FT’s Jemima Kelly: Who wants to live forever?

Key topics:Life expectancy gains are slowing despite hype around radical longevityLongevity tech boom fuels products, ideologies, and risky health trendsObsession with living forever risks mental health, community, and meaning.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Jemima Kelly.It’s a funny thing. Just when scientists have started telling us that we in the developed world might have reached peak life expectancy, the idea that we can in fact beat science and keep extending our lifespans — perhaps obliterating such a notion as a lifespan entirely — has never been more hyped.A PNAS study published in August found there had been “a significant deceleration” in the pace of life expectancy gains among those of us currently living, “disrupting the long-standing trend of steady gains observed over the past 39 cohorts”. Another, published in Nature Aging the previous year, found that the proportion of people living to 100 in this century is unlikely to exceed 15 per cent for women and 5 per cent for men. Yet try telling that to the tech men. (And it does tend to be the males of the species who are particularly obsessed with extending their lifespans, while women are more concerned with, I regret, looking younger.) At the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, “longevity tech” appeared to be the hype vertical du jour. Among the highlights was a $899 “longevity mirror” that you stand in front of for 30 seconds while it calculates a score to tell you how well you’re ageing (as if standing in front of a regular mirror weren’t bad enough). Another was a $600 “longevity station” that measures your body composition and assesses your health across more than 60 “biomarkers” to give you a “longevity assessment”. .Read more:.Menopause’s secret – Longevity boost for humans and whales: F.D. Flam.There is clearly a market: global Google searches for “longevity” tripled over the course of 2025. And my inbox is positively brimming with longevity pitches. Would I like to attend an all-expenses-paid “Legends of Longevity” press trip to a private island alongside the ice (bath) man Wim Hof himself? (Alas, journalistic ethics precludes it.) Would I like to visit a “cool new longevity club” in Shoreditch? (I did go; it was very pleasant.) What about a gym and “recovery spa” that is “tapping into the growing interest in longevity”? (What was it tapping into before, if not people’s desire to live healthier and longer lives?)The idea of immortality is no longer confined to science fiction. Bryan Johnson, the former tech founder who has surely done more than anyone else to promote the idea that we can increase our lifespans indefinitely, told this newspaper last year that he wants his “Don’t Die” movement to be “the most influential ideology in the world by 2027”. Despots can now dream about ruling forever, rather than limiting their imagination to running a country for mere decades. A hot mic last September caught Vladimir Putin — who has been Russia’s president for 22 years so far — telling Chinese leader Xi Jinping that “human organs can be constantly transplanted, to the extent that people can get younger, perhaps even immortal”. Reassuring stuff. Trying to stay alive might sound like an axiomatically benign and risk-free pursuit. But not necessarily: medical experts warn that a fast-growing black market for peptides — amino acids that users take for longevity and “looksmaxxing” purposes — could be dangerous.And so obsessed have some become with extending their lives that a clinic in Switzerland has come up with a new mental health disorder (because we didn’t have enough already): “longevity fixation syndrome”. “People start giving up on things that are important for them,” the clinic’s founder said last month, comparing the syndrome to an eating disorder or a compulsive addiction. “The career can suffer, personal relationships can suffer.”There is a deep irony here: we know that social isolation is very bad for our health, that mental health is not separate from physiological health, and that chronic loneliness has as negative and life-shortening an effect as obesity or smoking. And yet developing personal relationships doesn’t seem to figure in most longevity bros’ five-hour morning routines.The obsession with longevity reveals a self-centered society that has become detached from community, and one that struggles to accept mortality and the fact that when we die is not something we can control, and is largely down to our genes. Longevity mania comes at a time when birth rates across the developing world are tanking. As Johnson put it, in “previous generations you have kids so that you can pass the torch, and now you have kids so that you can journey with them”.But it’s also, let’s face it, the latest way of selling products using the latest buzzword. Too bad you can’t sell longevity laughter: it might have life-lengthening properties but it isn’t as marketable as — and might interrupt — shoving 100 pills down your gullet. It also carries the risk of making you realise that actually, life is too important to waste it trying to live forever..© 2026 The Financial Times Ltd.

FT’s Jemima Kelly: Who wants to live forever?

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