Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
"What are you drinking?", I ask my girlfriend. She is shaking powder and water in a shaker. As the powder slowly dissolves, the liquid turns a toxic pink. "That's the new longevity mix by Bryan Johnson." Ah, the new longevity mix by Bryan Johnson, I think.
Anyone who does not spend half the day doomscrolling has probably never heard of Bryan Johnson. With his “Project Blueprint”, the 48-year-old technology entrepreneur has launched a multi-million-dollar experiment with the goal of not dying. Johnson is trying to bring his biological age back to that of an 18-year-old and to reach the so-called Longevity Escape Velocity, that historic point at which medical progress advances faster than the human aging process.
The fitting motto is accordingly simple: Don’t Die. One of humanity’s oldest dreams is restaged here as an n=1 experiment. More than a hundred biomarkers are monitored, more than a hundred supplements taken daily, and millions invested. The results are documented and by now even marketed to us (still) mortals. Everyone can thus do a little work on their own immortality.
Progress Fatigue
Much is said today about the absence of progress: about the darkening of the horizon of the future, the loss of political utopias, and the exhaustion of grand social narratives. The diagnosis seems familiar: we have lost the future. Instead of striving toward a better world, we settle into an extended present or turn our gaze nostalgically back to a supposedly happier past.
And yet it is remarkable what many of today’s fantasies of progress are directed at. Progress has by no means disappeared, even if precisely that is often claimed today. It has, however, changed its addressee.
For Johnson’s project is not conceived collectively but primarily individually. The point is neither to make humanity smarter, more creative, or politically more mature, nor to enable new forms of living together. No longer is society meant to improve, but the individual body. Humanity is not meant to advance; the individual is meant to live longer, become more productive, and age in better health.
The actual object of progress is not the human being as a species, as it was for the Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century, but the single individual. Precisely here the new longevity cult differs from earlier conceptions of progress. The great progress projects of the past understood progress as something collective and egalitarian. They aimed to expand the capacities and room for action of humanity as a whole, and thereby led to a stronger symmetrization of social opportunities. Today the gaze turns increasingly toward the self. Humanity is not meant to advance; one’s own body is meant to stay capable for longer. This shift concerns not only the goal of progress but also the image of the human being that underlies it.
From the Image of Man to the Optimization of Man
Perhaps this shift can be grasped more precisely with Peter Sloterdijk. In his essay “Rules for the Human Park”, he describes humanism as a historical project of forming human beings. Through books, education, and cultural practices, the human being was to be raised and cultivated. Progress here meant not primarily technical improvement but self-formation. This is exactly why Sloterdijk is relevant here. For when the classical humanist institutions lose significance, the desire to improve the human being by no means disappears. It merely changes its form.
Where schools, universities, and political projects once were meant to form the human being, sleep trackers, blood tests, supplements, and genetic promises of the future now take their place. The question “How do we educate the human being?” is replaced by the question: “How do we optimize the organism?”
The longevity cult then appears not as a fringe phenomenon but as the expression of a deeper shift. The anthropotechnics of modernity have shifted their object. Progress is increasingly conceived in technological-biological terms. The human park has lost its pedagogical personnel and relies solely on physical conditioning.
What matters here is not that people want to improve themselves. They always did. What matters is that the horizon of improvement is shrinking. The human being is no longer meant to become freer, more capable of judgment, or more solidary, but more measurable, more efficient, and longer-lived. A remarkable shift takes place: the question of how we as human beings can live together and judge better gives way to the question of how we optimize our bodies, increase our performance, and extend our biological lifespan. The classical idea of self-formation – the work on character, on judgment, and on understanding the world – loses significance against a logic of self-optimization. No longer is the unfolding of the personality at the center, but its measurement; no longer the search for wisdom, but the maximization of efficiency; no longer the question of the good life, but of a life as efficient and healthy as possible.
This does not mean that physical health or fitness should be held in low regard. Not at all. We know how important they are for leading a good and flourishing life. What is new is the cultural hierarchy: what once counted as a precondition for a flourishing life increasingly becomes its actual goal. The improvement of the body takes the place of the perfection of the human being.
The Second Nature
Bruno Latour pointed out again and again that modernity directs its greatest creative energy at the transformation of nature. Diseases are fought, genes decoded, bodies optimized. The material world appears as something that can be changed further and further with enough knowledge and technology.
The social world, by contrast, often appears strikingly immobile. Institutions, property relations, or social inequalities often seem like laws of nature: hard to imagine otherwise, barely changeable. It is easier to imagine a future without aging than a society without precarious work or secured borders. Mark Fisher’s thesis on the unimaginable end of capitalism sends its regards.
The history of modernity can therefore also be told as the history of a peculiar imbalance. The greater our technical power to shape becomes, the more modest our political imagination often seems to be. We can analyze the aging process at the molecular level and may soon be able to influence it deliberately. At the same time, we find it strikingly hard to conceive of social conditions under which people could age in equal health at all.
Precisely for this reason the longevity hype seems so symptomatic. The future is no longer imagined primarily as a collective project of social improvement, but as the biotechnological optimization of the individual body. Progress withdraws from society and concentrates on the organism.
Who Gets the Extra Years?
Classical modernity almost always tied progress to an equalization of social conditions of life. Vaccinations, electricity, education, or social security systems counted as progress because they became accessible to ever more people. Here it truly makes sense to speak of a trickle-down: refrigerator, television, car, a trip to Italy.
The new biotechnological progress, by contrast, could unfold an opposite dynamic (for a counterposition see here). The question moves up: who will live longer? At the very moment when the nature of aging becomes technically assailable, the social conditions of aging appear remarkably unchangeable. While enormous resources are spent on gaining a few additional years of life, the question of why life expectancy is so unequally distributed in the first place remains largely unanswered.
Science fiction, of course, played this question through long ago. In the series Altered Carbon, minds can be stored digitally and transferred into new bodies. Immortality actually exists there, though only for those who can pay for it. In biblical fashion, these super-rich are called Methuselahs. The future does not remove inequality: it prolongs it.
The future appears here not as the overcoming of social contradictions but as their sharpening. This already shows most clearly in the United States today. Affluent groups live ever longer and healthier lives, while poverty, disease, and so-called “Deaths of Despair” lower the life expectancy of other groups.
A Sip of Progress
An old question of progress thus poses itself anew: not only what is technically possible, but who benefits from these possibilities. The history of modernity is, after all, not only the history of ever new inventions but also the history of their distribution. Electricity, education, medical care, or digital communication once counted as progress. What was decisive, however, was never their existence alone, but who had access to them.
Perhaps the actual shift in our concept of progress shows itself right here. For a long time, progress was tied to collective hopes: more freedom, more education, more political participation. Today it retreats ever more often into private space. One no longer dreams of a better world, but of a better sleep score.
That is by no means irrational. Who would not like to live healthier, fitter, or longer? And yet a strange unease remains. For the more energy is spent on perfecting the individual body, the less self-evident becomes the idea that the social conditions under which people live, age, and die can be changed as well.
And then I am sitting next to my girlfriend again, shaking her toxic-pink drink. “Do you want to try some?”, she asks. I hesitate. On principle, I would have to decline. Out of critique. Because of Adorno. Then I take a sip. Not because I believe it will get me to Longevity Escape Velocity. But because the wish to live a little healthier, a little fitter, a little longer is one you can never quite escape. It tastes artificial. But not bad. And for a brief moment I ask myself: did I just take part in human progress?
