Chasing Immortality

Bryan Johnson & the Pseudo-Religion of “Don’t Die”

“I describe aging as our greatest humanitarian challenge,” said Andrew Steele, author of Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old. This is but one of many unintentionally ironic statements pervading the 2025 Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever. The man in question is Bryan Johnson, a tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist who rose to prominence in 2021 when he launched Project Blueprint, a suite of protocols, therapies, and treatments to optimize health and longevity. Undoubtedly, many of his prescriptions—the exercise and sleep routines, for example—are both accessible and beneficial to the average individual. Others, such as gene therapy and blood plasma transfusions, are not.

Johnson’s philosophy, “Don’t Die,” forms the modus operandi by which he lives and claims the titles of both healthiest and most-measured man in the world. The latter title stems from his evaluation of as many as 75 biomarkers, including the biological age of each of his organs. Johnson sells a host of Blueprint-branded foods, vitamins, biomarker kits, and Don’t Die clothing so others can emulate the existence that he himself quite literally embodies.

Johnson initially funded Blueprint in its entirety, and he continues to spend millions on everything from his 90 supplements a day to his own hyperbaric oxygen chamber. He can do this because he sold the tech company he founded, Braintree, to PayPal in 2013 for a cool $800 million. Nonetheless, considering the cost and notwithstanding the sensationalism of the documentary’s subtitle, we might ask, To what end, really?

Delay or Prevent?

Johnson says he is pushing the boundary of the human lifespan—a not-unreasonable goal, depending on what he considers to be the boundary. Nonetheless, his explanations are at times contradictory. At one point, he clearly says his treatments focus on reducing his speed of aging, not on preventing death; elsewhere he says, “avoiding death is the target no one can see.” Regarding aging, he uses the words delay and prevent interchangeably and occasionally injects vagaries like neutralizing. Yet elsewhere still, he says the goal of Blueprint is to reverse his biological age, which brings to mind Johnson as a shriveled infant Brad Pitt from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Johnson’s definition of Blueprint changes as well; it is first a project, then an anti-aging protocol, then a suite of protocols, then a thought experiment, and finally an algorithm.

Perhaps all of this was simply a consequence of rebranding throughout filming, but one can’t help but question Johnson’s equivocation and, by extension, his intentions, much as blogger Rebecca Watson does when she characterizes Johnson as a grifter trying to profit off of humanity’s innate fear of death. Johnson’s popularity on social media may be some indication of his followers’ existential trepidations, but I don’t believe he is a con artist. Given his already inordinate wealth, the transparency of his biomarker data online, and his emphasis on instructive, albeit sometimes puerile, social media content, Johnson appears to care less about vitamin sales than about philosophical buy-in.

The Longevity Gospel Guru

When I first began following Johnson, he struck me as a next-gen Tony Robbins or Joel Osteen. As chief ideologue of his own brand, he writes books espousing his philosophy, speaks at his own events (called “Summits”), and is by all accounts the preeminent guru of his message. Much like Robbins’s philosophy on life management or Osteen’s framing of Christianity as an avenue for wealth, Johnson endorses “Don’t Die” as a holistic framework for health and lengthening lifespan. But since he often equivocates about it, it sometimes comes off as something surreptitiously more grandiose.

In late 2025, Johnson hired a CEO to handle day-to-day operations of Blueprint so that he could focus on promoting his philosophy. As he explained,

Every minute spent dealing with problems like “why a supplier shipped us something out-of-spec” (now stuck on a boat) is a minute not spent figuring out how to make Don’t Die the fastest-growing ideology in history, increasing our odds of survival and thriving.… My sole purpose in existence is the survival and thriving of the human race.

Much of Johnson’s personal story is revealed in Don’t Die. This brings me to what I believe drives his whole endeavor: Johnson wants to raise his brand of longevity to a religion. Don’t Die lends as much runtime to unearthing his pre-millionaire, tech-entrepreneur past as it does to his immortality-aspiring present. Less than halfway through, the story shifts into melancholy territory: Johnson’s impoverished childhood, his parents’ divorce and father’s criminality, as well as his own contentious marriage, divorce, and depression. Underlying this upheaval is his upbringing in, and subsequent rejection of, Mormonism, the existential framework through which he understood reality—as he says, “It gave me all the answers to existence.” It is also the framework from which he was happy to be liberated at age 33.

Nonetheless, abandoning one’s foundational understanding of reality, no matter how liberating it may feel, is likely to leave a void. It’s understandable that he would turn to a health regimen, not only as a remedy for depression but also as a way to supply meaning to his life. He specifically says that his dedication to Blueprint developed out of his rejection of Mormonism.

An Immortality Odyssey

A man suffering a mid-life crisis in the face of life’s complexity and tragedy is nothing new. Rarely, however, does anyone have millions with which to erect his own new brand of existential scaffolding. But Bryan Johnson did, and he is now promoting Blueprint and the Don’t Die philosophy as a biological means by which humanity may yet transcend its apparent impermanence. Indeed, underlying much of his commentary, and that of the longevity experts who appear throughout Don’t Die, is the suggestion of some forthcoming golden age in, well, anti-aging. In the time since Don’t Die came out, Johnson has only doubled down on such rhetoric. In one especially telling interview, he said, “We are on the verge of the most extraordinary existence in the galaxy.… My objective is not life maximization, it’s species maximization.”

In similar interviews, Johnson frequently articulates his desire to use artificial intelligence to help maximize lifespan, promulgate a global movement, and determine how the human race will survive the rise of a potential superintelligence.

Listening to Johnson is akin to reading an Arthur C. Clarke ­novel—the initial subtext and eventual denouement is a renunciation of the Christian worldview in favor of a transhumanistic, neo-evolutionary trajectory of human advancement, salvation even. Indeed, one can’t help but get the feeling that Johnson would collapse in elation were a monolithic artifact to land in his backyard.

Chasing Salvation, but in the Wrong Place

Johnson’s chief obsession is avoiding death. “Death is our only foe,” he said on social media. But without a biblical framework for understanding life, he constructs temporal, physiological interventions to what is ultimately a spiritual problem. “Every religion is an attempt to reconcile with death,” he says.

But he is wrong about that. Christianity is not an attempt at reconciliation; it is the story of how death has been overcome. As 1 Corinthians 15:26 states, because of Christ’s death and resurrection, death is a defeated foe. Neither is Don’t Die a reconciliation with death; it’s simply an attempt at evasion. Johnson’s pursuit, though rooted in a legitimate existential yearning, is fundamentally misdirected due to his inability to grasp reality without the mind of Christ.