Once thought to be a balance between genetic lottery and lifestyle, it is now seen as a race for privileges that allow for earlier diagnoses, halting processes and reversing damage. And all of this comes at a premium price
Let’s get this out of the way: being old is certainly not a status symbol. We live in a society where the value of everything plummets after the age of 50, but where, paradoxically, the struggle to extend the limits of life by trying to reverse biological aging has become the latest religion. It’s called longevity.
His followers have everything they need to nurture a new creed: a divine word, longevity —the English term is colonizing digital marketing everywhere—; an aspirational metric: 120-150, the number of years that, according to various studies, the latest one published in Nature, mark the limits of the human lifespan; a doctrine: the Don’t Die philosophy, founded by the biohacker Bryan Johnson with the ambition of being “the most influential ideology in the world by 2027”; a common enemy: death, “the only cause capable of uniting all of humanity” (also Johnson’s words). Their messiah, who could be Johnson himself, but also the Harvard University geneticist David Sinclair or even the technocapitalist Peter Thiel. Any one of them is followed by their apostles, an elite willing to sacrifice themselves and be guinea pigs for all the new procedures.
The latest Future of Wellness report from the consulting firm McKinsey highlights that for 60% of people, aging well is “a top priority,” regardless of the treatments they can afford. In its survey, 70% of consumers in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 85% of those in China, indicated that in 2024 they purchased more products from the healthy aging category than in previous years. McKinsey also points out that customers in the global wellness market, valued at two trillion dollars and curiously dominated by more millennials and Gen Zs than boomers, are reluctant to take too many leaps of faith and are looking for therapies backed by scientific evidence whose results can be verified in the short term. “Not everyone is willing to wait half a century to see whether supplements deliver on their promises,” the authors note.