The All Too Familiarity With Unholy Territory
He’s very much alive, but he stopped living a long time ago
Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This weekend, we discuss living forever while not actually living at all.
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I, like many others scrolling X this week, stopped short when Bryan Johnson announced he had “cloned” himself as a newborn. The man already famous for an experimental plasma exchange involving his teenage son was now talking about a petri-dish version of himself that could serve as a test subject, a source of young cells, and eventually an organ donor.
His comment section was flooded with warnings of the moral implications of cloning himself and creating a newborn, with some asking who was going to raise the child. But the firestorm was all for naught because, in reality, he was being dramatic. There is no clone. Johnson had his blood drawn, then had cells extracted and treated with Yamanaka factors to reset the cells to an embryonic-like state. “Baby-Bryan,” as he called it, lives in a dish for now. No new human being was brought into existence.
Still, in all fairness, of course these people believed him. He’s objectively weird. But his obsession with never dying and preventing aging at all costs is not a heroic extension of medical advancement. To any normal person, it reeks of mental illness. Some claim he’s autistic, and maybe he is, but this doesn’t excuse his odd behavior. It’s troubling that he sees his body breaking down as an attack, not a blessing.
There is something so beautiful about life being finite. A good life includes coming to terms with decline and death and, in doing so, using every unguaranteed moment to live well. That finitude creates the conditions for urgency, repentance, gratitude, and the proper ordering of love. His scheme is abnormal and morally fraught because it rejects God’s divine structure for human life.
Bryan views aging and death as a design flaw. He truly believes he can stop them from happening.
He’s not the first to wish he could be God.