Why Are The Worst People Alive Obsessed With Living Forever?

‘Genius can hit a target no one else can see,’ said Bryan Johnson, the one-time CEO of Braintree who has reinvented himself in recent years as a guinea pig for hyper-wellness and the search for immortality. In the Netflix documentary Don’t Die, Johnson sort-of opens up about his intense and parodic regime of supplements, transfusions and nightly erection data tracking that he hopes will allow him to stave off death’s inevitable claim. It’s a depressing viewing experience, both ridiculous and cynical to the extreme, as Johnson packages his quackery as a sure-fire bet that is conveniently for sale to the masses. It seems to be a pretty miserable life, one of unforgiving routine that is devoid of the spontaneous pleasures that make our days special. And it’s also an increasing aspirational norm for a specific kind of person with too much money and grand ideas of their own importance.

Johnson is, of course, not the first tech bro hunting for immortality. That’s a trope from sci-fi and dystopian fiction that well predates his clammy endeavours. Yet it does feel like, over the past decade or so, more evil rich men than ever are trying to create the torment nexus with the explicit aim of staving off death. Peter Thiel has heavily invested in similar research. Jack Dorsey’s shaman-esque diet and wellness routine is a blend of woo-woo quackery and anti-death rhetoric. That one dead financier was constantly hobnobbing with scientists and investing in works that were designed to prolong his life and bloodline. Elon Musk keeps having babies with an array of women who are slowly turning against him. Eugenics never really went away, but the pronatalist fascism of 2026 has the undeniable sheen of a Silicon Valley startup.

In many ways, these men are no different from any number of raw milk-chugging influencers with Amazon affiliate links to promote. It’s all a big sale and everything can be commodified for profit. It also reminds me of Gwyneth Paltrow and her brand of aggravating rich woman wellness. GOOP is built on the idea that the wealthy are somehow genetically superior to us plebs, that their stresses and issues are too special to be treated with modern medicine or something you can buy over the counter. No, it needs to be dealt with through a macrobiotic diet, vaginal eggs, and sex dust. Bryan Johnson is a rather familiar figure: a divorced dad with depression who left the Mormon church and had a midlife crisis. Rather than go to therapy or do some charity work, he embraced the notion that his issues were too unique for reality. He couldn’t just deal with them: he had to become a leader in optimising humanity for a brand new age. Cue the blood transfusions from his own kid.

Johnson’s flop-sweat fears are easier to mock than what his Silicon Valley contemporaries are investing in. Eugenics is back and it has a shiny new makeover. America first embraced eugenics in the 1920s, and they were so gung-ho about it that it became the trend of the moment. Philanthropists invested in it. Groups were set up in various states to advocate for legal changes. The Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell, still one of the most abhorrent mistakes made in US legal history, has never fully been struck down, and sterilizing of ‘feeble-minded’ people against their will happened all the time. The definition of ‘feeble-minded’, by the way, was vague and mostly used to sh*t on poor people, ‘hysterical’ women, and people of colour. That’s not changed over the decades. We’re not at the stage where Elon and company are actively advocating for forced sterilisation - yet - but their desperate breeding kink is fulfilling the same philosophies of a century prior: that the ‘worthy’ must ‘outbreed’ the competition. Why not add ‘live longer than them’ to the equation too? They’re already doing that by having better access to food, healthcare, and homes not polluted by data centres. Just rub it in a little more by pretending your daily dozes of supplements will add another year to your lifespan.

As an atheist, I’ve thought a lot about my relationship with death. I’ve had family members pass away over the past couple of years and the finality of it all has elicited some mixed feelings. It’s terrifying to believe that there’s nothing beyond this life, and I have often wondered if that’s a motivating factor for many of these tech bros. The desperation to live forever is not exclusively the hunger of the non-believer, but it makes more sense to actively hunt for it if you don’t think an all-loving deity is waiting for you once the lights go out (well, that or meeting your maker is a much scarier prospect when you’re actively evil, but I digress.)

This thought has been complicated by the tech bro world’s weird embrace of evangelism and the political right, which proudly hijacks faith for its own misdeeds. Elon Musk now claims he’s super religious because it’s convenient to do so, but his ilk still shill for a speculative hunt for the impossible that rejects the tenets of belief. Consistency was never his bag, but it might also clarify the simpler truth of the matter: that these people are dumb and scared and arrogant enough to assert that they think they have the right to not die. Eugenics has long been promoted by the stupidest people alive because they believe their race and gender gives them the power to stand at the top of the mountain and make all the rules. Alas, said stupid people have never been more eagerly and uncritically amplified than they are now.

Eugenics is explicitly dehumanising, and the live-forever war is equally so. Musk isn’t interested in raising the kids he’s donated his sperm for, and he rejects those that dare to have their own ideas and personalities. Malcolm and Simone Collins, the smarmy face of pronatalism, admit that they strike their kids in the face as punishment. Johnson views his own son as a blood bank and aspirational body type to fetishise. The insistence that genetics and IQ are the mightiest factors in raising human beings is a dystopian hell-dream designed to devalue empathy and community. No wonder tech bros love it so much.

I’m not sure how we escape this nightmarish situation beyond legislating billionaires out of existence (but hey, wouldn’t that solve a lot of our problems?) The revival of race science and its repackaging as aspirational content for the masses has done so much harm in a scarily short amount of time. And I can’t help but fear it’s going to get worse before it gets better. The Trump administration is pretty clear in its desire to force women to go back in the kitchen and become pliant breeding machines for the cause of creating more white babies.

A bunch of weak-chinned asocial creeps with bad lipo and fake hairlines are preaching about good genetic makeup while they fight against that most human of qualities, but because they’re all so obscenely wealthy, their vanity projects end up shaping so much of our own lives. The only solace it seems we can take in this nightmare is the knowledge that they all will, indeed, die. Just like the rest of us.