Published April 2, 2026 09:12AM<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Somewhere between scheduling my first prenatal appointment and Googling the cost of term life insurance, I realized I had become a person who thinks about their longevity. I\u2019m pregnant with my first child and approaching 40. I\u2019ve done the math. I\u2019ll be close to 60 when she is halfway through college. I\u2019ve started doing things I previously considered optional, like tracking my vitamin intake on my phone, starting my mornings with hot water and lemon, and searching for longevity workouts. As existential crises go, mine is not exactly original\u2014humans\u00a0have been avoiding death since the dawn of time.<\/p>\n
The oldest story ever written down<\/a>, The Epic of Gilgamesh, <\/em>after all, is about someone who doesn\u2019t want to die. In ancient Mesopotamia, Gilgamesh, the King of Uruk (now Warka, a city in Iraq), traveled across land and sea in search of a magical plant that could restore youth. He found it, but a snake ate it one night while he slept.<\/p>\n The ancient Greeks, namely the physician Hippocrates and his followers, turned to the humoral theory to outrun death. The theory posits that the body was governed by four fluids<\/a>: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Keeping them in balance through diet and lifestyle, bloodletting, purposeful vomiting, and enemas,<\/a> was the key to a longer, healthier life, though life expectancy during this era was between 20 and 35.<\/p>\n Fast forward to 1900, human life expectancy sat at 47.3 years<\/a>. By 1950, it had climbed to 68.2, and, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention<\/a>, it jumped to 79 in 2024. There are a few reasons behind these increases in longevity, including clean water, flushing toilets, vaccines, advising people to wash their hands, and emulating the habits of people who seemed to live to 100 in so-called longevity hotspots, places known as Blue Zones.<\/p>\n A 1996 study, the \u201cDanish Twin Study<\/a>,\u201d confirmed that genetics accounts for only about 20 percent of how long we live. The rest comes down to how we eat, where we live, and who we surround ourselves with. That\u2019s reassuring, as those lifestyle factors are largely controllable.<\/p>\n Since we have been afraid of dying since we understood that we would, we\u2019ve leaned into managing and optimizing those factors\u2014hard<\/em>. Right now, that fear has facilitated the growth of the biohacking and longevity industry, which is currently valued at a staggering $30 billion<\/a>.<\/p>\n This innate fear of death is so strong that it has spawned a number of gurus and scientists who suggest that dying is optional. A Harvard University geneticist argues that\u00a0aging is a disease we can treat<\/a>, and there\u2019s at least one man in California who tracks his nighttime erections as a health metric. Whether any of it works is one question, and what our quest for longevity says about us is another, better one.<\/p>\n In the early 2000s, National Geographic Explorer and journalist Dan Buettner<\/a> and a team of researchers went looking for places on earth where people not only routinely lived past 100 but were in good health. They found five: Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Icaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California. They drew circles around them on a map with a blue marker and called them Blue Zones. Those who reached centenarian status were living about seven to ten years longer<\/a> than most Americans.<\/p>\n The habits Buettner\u2019s team identified were not complicated: move your body every day, eat mostly plants, pay attention to your food consumption (Okinawans suggest eating slowly until you\u2019re satiated rather than stuffed), identify your life\u2019s purpose, and build lifelong connections. It\u2019s important to note that, despite Buettner\u2019s discoveries, other research suggests<\/a> that the accuracy of his data may be skewed, as counting centenarians is difficult due to inconsistent birth record-keeping.<\/p>\n Though the above longevity advice still holds, it wasn\u2019t going to satisfy a culture that prefers its solutions optimized, quantified, and delivered by someone highly (and supposedly) credible\u2014which is exactly what came next.<\/p>\n In 2019, Harvard geneticist David Sinclair<\/a> published Lifespan: Why We Age\u2014and Why We Don\u2019t Have To<\/i><\/a>, arguing that aging is not random biological decay but a disease that could be treated and potentially reversed.<\/p>\n His central claim is easier to understand through his own analogy<\/a>: your cells are like a compact disc, all the information encoded and intact. As you age, the disc gets scratched and skips. The signals that tell each cell which genes to activate get corrupted<\/a>, and the cell loses its identity. Sinclair\u2019s argument is that a backup copy of those instructions exists inside every cell and that science may eventually be able to use it to basically reboot someone\u2019s biological system.<\/p>\n Sinclair is open about his supplement use in his \u201canti-aging protocol<\/a>.\u201d He takes nicotinamide mononucleotide for DNA repair<\/a>, fish oil to reduce inflammation, resveratrol<\/a> (every morning with a cup of coconut yogurt) to boost heart health and memory, and metformin, a decades-old diabetes drug he takes because he has a family history of the disease (research also posits that the drug could slow cancer and Alzheimer\u2019s). For readers around the globe, that list functioned like a prescription.<\/p>\n In 2022, scientist Charles Brenner reviewed Sinclair\u2019s book in a paper<\/a> titled \u201cA Science-Based Review of the World\u2019s Best-Selling Book on Aging.\u201d Long story short, Brenner claims<\/a> that Sinclair\u2019s book contains several misinformed claims that could be harmful to the general public. But also, both Sinclair and Brenner are associated with two different companies that produce longevity supplements\u2014hinting at competing interests. So take that information as you wish.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just scientists; tech moguls have also joined the longevity chat. No one has taken the premise further, or stranger, than software developer Bryan Johnson. He formulated and follows a strict longevity protocol called \u201cDon\u2019t Die<\/a>\u201d and founded Project Blueprint<\/a>, a longevity supplement company. He does not drink alcohol. He does not eat after 12 P.M. and stops drinking fluids at 4 P.M., and he is in bed by 8:30 P.M. He takes about 60 supplements daily, submits to full-body MRIs, wears a device that tracks his nighttime erections (a metric he uses to gauge heart health), and employs a team of more than 30 doctors to measure, test, and optimize every organ in his body. He spends over $2 million a year<\/a> doing this. His goal: reach the biological age of an 18-year-old. He is 48.<\/p>\n Not everyone is going about it the same way. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (the company that created ChatGPT), has invested $180 million of his own money<\/a> in Retro Biosciences, a startup whose stated goal is to add ten healthy years to the human lifespan through processes such as cellular therapy, which replaces damaged cells with healthy ones.\u00a0Where Johnson is his own experiment, Altman is funding someone else\u2019s.<\/p>\n Jeff Bezos has backed Altos Labs<\/a>, a cellular rejuvenation startup. Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who once said, \u201cDeath has never made any sense to me,\u201d has directed millions toward anti-aging research. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, has done the same and has even signed up to have his body frozen after he dies so that he can potentially be brought back to life one day in a process called cryonics<\/a>. While he says he\u00a0doesn\u2019t think it\u2019ll work, he believes it\u2019s something he should try.<\/p>\n Tech entrepreneurs pursuing longevity, according to Venki Ramakrishnan<\/a>, a Nobel laureate, chemist, and author of Why We Die<\/i><\/a>, became successful very young and got used to the idea that they can do anything.<\/p>\n \u201cBut they\u2019re only used to software,\u201d he told me. \u201cBiological research takes time, and it\u2019s complicated. You can\u2019t change just one thing, because it affects a lot of other things.\u201d His read on people like Johnson is not unkind, but precise. \u201cThey can\u2019t buy youth,\u201d he says. \u201cBut they can buy research.\u201d<\/p>\n I agree with him. The longevity industry has acquired a very specific type of believer: people who have already solved every other problem money can solve.<\/p>\n Ramakrishnan\u2019s bigger question isn\u2019t whether any of this works. It\u2019s whether we\u2019ve thought carefully enough about what we\u2019re trying to preserve. When I asked him why we spend so much time and money trying to outrun death, he didn\u2019t hesitate. \u201cWe don\u2019t like the idea of not existing,\u201d he says. \u201cI think that\u2019s the real thing. We don\u2019t want to suffer in the act of dying, and we don\u2019t want to not exist. Because this is all we know.\u201d Living forever, he says, remains science fiction. Our natural biological ceiling appears to be around 120 years<\/a>. But improving the years you spend genuinely well is the part most people can agree on.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a moment in Gilgamesh\u2019s journey that\u2019s worth noting. Before the king crosses the Waters of Death, an innkeeper named Siduri tries to stop him from pursuing that magical plant, insisting that his quest is born out of vanity and encourages him to simply enjoy the experience of being alive. Gilgamesh ignores her, crosses anyway, loses the plant to a snake, and returns home with nothing except the knowledge that he will inevitably die. The oldest story we have about the search for longer life also contains, buried in the middle, an argument against making that search your whole<\/i> life.<\/p>\n I started writing this story thinking I\u2019d find the answer to a practical question: What longevity methods actually work? I\u2019m leaving it less interested in the answer and more interested in why I was asking. The honest answer is that I care about longevity more than I ever have, not because of the supplements or the science, but because there is now a person on the way who will need me to show up for a very long time. Having a daughter didn\u2019t make me want to live forever. It makes me want to be present for the time I have. Those turn out to be very different goals. Siduri knew which one mattered. It just took me a while to get it.<\/p>\n Want more\u00a0Outside<\/em>\u00a0health stories?\u00a0Sign up for the Bodywork newsletter<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/div>\nWhat We Can Learn From the People Who Reach 100<\/h2>\n
The Scientists Who Believe Aging Is a Treatable Disease<\/h2>\n
The Tech Billionaires Chasing Immortality<\/h2>\n
Our Desire Is Simple: We Really Don\u2019t Want to Die<\/h2>\n