From the Epic of Gilgamesh to sixteenth-century alchemists chasing the mythical ‘elixir of life’, and from modern obsessions with intermittent fasting and red light therapy to the longevity secrets of the Blue Zones, humanity’s desire to outrun death has endured through the ages. Ageing has become a slur; longevity an accomplishment. In the twenty-first century, this ancient longing has a new shape: the ‘Don’t Die’ movement.
In a sunny, innocuous neighbourhood in Venice, California, resides the ‘Don’t Die’ movement’s polemic prophet. He rises at 4:30am, eats all of his meals before 11am, swallows 111 pills, dons a red light therapy cap, and even stimulates his penis with shock waves, before a strict 8:30pm lights out – no exceptions. All of this is in the service of one aim: don’t die. More precisely, to let chronological time keep moving while his biological clock stays still.
“From modern obsessions with intermittent fasting and red light therapy to the longevity secrets of the Blue Zones, humanity’s desire to outrun death has endured through the ages”
Bryan Johnson sold Braintree (owner of Venmo) to PayPal in 2013 for a cool $800m, yet describes the following decade as one of overconsumption, vice, and depression. He then asked himself whether he could be happy as he was; the answer was no. Hence, the pivot to “augmentation”. Now “the world’s most measured human”, he is tracked by a team of doctors monitoring everything from cholesterol to telomere length. The spine of his routine is conventional and evidence-based – resistance training, cardio to increase VO2 max, sleep discipline, calorie control – after all, the movement’s goal is to extend healthspan (the years lived in good health) as much as lifespan. At times, though, he has chased the headline-grabbing and scientifically dubious, including human growth hormone and even transfusing plasma from his son. Is it working? While yes, many of his biomarkers have improved, Johnson has at best slowed his ageing process; there is no evidence that he has reversed or eliminated ageing altogether.
Spectacle aside, there have been scientific advances that suggest ageing might, in some respects, be reversible. Beyond the ashwagandha powders, plasma infusions, and cocoa flavanols that Johnson and his followers swear by, the real breakthroughs are happening in laboratories rather than living rooms. In recent years, studies from teams such as Dr. James Kirkland’s at the Mayo Clinic and the British Society for Research on Ageing have illuminated one of the body’s most important culprits in the ageing process: senescent cells.
Senescent cells are cells that have stopped dividing but refuse to die. Instead, they linger in the body, secreting inflammatory molecules — known as the senescence-associated secretory phenotype, or SASP—that gradually poison the surrounding tissue. Over time, these “zombie cells” accumulate and drive the degenerative processes behind nearly every age-related disease: cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, osteoarthritis, diabetes, even some cancers.
“Over time, these “zombie cells” accumulate and drive the degenerative processes behind nearly every age-related disease”
Enter senolytics: a class of drugs designed to find and destroy these malfunctioning cells. In animal studies, senolytics have been shown to eliminate senescent cells, reduce inflammation, and restore tissue’s ability to regenerate. The most studied example is dasatinib, a chemotherapy drug, which—when combined with plant-derived compounds like quercetin or fisetin—has extended lifespan and improved healthspan in mice. These results are promising enough that early-stage human trials are now testing senolytics in patients with diseases such as Alzheimer’s and pulmonary fibrosis.
Another breakthrough came from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Germany, where scientists combined two existing drugs—rapamycin and trametinib—to extend the lifespan of mice by roughly 30 percent. The treated mice not only lived longer but aged better: with fewer tumours, less inflammation, improved heart function, and greater mobility. Importantly, both drugs are already approved for human use in the US and EU for other conditions, making their translation to longevity trials more feasible than purely experimental compounds.
Together, these findings hint that ageing may be more malleable than previously thought — not an immutable decline but a biological program that can, at least in theory, be slowed or partially rewritten. Yet for all the optimism, these breakthroughs remain confined largely to mice and cell cultures. The gulf between extending a rodent’s life in a lab and meaningfully lengthening a human’s remains vast.
“Ageing may be more malleable than previously thought — not an immutable decline but a biological program that can, at least in theory, be slowed or partially rewritten”
But what if, in trying to make the unnatural natural, the ‘Don’t Die’ movement has missed the point? From a biological perspective, death is essential to evolution. Evolutionary biologists Peter Medawar and George C. Williams proposed that ageing evolved precisely because evolution “cares” more about reproduction than indefinite survival. Natural selection acts most strongly on the years before and during reproduction, but evolutionary pressures weaken with age, allowing damage and mutations to build up over time. In that sense, mortality is not a design flaw but a feature: it clears space for new generations, preventing stagnation. Later theories, such as the “disposable soma” hypothesis, refined the idea further–suggesting that organisms invest just enough energy in maintaining their bodies to reproduce successfully, but not to live forever.
Religions have long intuited this balance. In Hinduism, Yama, the god of death, presides not as a villain but as the necessary arbiter of rebirth; death is the mechanism that allows samsara, the cycle of reincarnation, to continue. In Buddhism, impermanence (anicca) is the first mark of existence—without it, attachment would be endless and suffering eternal. Christianity teaches resurrection through death, not in spite of it, and even in secular modernity, our cultural archetypes — from Frankenstein’s monster to Tithonus — warn that eternal life often becomes a form of living death. Across time and culture, humanity has recognised death not as a flaw in the design, but as the mechanism that gives life its shape and meaning.
Psychology mirrors the theology. A 2009 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that participants reminded of their own mortality reported greater gratitude for life, stronger ethical convictions, and deeper social connection. Another, published in Psychological Science in 2012, showed that mortality awareness increased empathy and prosocial behaviour, such as volunteering or helping strangers. Far from paralysing us, the awareness of death appears to clarify priorities and heighten meaning. Behavioural scientists describe this as the scarcity principle: when something is finite, its perceived value rises. The same is true of life.
Extending healthspan is a rational and humane goal. But while the anti-ageing movement treats mortality as a malfunction to be reprogrammed, death is neither a design flaw nor a failure of biology; it is a natural imperative and, perhaps, a psychological one too. In their zeal to defeat mortality, the “Don’t Die” disciples risk erasing the very condition that gives life coherence. Death isn’t life’s opposite but its frame — the boundary that gives joy its urgency, love its depth, and progress its purpose. Without that limit, existence would risk becoming not infinite, but empty. To deny death is to deny the very thing that makes us human.
