I’m standing in a drafty room with several hundred people in London’s Truman Brewery, all of us shaking our hands above our heads, woo-wooing our way to the end of another day at SXSW.
I won’t lie –– I’d hoped something like this would happen at some point during the week. Weird, offbeat moments such as this really separate a fun conference from a boring one. This particular moment is a mini taste of a “longevity rave” –– an event style that’s popping up around the world, run by those who believe music, movement and connection can impact our health and happiness in the long term.
“Genetics is a very small determinant of health –– other factors are more important,” Tina Brown, a social entrepreneur and systems architect who co-founded Longevity Rave, told us just minutes earlier. “The joy of living is a really powerful motivator.”
The idea of living longer, healthier lives is nothing new, but the science of aging is now better understood than ever, and methods to reduce the often substantial gap between our lifespans and the length of time we’re able to stay healthy (known as health spans) are becoming more accessible. I’ve long been skeptical about the idea of investing significant time and money into trying to live longer –– but perhaps that’s because I just assumed it wasn’t for people like me.
Back in 2017, I interviewed billionaire tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson about his mission to level up everyone, including himself, by implanting chips in our brains so that we could compete with AI. This conversation has haunted me over the years. Even though I’ve dabbled in biohacking myself (I have a chip in my hand to do basic smartphone-related tasks), I’d advocate for a cautious approach.
Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson talks about taking extreme measures in the name of longevity.
Since then, Johnson’s name has become synonymous with taking extreme measures to reverse aging and extend his life — among them, injecting the blood of his 17-year-old son into his 47-year-old body (he has since ceased this practice in favor of “total plasma exchange”). The quest for longevity is often associated with Silicon Valley billionaire biohacker boys like Johnson and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, which makes it feel alienating and inaccessible.
That’s why at SXSW London, I was curious to see not one but two all-female panels discussing reverse aging and extending our health spans. The panels didn’t indulge in the kind of anti-aging rhetoric I’ve grown up with, which demands that women do everything in their power to remain young and beautiful. Even though, as Canadian comedian Katherine Ryan joked during one of the panels, women should avoid stress by staying single, as “it makes you ugly, being married to a loser.”
The new science of aging
Ryan hosts a podcast called What’s My Age Again?, in which she interviews celebrities who have undergone testing to determine their biological age as a jumping-off point for discussing their own relationship to aging.
Celebrity women, perhaps more than any of us, live inside a vanity pressure cooker, where their appearance is constantly judged. It’s fair to say that a surge of famous women, from the Kardashians to Meghan Trainor, have been vocal about all of the many steps they’ve taken to reverse their aging.
Cosmetic benefits aside, the health and quality of life benefits often make the most compelling case for the pursuit of longevity. With more women having babies later, they want to maintain their youthful energy to be present, active parents, said Ryan. Also, for many of us, there is a significant gap between the number of years that make up our lifespan and the number of years we remain healthy. But many believe that this gap is ours for the closing.
“A person’s biological age and chronological age often don’t match,” said Nichola Conlon, a molecular biologist and CEO of healthy aging company Nuchido, who is a frequent guest on Ryan’s podcast. “Everyone associates age with a number… that kind of doesn’t matter anymore.”
Katherine Ryan, left, and Nichola Conlon at SXSW London.
In the past, scientists thought that how we age was a fixed process determined almost entirely by our genetics. That’s no longer the case (as confirmed by multiple peer-reviewed studies that confirm aging is influenced by multiple factors). “Aging is a malleable process, as we are finding,” said Brown. The science is fast evolving, and there’s even an XPrize Healthspan, offering $101 million to anyone who can come up with a solution to knock 10 to 20 years off someone’s age.
We already know that aging is influenced by a variety of factors, in addition to genetics –– largely how we live our lives. As such, it’s important that we attempt to understand our bodies and treat them well, which is pretty universal advice.
“You can live more healthily in middle age if you stop following general guidelines and instead follow your data,” said Deepti Agarwal, a doctor specializing in healthy aging, during a panel about valuing health span over lifespan.
This approach, known as precision medicine, advocates for a tailored, rather than one-size-fits-all approach to health. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of medicine, but isn’t without its criticisms.
Longevity, but only for a select few?
Transferring the responsibility for aging to the individual can reduce support for public health measures, said Timothy Caulfield, a professor and the research director at the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta, speaking not at SXSW, but on the Atlantic’s How to Defy Death podcast (a deep dive I’d recommend if you want to learn more).
It’s all very well emphasizing that you have control over your own longevity if you have the time, money and resources to take care of yourself, he said. But that’s simply not the case for many people, meaning that seeking to prolong longevity has the potential to exacerbate existing inequalities. He added that it also sends the message to people that “if you’re not doing it, you’re failing.”
It also creates space for the wellness industry to exploit people’s anxieties by selling them products based on sketchy science-adjacent claims that aren’t necessarily supported by a robust body of evidence, said Caulfield.
There is an important conversation to be had about equal access to longevity treatments as it becomes more mainstream, said Cat Wiles, founder and CSO of marketing agency Spark, who appeared on the panel alongside Ryan and Conlon. “We’re already starting to see warning signs about inequality,” she said. Age spans might be increasing among the wealthy elite, but in poorer areas, the reverse is often true.
Private health companies are already giving people who can afford it tools to improve their health, and it would be worrying to think insurance premiums could be tied to your biological age, Wiles added.
Conlon has hope, though, that we’ll reach a point at which longevity medicine is so affordable that it will become “unethical” for doctors not to help you slow down or reverse your aging. Plenty of the more extreme measures taken by the billionaire biohackers –– Johnson’s blood exchange, for example –– will likely remain inaccessible (as well as unsavory) to most of us. The same might not be true of other solutions.
Nuchido, Conlon’s company, makes NAD Plus supplements, which are popular among celebrities and have some evidence to support their use for anti-aging, although they are the subject of much ongoing research.
During the health span panel, Tamsin Lewis, a doctor who founded the de-aging company Wellgevity, said that intravenous NADs are not the answer to slowing down your rate of aging. It will slow down your finances, though. Instead, she and the other women on her panel advocated prioritizing cheaper interventions.
What actually works?
It might not be what you want to hear if you’re ready to throw money at the problem, but the best scientific evidence we currently have to support healthy aging and longevity are the obvious solutions: We need to prioritize nutrition, exposure to sunlight, movement and building muscle.
“We wear this meat jacket, but it’s very much a scaffolding for our longevity,” said Lewis. “It protects our brain, bones, hips, sleep and blood sugar levels.”
Other key factors include getting enough sleep, minimizing stress, maximizing resilience and bolstering our emotional and mental health.
“The movement of longevity has got bogged down in biohacking bros,” said Nikolina Glauc, co-founder and CEO of GlycanAge, a company that uses biomarkers to detect disease on a molecular level. The biggest thing that has made a difference for her in her own quest to extend her lifespan is psychotherapy, she added.
As Lewis closes out the session with breathwork and the mini rave, I feel as though I’ve been on an entire journey through longevity culture. I feel skeptical about some of the pricey reverse aging options that I’ve come across, which feel a little like exploitative wellness culture dressed up in dubious science. I also worry about unequal access to reverse aging solutions and the social and public health impacts.
At the same time, I feel buoyed by some of the research currently underway, particularly by what Brown calls the “science of connection,” which she’s exploring through dance, music and community.
“In the end, humans need to be with other people,” she said. Of all the advice I’ve received, it feels like the easiest to follow –– and even if it doesn’t wind back the clock for me, it will at least keep me sane and happy for the duration of my lifespan.
