Bryan Johnson believes people saw his illness as punishment for trying to defeat death

Bryan Johnson believes people saw his illness as punishment for trying to defeat death

Bryan Johnson has been diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis, a chronic disease in which the immune system attacks the stomach lining. In a July 12 post, he writes that one response followed a recurring formula: “He deserved it.” Johnson links this reaction to a need to see someone defeated after publicly refusing to accept death as a given.

For several years, Johnson’s team could not explain his low ferritin, the protein that stores iron in cells. Doctors made the diagnosis in May. According to a Northeastern analysis, autoimmune gastritis can develop without noticeable symptoms, while the causes of such immune dysfunction often remain unclear. Doctors know that heredity and environmental factors play a role, but they cannot identify a single cause of the disease.

The diagnosis gave observers a ready-made narrative. A man who spends millions measuring his body and trying to slow aging had proved vulnerable to a process that may have been developing for years. It is easy to turn that narrative into a cautionary tale about pride. However, illness does not choose people according to their views on death.

A week ago, the argument surrounding Johnson focused on the phrase “so busy trying not to die that he forgot to live.” In that debate, critics examined his regimen and the cost of maintaining constant control over his body. On July 12, Johnson identified a different formula in the discussion:

“The person who challenged death must lose, and his loss must seem deserved. That is how people protect themselves.”

Criticizing the protocol and taking pleasure in someone else’s illness are different actions. Johnson’s regimen, public image, spending, and promises are all open to criticism. Such criticism examines his methods, data, and results. The statement “he deserved it” delivers a different verdict: a person who wants to live longer has violated the natural order and must lose.

Johnson looks for this idea of order in old stories. Gilgamesh loses the plant of youth and returns to mortality. Asclepius, who learned to restore the dead to life, is killed by Zeus’s lightning bolt. Johnson also includes the story of Jesus and sees a shared pattern: anyone who tries to overcome death must be defeated so that everyone else can once again feel that death is inevitable.

Johnson has not measured all the comments. His post presents his personal reading of the response. He proposes another mechanism: the defeat of someone fighting death may reassure people who regard their own mortality as the only possible order of the world. Illness then becomes an argument against the attempt to defeat it.

A culture accustomed to treating death as the ultimate limit can debate biohacking, money, and self-promotion. When it takes pleasure in the illness of someone trying to extend the limits of life, it defends the familiar verdict imposed by death. Illness remains illness. The attempt to defeat it remains work in service of life.