Most of us deal with death by choosing to ignore it. “Being unable to cure death,” Blaise Pascal once wrote, “we’ve decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.”
In Pascal’s 17th-century Parisian context, death-avoidance was a rich man’s game. Gamble more, hunt more foxes, plan another ball. He could hardly have imagined the mainstream opportunities for distraction we now take for granted. No humans have ever had more options “not to think about such things.”
But for precisely that reason, another recent trend is all the more striking. A rising tide of influencers is challenging the premise beneath Pascal’s complaint—the notion that death is incurable in the first place. Far from avoiding the subject, they’re confronting the problem head-on.
Extreme longevity is having a moment. Peter Attia’s Outlive has sold more than 3 million copies in three years. Bryan Johnson, founder of the Don’t Die movement, was the subject of a popular 2025 Netflix documentary. And last summer, The New Yorker ran an in-depth profile of Peter Diamandis and the rise of specialized longevity clinics like his own Fountain Life—one of thousands of similar clinics worldwide, up from fewer than a hundred barely 10 years ago.
What should we think about this trend? And what opportunities does it open for Christian witness?
It’s deeply human to long for more life, and it’s certainly wise to take care of the bodies God has given us for as long as we can. But there’s a deeper conviction beneath this trend that we have to recognize and confront. Longevity influencers believe we’re our own best shot at dealing with the problem. They’ve vastly underestimated both the problem of death and the hope of the gospel.
Who Are the Longevity Influencers?
Longevity influencers make up a diverse and quirky crowd. On one end you have Johnson, arguably the most well-known and provocative of the bunch. His obsession is reverse-aging, on which he reportedly spends a quarter-million dollars per year.
His daily regimen involves pills, supplements, extreme exercise, and a diet restricted down to the last calorie. His experimental therapies have included intergenerational plasma exchange between him; his septuagenarian father, Richard; and his teenage son, Talmage. In theory, Richard got a boost from the blood of a much younger man. The benefit to Talmage was, shall we say, less than clear.
Meanwhile, Johnson takes an open-source approach to his biometrics, tracking and publishing everything from his BMI and resting heart rate to his liver enzymes. Johnson deploys his body like a billboard for the products and services he’s eager to sell to you. Never mind the fact that he stacks his therapies one on top of the other, so good luck tracking what works and what doesn’t and why.
A rising tide of influencers is challenging the premise beneath Pascal’s complaint—the notion that death is incurable in the first place.
Diamandis represents the tech-positive clinical approach to longevity, arguably less provocative than Johnson but every bit as optimistic. In an age of stunning technological achievements, it should come as no surprise that the leading influencers in the longevity movement aren’t doctors but tech entrepreneurs. Sure, some ambitions on record seem wildly over the top. But who in 1970 wouldn’t have scoffed if you’d said that 70 percent of the world’s population would own pocket-size, interconnected supercomputers by 2026?
Every technological breakthrough sounds crazy right up until it changes the world. Why wouldn’t we be able to figure out limitless life? Diamandis perfectly captures the aura of tech-bro optimism: “It’s either a hardware problem or a software problem—and we’re going to be able to fix that!”
So far, efforts to “fix that” are all over the map, effectiveness very much TBD. According to the New Yorker profile, Diamandis is hard at work on a blood filter to weed out metastatic cancer, as well as a transmitter of high-frequency waves to “diagnose strokes and zap depression.” Other gurus focus on the preservation of individual consciousness (a software problem?). In theory, if you could upload your consciousness now to the cloud, generative AI could predict your thoughts and reactions and desires in response to whatever happens forever and ever, as easily as it already completes your text messages.
But whatever the preferred strategy of the moment, the underlying confidence is that one breakthrough leads to another. We don’t have to solve death in one stroke. We just have to make enough progress to buy time for more progress, on and on, until it’s done.
It’s worth noting that at least for now, longevity isn’t a poor man’s game. As one practitioner puts it, “We don’t work in mice. We work in billionaires.”
Diamandis’s Fountain Life clinic describes itself as “like a country club for precision diagnostics.” An annual membership costs more than $20,000, with thousands more required for supplements and optional testing, and that’s just the baseline. Those hoping to go above and beyond subscribe to the $85,000 Epic program, which “includes an exercise coach and a nutritionist, stem-cell ‘re-education,’ and treatments such as therapeutic plasma exchange, in which plasma is filtered from your blood and replaced with albumin and antibodies from healthy donors.”
You’re also invited to the semiannual Platinum Trip—$70,000 per person—where you’ll enjoy personal interactions with longevity scientists, opportunities to invest in experimental therapies, and priority access to those therapies for yourself.
In a way, this makes sense. The more money you have, the more you have to lose through death, and the more you have to spend on living longer. Fountain Life’s chief medical officer summed up her clientele: “They spent their health getting their wealth, and now they have to spend their wealth getting their health back.”
Reverse-Engineering the End of Life
Attia represents the lower-tech end of the longevity spectrum. After years chasing more ambitious solutions to the problem of death, he narrowed his focus to what he calls the “marginal decade”—the final 10 years of life.
Modern medicine has extended life expectancy but not wellness. People are living longer than ever before, but the final years are often marked by cognitive, physical, and emotional decline that medicine only addresses once it’s too late to undo what’s already happened. What good is more life if you’re miserable?
Attia argues for approaching your health for the marginal decade in the same way you might approach retirement savings. A financial planner helps you define what lifestyle you hope to have in retirement and work back from there to the funds you need to be setting aside now. Health planning should work the same way. First, define what’s important to you. Pickleball prowess? Mountain climbing in your 80s? LEGOs on the floor with your great-grandkids? Figure out what you want to do in your final years of life, and start training now to make sure you get there.
I have far more sympathy for this longevity approach than for the more outlandish and obsessive versions of guys like Johnson or Diamandis. Many of Attia’s anchor concepts are what you might call commonsensical, if easier said than done. Watch what you eat. Make sure you get enough sleep. Definitely don’t skip leg day.
His future-oriented approach to the present also resonates with the wisdom of the Proverbs and its approach to the good life. Actions have consequences. Laziness and apathy bring bad outcomes. So pay attention, plan ahead, and act accordingly.
But if Attia’s ambitions are admittedly modest compared to others, he’s fully in line with the broader movement where it matters most. For all these influencers, the future is a problem to solve, and we’re the ones who have to solve it. We’re our own best chance at survival. Or, as Attia puts it, “Hope is not a strategy.”
How Christian Hope Is More than a Strategy
This is precisely the point at which the longevity movement offers a wonderful opportunity to clarify the hope of the gospel.
The first thing to be said is that Attia is exactly right. Our hope is not a strategy. Christian confidence flows from humility. It starts with desperate honesty about the problem we’re facing, then quickly admits we can’t possibly fix it. Our hope depends completely on the Lord, who isn’t limited as we are. Just browse the juxtapositions of Psalm 33, or Psalm 90, or Psalm 102.
Aging isn’t a disease to be prevented or cured. Death isn’t a software problem, a hardware problem, or any sort of engineering problem to be worked until we’ve solved it. Death is God’s just response to our attempt to play God. And it can only be overthrown by the same steadfast love that gave us our lives in the first place. Our hope assumes only God can fix this problem.
But the Lord exalts the humble, if we can accept a solution we can’t take credit for. In the hope of resurrection, we find a resource far more suited to our need than any other approach to longevity.
1. Christian hope is realistic.
Any strategy that leaves death standing isn’t good enough. Christian hope assumes Paul is right: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:26).
The contrast to Attia’s Outlive is important. The strength of his approach is his future-oriented posture toward the present. Its weakness is that his approach fails to look far enough ahead.
Death is God’s just response to our attempt to play God. And it can only be overthrown by the same steadfast love that gave us our lives in the first place.
His laser focus on the marginal decade, setting aside the reality that lurks on the other side, is far too convenient. At least the Don’t Die crowd is honest about the scale of what we’re up against. Hope may not be a strategy. But as long as death itself remains our greatest enemy, Attia’s wisdom isn’t much of a strategy either.
All this focus on the marginal decade is a bit like offering someone goggles to keep the wind out of his eyes as he falls to the pavement from a 40-story rooftop. Compared to the pavement at the bottom, who cares about the wind in his eyes? It’s a helpful program so far as it goes, but the rhetoric and enthusiasm overpromise and underdeliver.
2. Christian hope is concrete.
Our hope isn’t just realistic about the enemy we’re up against. It’s grounded in the concrete reality that Christ has conquered death for us.
At one point in the New Yorker profile, a colleague of Diamandis had this to say about how quickly he promotes unfounded claims about new treatment options: “Peter has learned that a compelling offer is ten times more powerful than a convincing argument.” All these wealthy clients are simply “trying to buy their stairway to Heaven.” And “nearly all of them are deathly afraid of death.”
That’s remarkable honesty. It’s also a good summary of an age-old knock on Christian faith: People desperately want life after death, so they believe it actually exists. It all boils down to wishful thinking. Framed negatively, it can’t be true if we want it to be.
This way of thinking might explain the commercial success of Fountain Life clinics. But it vastly underestimates the evidence for Jesus’s resurrection. Christian hope is gloriously concrete. The best reason to believe that a deathless life is possible is that Jesus already has one. It’s all in 1 Corinthians 15: “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (vv. 19–20).
3. Christian hope is active.
To observers like Attia, hope functions like an excuse to justify not doing what you can for as long as you can to push back death’s progress. Hope comes off as sentimental passivity faced with what you ought to be resisting. As one interviewer puts it, “Attia tends to argue that individual choices matter not because they are all-powerful but because they are the power that we have.”
But what about when those individual choices are taken from us? What about when we don’t have even this much power over quality of life anymore? Attia’s Outlive strategy has nothing to offer those already disabled, or suffering through early onset dementia, or grieving the loss of a grandchild they’d otherwise be healthy enough to toss in the air.
Christian hope is gloriously concrete. The best reason to believe that a deathless life is possible is that Jesus already has one.
Precisely where Attia’s strategy runs into a wall, Christian hope meets a precious growth opportunity.
Cultivating hope in Christ is an everyday activity, and there’s nothing easy about it. It takes discipline to set your mind on things above, so that what Christ has promised shapes every part of your life in the meantime (see Col. 3:1–17). It takes relentless effort to hold on to hope in the face of suffering and death you can’t avoid or outrun.
The active hope Paul calls for in 2 Corinthians 4 involves constant comparison between what’s transient and what’s eternal—between the afflictions we’re suffering through and the unseen glory they’re preparing for us.
Hope is like a muscle that grows as you use it to lift the burdens in your life. It feeds on suffering and sorrow. The worst things that can happen to us, in the marginal decade or whenever else, only clarify why a resurrected Savior is indispensably necessary, and why it’s so wonderful to know that we have one.
True enough, hope is not a strategy. But in Christ, it’s an unyielding power we can live on, until we never need it again.
