"Don't Die"? What Bryan Johnson Gets Wrong

Bryan Johnson wants to live forever, but that kind of thinking is why life on Earth is at risk of extinction. Here's my humble proposal for the type of "don't die" we should consider instead.

Bryan Johnson, the centimillionaire biohacker, entrepreneur, and investor who spends $2 million each year in a well-documented attempt to maintain the body of an 18-year-old, has become the mascot for a time-tested fantasy among the Silicon Valley set (especially among transhumanists and accelerationists): that death, like any other problem, can be optimized away. With his strict diets, blood transfusions, wearable trackers, and, uh, boner tracking, Johnson’s attempt to cheat death is unambiguous—and in case it managed to escape comprehension, he’s made the phrase “don’t die” his literal mantra. Unsurprisingly, it’s also the name of the Netflix documentary that chronicles his journey.

In these efforts, he’s also tried to brand “don’t die” as a rallying cry, framing his own outsized spending and lifestyle asceticism as beneficence, the upshot of which seems to be that his crusade is, at root, intended for public benefit. As flawed as this kind of god-complex justification always is among those with too much power, it’d be easier to believe that he actually believed this if he weren’t simultaneously building out a whole product line called Blueprint (again, he’s already a centimillionaire, worth nearly half a billion dollars), and if he’d proven himself to be committed to the public good in any other capacity, or even basic human decency.

For no reason whatsover, I’m including the conversation I had with Taryn Southern on the Urgent Futures Podcast:

But leaving aside the conclusions we’re left to draw about Johnson as a person, and the distorted ideas of people with too much money who—for some reason—never want to invest it in ways that would genuinely help people who urgently need it right now: “don’t die” is itself reflective of toxic late capitalist ideology. Watching the horror-show of 2025 continue to unfold, while working on my book manuscript for How to Survive the 21st Century, I felt compelled to use the momentum behind the adage to propose an alternative, more life-affirming framing.

“Don’t Die,” But Better This Time

Johnson’s version of “don’t die” is a mirror of the system that produced him—a world that demands endless growth, endless self-optimization, endless extraction. It’s not about life in any collective sense. It’s about domination over the conditions that make life fragile. It’s the capitalist death drive disguised as vitality.

Under these conditions, death is treated as an inefficiency. Aging is a bug to be fixed. The human body is an investment portfolio that must yield returns ad infinitum. Johnson’s meticulous self-monitoring isn’t all that different from the way corporations monitor quarterly growth or the way algorithms are geared to chase engagement at all costs on social media—all seeking the same asymptote: infinity. But unless I missed news to the contrary, we still live on a finite planet.

“Don’t die” is peak growth imperative, tailored to the individual body. Let’s say that we could hypothetically develop the right cocktail of treatments to achieve immortality; how exactly would that work on our finite planet? Taken to its logical extreme, it’s just another vector through which inequality will flourish, with the ultra-wealthy hoarding ever more of the finite resources available on the only planet we call home (don’t even get me started on the misguided attempts to “colonize” Mars).

To understand why inequality is directly correlated to collapse, check out this episode of Urgent Futures with existential risk researcher and Goliath’s Curse author Luke Kemp:

So if you’ll indulge me, let’s refract “don’t die.” What if it weren’t about hoarding vitality, but nurturing and distributing it—not for the individual body, but the collective survival of life on this planet?

Here’s the hard truth: while centimillionaires and billionaires try to cheat death, the planet itself is dying before our eyes, and fast. Forests are burning, oceans are acidifying, species are vanishing at a rate unseen in millions of years (to mention just one recent example, you may have missed the news that two species of Florida coral reefs have been declared “functionally extinct”).

The biosphere that allows any of us to live—the thin membrane of conditions that cradles all life—is in a state of collapse. Our obsession with individual survival—something we’re conditioned to pursue under the alienating conditions of capitalism—has distracted us from the larger system that makes survival possible. The “environment” isn’t just a nice thing that we should be sad to lose (though it’s that too), it literally sustains us. We cannot live without a healthy “environment.”

To put a fine point to this, I’ll draw your attention to a study published this summer, which holds that we are on-track to heat the planet a staggering 3°C above preindustrial levels by 2050—less than 25 years from this moment. There is no way to sugarcoat this: sustained surface temperatures this high are a literal death sentence for most living things on this planet, including you.

In other words, these researchers believe we only have 25 years to make sure that we create the conditions by which we all—and all future generations of our species and others—can survive. While life has managed to spring back after the five previous mass extinctions, it’s taken millions of years each time, and the proverbial players are all different.

Here’s a bit more on that particular subject with Peter Brannen:

In that case, the right kind of “don’t die” is ecological, not egocentric. It’s about the survival of the conditions for life, not just the extension of one life at all costs. It’s about the air we breathe, the soil we touch, the relationships that sustain us; it’s about realizing that our bodies are not separate from the world that holds them—that the line between “me” and “environment” is a porous, constant exchange of breath, water, matter, and meaning.

This other “don’t die” isn’t glamorous. It won’t land you sponsorship deals, venture capital funding, or a glossy WIRED profile. It asks for humility, perseverance, and day-in-day-out struggle instead of transcendence. Under this view, mortality isn’t failure to be streamlined away, but part of the cycle of renewal—compost, decay, rebirth. Sure, there might come a time in the distant future when we have the capability and wisdom to consider what the right conditions for living forever might be, but for now we have to focus on building systems that will outlive us: communities, ecosystems, networks of care.

Bryan Johnson’s version of “don’t die,” when scaled up to the planetary level, is the exact same logic of capitalist economics: infinite growth. The economy must never die, even if everything else does—even if this pursuit ruins its “host.” When rivers dry up, we desalinate the oceans. When crops fail, we genetically modify them and find new tracts of fresh soil to then desertify. When the climate collapses, we build high-tech bunkers. The system’s refusal to die is killing everything and everyone else.

So the correct “don’t die” is not denial of individual death, but the refusal of collective extinction. It’s a politics of persistence—the long, often unsexy work of maintaining the fragile balance that allows complexity, beauty, and diversity to continue on.

Imagine if we spent as much collective energy ensuring coral reefs don’t go extinct as one millionaire spends ensuring his mitochondria don’t age (or comparing his nighttime boners to his son’s)—or if the algorithms optimizing ad revenue were redirected to regenerate the species and lands we’ve devastated.

The irony is that the more Johnson and his peers chase eternal life, the more they affirm the system that will guarantee our extinction. They are avatars of a world that cannot stop consuming. They’re not achieving immortality, but metastasis, a cancerous ideology that flourishes so successfully it drives the body to its inevitable end. To embrace the better “don’t die” requires letting go of the fantasy of control, and with it, the misguided but persistent myth that the economy is somehow separate from ecology, that everything is interrelated.

There’s a different kind of transcendence available, waiting for us—not upward, into silicon, but outward, into relation. This is something that Indigenous peoples around the world have known for millennia: that you become part of something larger not by conquering it, but by belonging to it; that you find “immortality” not in the endless extension of the self, but in the continuity of life itself, even when you’re no longer individually expressed within it.

Johnson calls his brand “Blueprint,” but what he doesn’t seem to realize is his blueprint is one of individual success that destroys the collective. In a sense, I feel sorry for him—this is such a simple thing to grasp, and would open him up to experience genuine meaning and connection in his life. If I had hundreds of millions of dollars, I would joyfully use it to minimize suffering among humans and our fellow earthlings. I don’t mean this in some hokey faux-altruistic sense: it would be the honor and joy of a lifetime to be able to foster change this way. And I suspect you, dear reader, would do the same. The choice not to do this is indicative of a deeply unhappy, lost person who, in the end, will never know peace—even if they manage to live well past 100. We’ll never have his level of wealth, no, but we already know that living more isn’t worth a whole lot if you don’t actually live well.

So yes, absolutely: don’t die. But not as a call for each of us to individually live forever—for this whole weird-ass miraculous pageant to persist. Scientists believe we live in the most biodiverse epoch this planet has ever known, and our economic systems are rapidly unraveling it. That, to me, is a tragedy. In the face of our impending doom, I join so many before me in embracing “don’t die” not as a personal project, but a planetary one.