Checked out Cy Canterel’s TikTok channel? She has a good piece on the super-rich trying to become immortal / live in a bunker after an apocalypse/ start as space colony.
"Why do I avoid the present?” because those questions would unearth painful answers, and we can’t be negative, can we?"
I found myself getting sucked into the whole corporate, positive thinking movement one too may times in my life. I wanted to be rich and this seemed like an easy way to get there. I was an actress after all. I could fake it til I made it. But I am not wired that way. I cannot be jolly all the damn time. I also like to sit in a pensive and meloncholic state, especially if it's raining. I don't like to sit in it too long. I treat it as a sauna - get the impurities out. Then go back to enjoyment of everything. You are right. The whole endeavor is soul-sucking. I've seen so many people go through these programs with immense exuberance only to be met with "ghosts" - whether it be an overdue bill, a broken-down car, a dying mother - and then they completely fall apart. They hadn't acquired the millions yet to "fix" those problems. It's like the stupid prosperity gospel. It's so detrimental and completely unrealistic. "Just believe it into existence!" Um, No. And, if one is a Christian, you believe you WILL live forever. And it's this, little life that you've been given while here on earth that makes all the difference. How well did you use what God gave you for your fellow man and to further His kingdom? We need very little help being our own god. We've proven time and time again we are untrustworthy of God's gifts.
This line made me consider my deep, pervasive melancholy for the human condition, as something beautiful:
"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 Bryan Johnson phenomenon has been troubling me for some time. You’ve put your finger right on it…he’s sacrificed his “Aliveness”…bizarre and sad. We cannot outrun life or death, no matter how many millions get thrown at the task. Not to be too grim, but if this were a novel, he’d get hit by a bus.
No, I’d say that if there are “things worth dying for,” it doesn’t imply immortality, but that it implies causes and people worth giving up what remains of one’s existence to insure that they survive.
(Well, maybe that one wants immortality in the pages of history)
Wonderful essay—telling point after telling point—and you’re taking on one of today’s most powerful temptations and proposing the antidote: aliveness.
One minor point, the wonderful mid-Atlantic accent has mysteriously disappeared, a victim of the bland, demotic, materialist, equalitarian:authoritarian Zeitgeist which Bryan Johnson so repellently exemplifies.
By way of explanation, I’ll quote a learned friend of mine: “there's something fishy about the squashing of the Hollywood Mid-Atlantic accent around the same broad era, and my gut tells me it's related. It was obviously associated with a link to the old world, empire, tradition, etc., and by dominating Hollywood it was glamorous, something to aspire to, etc. It was quite intentionally pushed out in favour of regional and 'General American' accents; I've heard that that was because Americans wanted their own identity and so forth, but I don't entirely buy it. The Mid-Atlantic WAS part of America's identity (it was no more English than it was East Coast American), and was an aspirational accent of rich, successful, powerful, worldly, cultured people. I think it wasn't 'diverse' and egalitarian enough. All voices matter, etc...Don't aspire to connect to your history...Stay in your regional ghettos and eat the slop we feed you, &c &c...That's my tin-foil hat conspiracy theory, for whatever it's worth!”
Wild how we’ve reached a point where a man can literally say he made a deal with the devil to stop feeling and people treat it like quirky branding. Johnson isn’t the problem. He’s just the clearest symptom of a culture that would trade aliveness for control if the price tag looked shiny enough.
You nailed the real issue. It’s not immortality he’s chasing. It’s escape. Escape from feeling, from failure, from the ordinary heartbreak that forces a soul to grow.
But you can’t outrun being human. The denial always collapses. Reality always wins the rematch.
So good I needed a cigarette afterwards. (We might be fishing in the same pond. You've put me in mind of Agamben's 'bare life.')
<<Let’s just call it dead-immortality. The idea that the memory of me in others constitutes some survival of death . . . even though I’m as dead as a rock. Most attempts to achieve dead-immortality are driven by an overweaning self-regard, the imaginary sustenance of which offers some rebuttal to the tawdry ignominy of modern measured death.>>
As always, I just love your writing, man. This piece in particular touches on something I’ve been thinking about lately. One of the greatest acts of rebellion in the forthcoming decades will be eschewing disembodying tools, be they medical or technological, and accepting the ultimate truth that, not only do we all die, but that embracing this fact is in itself life-affirming. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than the Johnson lifestyle, and a hell of lot truer.
Good to hear from you, Forrest. I'm starting to feel that you're right and the more I reflect on it, the more I feel I can hardly use the tools without losing something.
Great piece man! The title intrigued me because I wanted to write an essay about him for a while, but never got the pen on the paper. As it usually goes when this happens, someone else wrote the essay for me :)
I'm not 100% aligned to all of your points, but I do think the general concept of trying to outrun death is a super-sized avoidance of lots of emotions, and purely delusional anyway. When I watched the documentary it actually made me more empathetic and I could see he was just another human suffering and trying to outrun himself.
Thanks for writing this. If I write my own (which would be somewhat similar), I'll send it over!
Your antithesis ‘reality won’t be dominated; it demands us to dance’ especially reminded me of James Carse’s antithesis-laden Finite/Infinite Games.
I remember him saying in there something like ‘the finite player struggles against mortality; the infinite player struggles as a mortal.’ There is something beautifully tragic about the ‘struggle against’ finitude leading to finitude.
Seems the only way to wrench out a player like Bryan from the finite trap is a true pity, a ‘struggling with’. Struggling against him would just lead to more finitude.
This article made me think of a poem I wrote this last year:
I am a creature of habit
I want to face up the day and grab it;
but whenever something
disrupts my routine,
I become just like Alice's rabbit.
My habits mark out my steps.
They help me to know what's next.
But gum up the machine,
then I've met the red queen;
and it seems that I've lost my head.
Are my habits a crutch or a staff?
Are they a ship or a rudderless raft?
I don't know where I end
and where my habits begin,
and I fear there's not much of me left.
Beautiful.
Fairly good. Well done! xx
Amen brother. Let's rake some leaves.
Checked out Cy Canterel’s TikTok channel? She has a good piece on the super-rich trying to become immortal / live in a bunker after an apocalypse/ start as space colony.
🫡
"Why do I avoid the present?” because those questions would unearth painful answers, and we can’t be negative, can we?"
I found myself getting sucked into the whole corporate, positive thinking movement one too may times in my life. I wanted to be rich and this seemed like an easy way to get there. I was an actress after all. I could fake it til I made it. But I am not wired that way. I cannot be jolly all the damn time. I also like to sit in a pensive and meloncholic state, especially if it's raining. I don't like to sit in it too long. I treat it as a sauna - get the impurities out. Then go back to enjoyment of everything. You are right. The whole endeavor is soul-sucking. I've seen so many people go through these programs with immense exuberance only to be met with "ghosts" - whether it be an overdue bill, a broken-down car, a dying mother - and then they completely fall apart. They hadn't acquired the millions yet to "fix" those problems. It's like the stupid prosperity gospel. It's so detrimental and completely unrealistic. "Just believe it into existence!" Um, No. And, if one is a Christian, you believe you WILL live forever. And it's this, little life that you've been given while here on earth that makes all the difference. How well did you use what God gave you for your fellow man and to further His kingdom? We need very little help being our own god. We've proven time and time again we are untrustworthy of God's gifts.
I resonate a lot with what you've experienced. Thanks for your perspective.
One of the best things I've read so far.
This line made me consider my deep, pervasive melancholy for the human condition, as something beautiful:
"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."
Thanks so much for the reflection.
Posts like this make me want to write better. Thank you for your craft and work.
This is so good! Thank you for subjecting yourself to this fella for the rest of us.
Thanks, Mills.
This, yes, this! Wisdom
What profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his own soul….
The Bryan Johnson phenomenon has been troubling me for some time. You’ve put your finger right on it…he’s sacrificed his “Aliveness”…bizarre and sad. We cannot outrun life or death, no matter how many millions get thrown at the task. Not to be too grim, but if this were a novel, he’d get hit by a bus.
Ha, well God bless him, I say.
No, I’d say that if there are “things worth dying for,” it doesn’t imply immortality, but that it implies causes and people worth giving up what remains of one’s existence to insure that they survive.
(Well, maybe that one wants immortality in the pages of history)
I said eternity, which is not exactly the same. But, I'm being poetic so good luck to both of us figuring out what I meant.
Wonderful essay—telling point after telling point—and you’re taking on one of today’s most powerful temptations and proposing the antidote: aliveness.
One minor point, the wonderful mid-Atlantic accent has mysteriously disappeared, a victim of the bland, demotic, materialist, equalitarian:authoritarian Zeitgeist which Bryan Johnson so repellently exemplifies.
By way of explanation, I’ll quote a learned friend of mine: “there's something fishy about the squashing of the Hollywood Mid-Atlantic accent around the same broad era, and my gut tells me it's related. It was obviously associated with a link to the old world, empire, tradition, etc., and by dominating Hollywood it was glamorous, something to aspire to, etc. It was quite intentionally pushed out in favour of regional and 'General American' accents; I've heard that that was because Americans wanted their own identity and so forth, but I don't entirely buy it. The Mid-Atlantic WAS part of America's identity (it was no more English than it was East Coast American), and was an aspirational accent of rich, successful, powerful, worldly, cultured people. I think it wasn't 'diverse' and egalitarian enough. All voices matter, etc...Don't aspire to connect to your history...Stay in your regional ghettos and eat the slop we feed you, &c &c...That's my tin-foil hat conspiracy theory, for whatever it's worth!”
Man, I love that you took the mid-atlantic jab and ran with it in the opposite direction. Love that thought.
Wild how we’ve reached a point where a man can literally say he made a deal with the devil to stop feeling and people treat it like quirky branding. Johnson isn’t the problem. He’s just the clearest symptom of a culture that would trade aliveness for control if the price tag looked shiny enough.
You nailed the real issue. It’s not immortality he’s chasing. It’s escape. Escape from feeling, from failure, from the ordinary heartbreak that forces a soul to grow.
But you can’t outrun being human. The denial always collapses. Reality always wins the rematch.
So insightful I wonder if the author has made a deal of his own. Doesn't seem humanly possible to see and write so clearly. One quibble: the way out of addiction often has nothing to do with a Rock Bottom experience. https://open.substack.com/pub/jasonjonker/p/it-doesnt-pay-to-be-logical?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=tx1h9
I did make a deal and it's hopefully the opposite one. Thanks for the kind words.
So good I needed a cigarette afterwards. (We might be fishing in the same pond. You've put me in mind of Agamben's 'bare life.')
<<Let’s just call it dead-immortality. The idea that the memory of me in others constitutes some survival of death . . . even though I’m as dead as a rock. Most attempts to achieve dead-immortality are driven by an overweaning self-regard, the imaginary sustenance of which offers some rebuttal to the tawdry ignominy of modern measured death.>>
https://stanleyabner1951gmailcom.substack.com/p/immortality
I bragged about your first sentence to my wife this morning.
well deserved . . . fantastic piece
As always, I just love your writing, man. This piece in particular touches on something I’ve been thinking about lately. One of the greatest acts of rebellion in the forthcoming decades will be eschewing disembodying tools, be they medical or technological, and accepting the ultimate truth that, not only do we all die, but that embracing this fact is in itself life-affirming. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than the Johnson lifestyle, and a hell of lot truer.
Good to hear from you, Forrest. I'm starting to feel that you're right and the more I reflect on it, the more I feel I can hardly use the tools without losing something.
Great piece man! The title intrigued me because I wanted to write an essay about him for a while, but never got the pen on the paper. As it usually goes when this happens, someone else wrote the essay for me :)
I'm not 100% aligned to all of your points, but I do think the general concept of trying to outrun death is a super-sized avoidance of lots of emotions, and purely delusional anyway. When I watched the documentary it actually made me more empathetic and I could see he was just another human suffering and trying to outrun himself.
Thanks for writing this. If I write my own (which would be somewhat similar), I'll send it over!
Thanks, Jeremy!
Your antithesis ‘reality won’t be dominated; it demands us to dance’ especially reminded me of James Carse’s antithesis-laden Finite/Infinite Games.
I remember him saying in there something like ‘the finite player struggles against mortality; the infinite player struggles as a mortal.’ There is something beautifully tragic about the ‘struggle against’ finitude leading to finitude.
Seems the only way to wrench out a player like Bryan from the finite trap is a true pity, a ‘struggling with’. Struggling against him would just lead to more finitude.
I was just reading about Carse's book, funny enough. I really like this framing