Bryan Johnson
@bryan_johnson
“bro so busy trying to not die he forgot how to live”
I’m told hundreds of times a day that I need to live a little. That I’m so busy trying to not die that I’ve forgotten to live.
The psychology powering this sentiment is the most interesting phenomenon happening on earth right now.
Every individual constructs a persona, a character to present to the world. It’s a compromise between what they are and what society demands of them. In current culture, its characteristics are the appearance of living fully, productivity, busyness, enjoying life, pleasure, spontaneity, and being unafraid.
It’s carefully constructed to shield the wearer from the terror of their inevitable death. To make this irreconcilable pain invisible to themselves, they dissolve themselves into the group and enact its rituals.
Sleep under your desk, have a drink, pull the vape, grab a fast food meal, gamble a little, stay up late to watch your favorite show, splurge some, chill out…live a little.
They are living.
At the cellular level, metabolic debt accumulates and repair mechanisms are traded for short term dopamine spikes.
But it’s done together, so it’s normal, and even desirable. No one will die alone if everyone is dying together and all agree to call it living.
The group moves in unison, comforted by the rhythmic movement. When someone declines to participate in their shared rituals, they experience it as an insult and a threat that must be attacked, discredited and mocked.
Subconsciously, they know their rituals are performative and masking something that must be suppressed. But it’s been buried so deep that it’s only a faint whisper, easily silenced by a swipe at the offender.
But then the whisper becomes a quiet voice and asks if they’re afraid. They attack the mirror because they cannot bear the reflection.
In pre-modern societies, death rituals were explicit and honest. They held a funeral, kept a mourning period, washed the body, prayed for the dead and observed burial customs. They faced death and created community rituals to metabolize the grief, fear and loss.
We no longer have death rituals. As explicit customs eroded, consumer culture monetized the void, driving our existential anxieties underground. Thanksgiving debauchery, New Year drunkenness, Halloween indulgence, the wedding open bar, the treat, splurge and cheat day. They are commercialized, camouflaged celebrations staged as group rituals to dull the shared death anxiety.
We previously faced the fear and now we gluttonize on it. Group rituals that name and face death can metabolize it. Rituals that hide from it accumulate the debt and are owned by their creditors.
When I abstain from societal death rituals, I break the spell. The anesthesia only works if everyone does it together. One abstainer reveals to the room that they are drunk.
This is the source of the anger. It’s not my decisions. It’s their reflection in the mirror.
Predictably, the collective seeks to pathologize my non-conformity. They will claim that systematic discipline is just another defense mechanism; a frantic obsession with control to escape the same existential dread. They will argue that preserving the biological vessel is a sterile exercise, a perpetual preparation for a game I refuse to play.
They misunderstand the objective.
Control is maintaining the status quo. I seek an evolutionary jailbreak. Natural selection stops maintaining us once reproduction is done. Accepting that automated slide into decrepitude isn't ‘living’, it’s passive submission to a blind algorithmic process.
I am not opposed to pleasure. I am opposed to the counterfeit. I say no to the dying ritual so that I can say yes to the full offering of consciousness: a vibrant physiological state, cognitive clarity, and deep emotional coloring. Vitality is mastery, not abuse dressed up as freedom.
The reward is a clearer lens, the ability to see what is currently invisible. High resolution consciousness allows for depths of thought, creativity, and experiential variance that are far harder to reach when the brain and body are chronically inflamed, degraded, and sedated. I want to expand the boundaries of the human experience.
On offer in this new future are things that no human has ever tasted before. I’m not deprived by the lack of participating in the rituals, I’m pointing to a joy that the human mind has not yet imagined.
I don’t intend to live a little. I intend to live more than any human who has yet lived and invite you to join me.
