How this US multimillionaire’s cult-like Don’t Die movement made me rethink my reason for living

My survival instincts are working fine, as far as I can tell. I sleep when I’m tired, eat when I’m hungry, drink when I’m thirsty, try to go for an annual health screening, and look out for oncoming traffic before crossing the road. 
And yet, no matter how hard I try, I simply cannot wrap my head around American tech tycoon Bryan Johnson’s mission in life: Don’t die. 
The 47-year-old multimillionaire was in Singapore in mid-September to talk about his Don’t Die philosophy – a fringe movement that has gained a cult-like following among longevity enthusiasts around the world – at the Don’t Die Summit. And while I couldn’t relate to his decidedly zealous quest to defy ageing, I was curious about his previous headline-grabbing life choices.
Johnson, a former Mormon, made the news last year for receiving blood transfusions from his teenage son. He’s since abandoned the controversial plasma-swapping practice, apparently de rigueur among the uber-wealthy who want to retain their youth, due to a lack of results. 
But unlike human mortality, excellent SEO is forever. This vampiric method is aligned with his personal brand online. The Los Angeles-based entrepreneur, who sold his credit card processing company Braintree Venmo to PayPal for US$800 million in 2013, is also known for spending a couple million dollars each year to fight biological ageing.
At the heart of Johnson’s Don’t Die philosophy is a health and wellness behavioural framework called Blueprint. It’s a system of practices from sleep habits to supplement intake that he spent the past three years developing, and he believes this “algorithm” takes care of him better than he can himself. 
He also generously shares the details of this rigorous and rigid regime for free online, so anyone can join his quest for “life extension”. This includes waking up at 4.30am, eating all his meals before 11am, and going to bed at 8.30pm every day without fail, as well as consuming more than 100 daily supplements and exercising for at least an hour every day. 
The result of adhering to his algorithmic routine? Johnson’s speed of ageing is slower than 99 per cent of 20-year-olds and his “nighttime erections” that last 179 minutes are “better than the average 18-year-old”, among other humble achievements he lists online.
To be fair, I appreciate the essence of Don’t Die and Johnson’s attempt to break down the lofty ideology into everyday habits that produce tangible change. But while this extreme biohacking lifestyle is all well and good for one man – it is his money and life after all – he wants as many people as possible to get onboard. And for better or worse, I am very bad at following what people tell me to do even if it’s supposedly good for me, unless I can see the purpose of every action.
I initially hoped the Don’t Die Summit could answer the most important question: Why does anyone want to live longer than necessary? 
But perhaps what I really wanted to find out was why I don’t.
In a bid to resolve my looming existential crisis, I paid S$260 to attend the one-day summit, setting aside my scepticism to try and understand a community whose beliefs I suspect are often ridiculed. But barely an hour in, Johnson’s faith in artificial intelligence (AI) that underpins his stringent system for life had me further doubting my once-unquestionable will to live. 
For the opening act, Johnson got five participants on stage for a conversation to flesh out “the why behind Don’t Die”, at the same time inviting the audience to ponder their own answers to his questions. 
“If you could have an AI algorithm that promises to give you the best mental and physical health, but you have to follow everything it says, would you say yes or no?” he asked confidently. 
He was, of course, referring to his Blueprint framework, which “measures all of Johnson’s 70+ organs”, with his “diet and routine being determined by those measurements”, according to a media factsheet on the website. “His body and science – not the wishes of his mind – design his protocol.”
Perhaps I was slowly swayed by Johnson’s somewhat admirable nonchalance towards non-believers and online bullies, of which he has amassed an army thanks to his polarising philosophy. I started to see his reasons for his intense anti-ageing approaches – “gene therapy” for epigenetic age reduction, the flavourless meals I tried that had me lusting for a bag of chips, and even his daily fitness plan that would put any Hyrox champion to shame.
To me, the most unrealistic part of the Don’t Die lifestyle was instead his inflexible sleep schedule. Several audience members also pointed out that maintaining daily consistency in sleep time was near impossible when, say, you wanted a social life or you had young kids. 
But Johnson was adamant that there were activities he could do with friends before 7.30pm, and while he may not lead a conventional social life, he had one. All it took was making sleep his top priority.
“Reframe your identity. You are a professional sleeper. Your bedtime is the most important appointment of the day every day. Don’t be late for bedtime. Respect yourself,” he advised.
He also sets aside an hour of wind down time, beginning at 7.30pm. “Sleep Mode Bryan is in charge” from that time, he said. “If I have an idea at 7.31pm, Sleep Mode Bryan says: ‘Ambitious Bryan, that’s a good idea, thank you, but I’ll deal with it tomorrow.’ If you don’t distinguish between day self and sleep self, you’re going to ruminate about all these things.” 
Plus, the last meal of the day is “the most consequential thing” to getting good sleep. So he eats his last meal at 11am, he stated matter-of-factly, leaving me both fascinated and unnerved by his single-minded willingness to bend to an almighty algorithm.
I couldn’t quite pinpoint the source of my discomfort with Blueprint’s arguably noble mission to help people live healthier, longer, happier lives – until an audience member boldly questioned why Johnson felt the human race was so important in the first place that our species shouldn’t die. 
Then I also had my answer to why I wouldn’t want to live longer than necessary, at least not via such exacting methods that I felt missed the very point of living. 
I am all for wanting to prolong one’s existence out of sheer zest for life. I just couldn’t get behind the drastic measures that stem from the hubris of believing one could – and should – fight death.  
Still, I recognised that my stubborn scepticism and Don’t Die’s staunch supporters were perhaps opposite sides of the same coin. 
To spread the Don’t Die lifestyle and shift the social zeitgeist, it was important to be “uncompromising about your perceived weirdness”, one speaker said, in complete earnestness. “A small number of people who are completely inflexible can get pretty far.”
That sounds like something a serial killer would say, I remember thinking, only to later stumble upon a drink in the lobby aptly named “Patrick Bateman drink”. (It was made of cucumber juice, coconut water and mint.)
Patrick Bateman, the serial killer protagonist in literary cult classic American Psycho, was originally seen as a satirical embodiment of the moral bankruptcy in a hyper-capitalist society. But he has somehow been given a new – completely unironic – lease of life as an archetype of the “sigma man”, a lone wolf type whose focus is on self-mastery.
Unsurprisingly, a character who denounces social norms to the highest degree seemed to be the ideal anti-hero for the Blueprint crowd.
In another question similarly grounded in Johnson’s belief that AI, particularly Blueprint, will save humanity from ourselves, he asked the audience if it was possible that we “don’t know what to do”. 
The subtext was that if humans don’t know what to do, the ethically and morally right decision would be, clearly, to obey tech-driven systems that were tailored around optimising every aspect of our life. After all, Blueprint seemed to represent a cardinal Silicon Valley style of management mantra: If you can measure it, you can manage it.
Yet, there are things that contribute to longevity which can’t be measured, like spirituality, creativity and happiness, some in the audience argued. “You can live a long life but have a poor quality of life,” one said.
Although it is possible humans don’t know what to do, I don’t believe automatically knowing exactly what to do should be the point of life. The idea of not having to constantly decide how to attain optimal health levels may sound like a lazy girl’s dream, but I felt a stronger pull to exercise my free will. Being able to choose, even if it’s the “wrong” choice, was crucial for my sense of purpose, I realised. 
This might be what Don’t Die advocates would term “self-destructive behaviour” – a judgement that, I was quickly learning about myself, I was absolutely fine with.
I tried to keep an open mind throughout the day, even as I sensed an undercurrent of “healthism” at the summit. This describes a set of attitudes and beliefs that health is the most important pursuit in life and that an individual’s health is solely within their control and their personal responsibility. A “healthist” would hence likely judge people through the prism of one’s health status.
But as I took the time to listen to more longevity enthusiasts and speakers try to evangelise me into Don’t Die, I realised that one man’s Black Mirror was another man’s The Good Place. While I feared Johnson’s Don’t Die and Blueprint proposed a lifestyle too dystopian for me, who’s to say my natural scepticism towards alternative ideologies wasn’t another person’s version of hell?
For now, when it comes to taking life advice from multimillionaires worth around US$400 million, I resonate more with Kanye West’s: “Nothing in life is promised except death.”
Ironically, the summit may just have achieved its purpose with probably its biggest sceptic that day. I thought I was rather determined to stay alive. Turns out I just want to live.