The guy who wanted to live forever has decided he'll settle for being able to dunk a basketball and I find this very funny but also fascinating

You know that 'don't die' guy? The one who used to get infusions of his son's blood as part of his goal to live forever? The one whoseface looks weirdin a way you can't quite pinpoint but one glance and you know, instinctively, that something isn't quite right? He's recently admitted that maybe he went too far with the longevity thing and now he's made perhaps the funniest pivot of all time. He's not so focused on never dying anymore. Now he just wants to dunk a basketball. The Fighting Life is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is serious, apparently. Bryan Johnson, the super rich guy who used to post on Twitter about his nighttime erection scores and various other biomarkers that he was constantly, obsessively tracking, has apparently downgraded his ambitions from god-like immortality to throwing down a sick jam. (Spud Webb was 5'7 and he could do it. Just saying.) This is very funny to me. It is also weirdly fascinating. It's not just the comical shift in scope and stakes, though it is of course also that. Just imagine starting out by battling death, humanity's eternal and undefeated enemy, only to then switch to battling the fact that you're a middle-aged white man with limited hops. It invites us to consider what this guy's list of grand ambitions might look like. I mean, if no. 1 is live forever and no. 2 is windmill dunk, what the hell could no. 3 possibly be? There is something perfectly juvenile about it all. Johnson is a wealthy entrepreneur, a former tech founder and CEO whose estimated net worth is somewhere around $300 million. He previously believed that his riches and his rigid discipline, along with his access to basically any treatment or diagnostic tools he could dream up (a side effect of the wealth, naturally), would enable him to break free from the bounds of human mortality. Then he developed an autoimmune disease, which he attributes to eating fast food a couple decades ago and not to the fact that he's been running a non-stop science experiment on himself much more recently. He seems to have decided that he needed different goals, and they just happened to be the goals of a 14-year-old boy. Imagine finding a magic lamp with a genie willing to grant you endless wishes. That's sort of what it's like being a hundred-millionaire in America, or at least that's how it looks from afar. They don't have to work. They don't have to clean their own houses or cook their own food or fold their own laundry. Their time is entirely their own and maybe sometimes it feels like there's too much of it. What a person decides to do with that time is pretty revealing. Do they devote themselves to charitable works? To furthering their own power and ego? Do they just keep starting more businesses, making more and more money because it's the only reward system their brains understand? A lot of them seem to go into politics. (One of them is Montana's current governor, Greg Gianforte, who is another wealthy tech entrepreneur who was adamant about buying his way into public office only to get there and do not much of anything.) An enviable few prove capable of just going off to enjoy their lives while being quietly rich without needing our attention and adoration. Johnson does not seem like a very chill guy, though. He seems more like the type who needs a project. And not just building birdhouses or throwing pottery, either. He's the type who needs the project to be a) highly measurable, and b) comically ambitious. He wants lots of data points to record and analyze. Maybe that's why it was a seamless transition for him to go from tracking his erections to calculating the takeoff velocity required for a six-foot-tall man to dunk. If he set out to become an accomplished painter, how would he knew when he had achieved it? What numbers could he crunch to determine what it would take to get from here to there? But hey, fuck it, right? Getting this serious about dunking a basketball in your late-forties may be hilarious, but everybody gets just one life. You've got to decide on something to do with your days. As necessity disappears from those days — in other words, once you no longer face the choice between working for a living and starving in the streets — maybe the void yawns open ever wider. If this dude wants to spend a portion of his one life trying to do something that some physically gifted high school kids can do during PE class right now on a belly full of Burger King, that's his choice. It is a funny and bizarre choice, especially since he's approaching it with the exact same rigorously scientific seriousness that he approached THE PROJECT OF LIVING FOREVER, but that's human beings for you, I guess. One of the internet's favorite Albert Camus quotes is the one about how the meaning of life is whatever prevents you from killing yourself. I don't know if he actually put it exactly like that, but that was the gist. In other words, there is no meaning and no point. We're all just making up our own meaning or borrowing it from someone else in order to stave off the creeping suspicion that all of this is an absurd cosmic accident with no greater purpose to it. I guess you could try to extend your portion of that absurdity on and on indefinitely. But wouldn't it be a lot cooler if instead you could just step up and hammer down a tomahawk dunk? Because it's one thing to continue on living. It's another to actually trick yourself into wanting to. Thanks for reading The Fighting Life! This post is public so feel free to share it. Share