Lame Immortality

Demonic Habits.

Bryan Johnson and his son, Talmadge.

A Freudian slip is when you say one thing, but mean your mother.

So the joke goes.

Maybe it’s a product of Freud’s time period that he assumed any revelation was a verbal slippage of Victorian-style sexual repression - a life-long Freudian slip of his own.

Instead of moral repressiveness, our era is more like one of autistic literal-mindedness, such that people tend to reveal their personal mythologies not by verbal slippage, but by intentional and overt symbolism that they consciously believe to be meaningless or “just a joke.”

I watched a documentary on Bryan Johnson, that tech millionaire who is famously trying to live forever by doing million-dollar health protocols and, of course, injecting the blood of his 17-year-old son. In the film, they give his origin story and, I’m not kidding, he says something to the effect of, “… I was ready to make a deal with the devil so I would never have to think again. I believe consciousness is evil, so I wanted to create a system that replaces it.” I’m not going to subject myself to the film again to get the lines verbatim, but this conveys the meaning. The filmmakers don’t take this to be a horrific and embarrassing personal confession, but just an amusing if not a bit dramatic figure of speech.

Step one of the deal with the devil: abandon his overly restrictive family and church. His father notes that Bryan had absolutely no intellectual qualms with his religion - his body simply rejected the institution like a mismatched kidney. He would come home on Sundays incapacitated, lying in bed for hours, unable to pay attention to or help his wife or kids. Bryan reflects about how much he hated his consciousness, how he wanted to turn it all over to a perfect set of rules and habits. That’s when he “saw” it. Blueprint.

I suppose it impresses people when a visionary founder describes any sort of mystical experience as an origin story, nevermind if he explicitly tells you it’s the devil, he hates life itself, and wants to melt his body into data - an immortal bureaucracy - so that no true “life” is ever lived again. As long as he’s helping us productivity-maxx, that’s fine.

Our era is a funny one. Nobody is morally repressed anymore, but in order to do away with that repression, we jettisoned the very idea that actions, especially around sex and the body, mean anything beyond material explanations. To the point where naked photos of yourself with your son and a vial of his blood in your hand is socially acceptable, but noticing that the images are obviously reminiscent of some ancient evil¹ is unacceptable. This is made even more bizarre by the fact that someone in Johnson’s team must know what archetypes they are evoking, because they are intentionally invoking them to spark disgust and outrage, making him even more famous. This is more like a Freudian Russian nesting doll.

Now, I think if you were to ask Bryan about any of this, he would probably make a lighthearted and charming joke. Predictably, he has incredible psychological defense mechanisms in humor, which you would need if you were to step so far into taboo in the public eye. Besides it all, I don’t think “evil” is his intention on any sort of conscious level. That doesn’t need to be the case. All the better if not, in fact.

It’s hard for me to even blame Johnson. This is the inevitable end-game of the self-help/new age genre - the plucky mid-atlantic speech about the power of positive thinking, Tony Robbins calling you “brother” in a conference hall, or a Salesforce improv “team building” exercise. These have incarnated in this one man; fully matter, fully habit.

Most people sit through those powerpoints and laugh at the jokes and write down a list of professional goals on yellow notepad and promise themselves they are really going to get rich or die trying, but then they go home and they are forced to love their stupid husband or take care of a sick kid or rake leaves and all that reality snaps them out of their fantasy. And thank God. They only occasionally believe what the motivational speakers say and thus are saved from the worst of the pit by what they would probably call laziness. I would call it a love of life and a reflexive avoidance of what kills life.

Bryan Johnson, however, himself certainly soaked in this very same quasi-religious milieu of Silicon Valley, laid in his bed and festered on the pristine lifeless life of the positive thinkers. He stewed in that resentment more seriously than anyone, until he was ready to make a “deal with the devil.” Just a figure of speech, of course - one he is acting out religiously.

People make the following knee-jerk objection to Bryan: “I would rather eat a hamburger every now and then than live to be 200.” It’s not a bad rebuttal, but it’s not exactly right. All Johnson has to say (and he does) is “I’d get more pleasure from my health-filled life than any hamburger could give me.” The best way to put words to our intuition that his lifestyle is repulsive is not pleasure. It’s another concept that the hamburger is a low-resolution fill-in for: Aliveness!

“Positive thinking” and “habit building” will make you rich and happy, actually, if you can find the discipline. The reason you can’t find it, though, is not because you’re a badly programmed monkey who doesn’t know what’s good for you. It’s because “rich” and “happy” are not good enough reasons to live. What’s left of your aliveness revolts, unconsciously makes you “lazy.” If you manage to abandon yourself completely and sacrifice everything to the power of habit, though, you will become the walking dead because you’re missing the only thing that matters: Aliveness!

Aliveness or “consciousness” as Johnson calls it, is the ability to suffer normal people and mundane life and the knowledge of your eventual death. It is the reason that, for example, my friend Mr. George can bake a pie for my wife and I - he took care of his disabled wife for 25 years until she died.

Aliveness is the thing Johnson most hates. Hence, he currently looks like walking death. If a man has the physiognomy of a vampire, it might not just be an incorrect prejudice. Maybe he has actually committed himself to the highest fidelity a person can muster to becoming a human without aliveness. Maybe we can, actually, clock it in the emergent properties of his very being - what they used to call a “soul.” We see a marionette, a habit-stack, the puppet of some ghost he doesn’t understand (one he himself jokingly named “the devil”) because he has given up his ghost. And why? Because he hated reality - his home. Who knows how that happened. But it was probably similar to how it usually goes: neglecting the painfulness of the inner transformations toward higher emotional wisdom dirty-ol’ reality demands.

Making a habit out of avoiding reality is referred to as “addiction.” Any substance or behavior used to avoid immersion in reality creates a vicious cycle: reality gets worse by its neglect and requires more and more of the chosen escape, whether it’s alcohol, self-help, or dreams of bodily immortality. In psychology, it is well known that this cycle is nearly impossible to cure, except after one key event: rock bottom.

“Rock bottom” happens when you have a sort of psychological avalanche where the highest non-lethal dose can’t keep reality away anymore. For this reason among many, I feel sorry for Johnson. He has millions of dollars, fame, and the belief that he will live forever as good reasons to avoid hitting rock bottom for a good long time. I mourn for him when the debt finally comes due - and it always does. Reality won’t be dominated; it demands us to dance.

“Aliveness” is that quality of always being in negotiation with the demands of reality. When you can’t dance, the first moves are humiliating. But once you get a little wise, dancing makes everything else worthwhile. “Positive thinkers” can’t dance because you need to be able to cry as well as laugh. What “The Power of Habit” and “The Power of Now” have in common is they never bother to ask the question “Habits to what end?” or “Why do I avoid the present?” because those questions would unearth painful answers, and we can’t be negative, can we?

Mid-century American optimism and quasi-Eastern “mindfulness” philosophies have come together in an unholy union to create what we might call “corporate self-help.” This is the church of the go-getter who’s going to “crush it” but never dwells too long on the failures of the past because the past isn’t the present and the present is, like, the only thing that actually exists, if you think about it?

I was never cut out for that sort of thing. I like sadness, which I think is the most beautiful emotion. The heroic acts of ordinary people make me cry. Some people are cursed with an aptitude for intense disembodiment. I wasn’t, thank God.

The very peak of the corporate self-help pyramid is not a demigod or an ubermensch, but a sort of digital vampire. They stalk the shadows, cursed, and try to curse us back by selling us phones and shit, which suck out our blood and guts. We, unable to fully sell our souls to the devil because of the “weakness” of caring for those whom we love, are often relegated to being bloodbags, kept just alive enough to remain juicy for our predators. This is the horrible fate of those who only half-buy the vampiric world-view - TV addicts and doomscrollers. Lukewarm is an increasingly bad spot to be these days. Damn these vampires, deep in our arteries.

Clearly, there are things that are worth dying for, which means we strongly infer there must be some sort of eternity, at least one a little larger than our own lifespan. Sacrificing that eternity, whatever it might be, for personal bodily immortality is a cognitive error, plain and simple. It’s like the child who thinks you have ceased to exist because you’ve walked out of the room. If they only could see, they’d stop crying.

The bald rational truth is, it would be better to die this instant, with love for my fate and for life itself in my heart, than live a thousand years in Lame Immortality, fearfully stacking habits against the creeping horror of the truth: we’re all gonna die.

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Saturn-painting-by-Goya