in the night. We had no understanding of why any of it happened. Things just happened. Generation after generation, millennia after millennia. The disorder of the natural world was the overwhelming, defining fact of human life.
The margins were so thin that, during at least one period of extreme climatic upheaval, scientists believe our entire breeding population collapsed to roughly 1,300 individuals. Every ancestor of every person alive today, in a single auditorium. That's how close the disorder of the natural world came to finishing us off entirely.
And we survived. And then we started building. Each innovation was another layer of insulation between ourselves and the forces that had nearly ended us. Each one pushed the disorder of the external world back a little further. Made things a little more predictable. A little more survivable. If you compress the entire technological history of our species into a single idea, it's this: technology is a means of resisting external disorder.
And at some point, the project escalated beyond survival. Beyond comfort, even. We’ve made the natural world conform to us. The novelist Jonathan Franzen distills this with poetry and precision:
"..the ultimate goal of technology.. is to replace a natural world that's indifferent to our wishes—a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts; a world of resistance—with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self."
We've come a long way in the last 100,000 years, from the days of being huddled in a cave, completely at the mercy of our surroundings. Now look around. You wake up in a climate-controlled room at a time chosen by the alarm on your phone. You eat food grown on another continent. If you're bored, a universe of entertainment is in your pocket. For the fortunate among us, the natural world barely registers as a force at all. We have insulated ourselves from nearly every source of external disorder that once threatened us.
The friction of natural disorder has been so thoroughly engineered away that the boundary between what we want and what we get all but disappears.
All but one.
Human Nature Meets Modern Longevity Science
There is one domain where disorder remains completely, stubbornly sovereign. Like the fox in the forest, we fall apart. After decades of resisting its pull, we all succumb, ultimately, to entropy. Death is the last frontier of disorder. The one domain we haven't been able to engineer our way out of. The one place where the second law of thermodynamics still has the final, undisputed word.
Until, perhaps, now.
This brings us back to Bryan Johnson and modern longevity science.
Johnson monitors his biomarkers with the kind of precision that would make most research labs look casual. He has received blood plasma from his teenage son. He counts his nocturnal erections. He tracks, measures, and optimizes virtually every function of his body, and broadcasts the results to millions.
He has become the most visible face of the modern longevity movement, and people have not been kind about it. He's been called a narcissist, a crackpot, a tech billionaire who can't accept his own mortality. And you can see why. In isolation, stripped of context, some of it looks genuinely alien. It can seem like the behavior of someone who has lost touch with what it means to be an actual human being.
On the one hand, his actions seem completely alien and utterly unrelatable. Who amongst us has ever thought to inject ourselves with a relative's plasma? To rave with drugs or alcohol at 11am, or to take daily supplements in the hundreds?
On the other hand, however, when we view this through the very long arc of human technology, we can see something very familiar. What you're looking at is a man doing, with complete and total literalness, what our species has been doing since the very beginning: Resisting disorder.
Longevity science is the most direct confrontation our species has ever mounted against nature, waging a war against the second law of thermodynamics itself. Every previous technology fought disorder at one remove, managing the environment so the body could persist a little longer within it. Longevity science skips the intermediary and goes after entropy at its source: the cell, the gene, the peptide. It confronts biophysics itself.
Whether he'll succeed is an open question. Only time will tell whether we can overcome entropy in any kind of enduring sense. The desire to try, though, is not some modern aberration. It's not a product of Silicon Valley, and it's not simply a symptom of too much money. It is the defining yearning of our species.
The yearning that built every fire, every shelter, every technology that has ever kept a human being alive and separate from everything else.
References for The Psychology of The Law of Reverse Effort
Couch, J. (May, 2011) Oh the Places You’ll Go: Jonathan Franzen at Kenyon, The New Yorker
Schrödinger, E. (1992). What is life?: With mind and matter and autobiographical sketches. Cambridge university press.
