Remember You Must Die (And Get Wrinkles)

Immunity as Metaphor Part 3

Neurotoxins like Botox are FDA-approved to treat wrinkles as well as temporarily prevent them from forming. These injections do not delay aging, but by preventing the loss of beauty—perhaps more importantly, the loss of confidence—that comes with aging, they might as well.

Jia Tolentino wrote in 2019 about the emergence of “Instagram Face,” that “single, cyborgian face” of modern beauty, and the constant work that goes into maintaining it: “Ideals of female beauty that can only be met through painful processes of physical manipulation have always been with us, from tiny feet in imperial China to wasp waists in nineteenth-century Europe. But contemporary systems of continual visual self-broadcasting—reality TV, social media—have created new disciplines of continual visual self-improvement.” 

Rereading this essay in 2024, I am struck by the natural comparison between foot binding, waist binding, and Botox. Botox paralyzes the face, creating and freezing an image of youthful beauty. This freezing, like other kinds of beauty-binding, both manipulates the body into an unnatural ideal and stabilizes it.

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We pursue stability to repress the grotesque. The grotesque body, the real body, is always changing, breathing the world in and out of itself. It turns food into flesh and excrement, it merges with other bodies and gives birth, it swells and heaves, it decays and disappears so the cycle can begin again. The monumental body is the disgusted denial of all that: It is smooth and impenetrable, unchanging, stagnant, and the barriers between it and everything else are heavily policed.

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The Review of Beauty author Jessica DeFino wrote in “Everyone Is Botoxed & No One Is Horny” about the mounting evidence that neurotoxins get in the way of intimacy. In a 2023 study published in Scientific Reports, botulinum toxin type A was observed via functional MRI to alter how the amygdala processes images of emotional faces. The authors hypothesized that, since we understand the emotions of others by almost-imperceptibly mimicking their expressions, paralyzing the facial muscles involved in expression can interrupt human communication.

The “paradox of Botox,” DeFino argued, is that we get it to feel beautiful and confident, which is meant to improve our lives, but what we are actually doing is feeding the machine that kills our confidence in the first place and “limiting our potential to connect and communicate and empathize with others,” which is what makes life meaningful.

That neurotoxins dull recipients’ ability to relate emotionally to other people strikes me as an unconscious fringe benefit, another stabilizing bind: Relating authentically to another requires authentic embodiment, a mutual acknowledgement that we are both vulnerable nests of flesh, effervescent soap bubbles, brief candles.

Putting on an artificially ageless face prevents me from having to see the dying one in the mirror-screen and in the mirror of another person. The whole monumental body project is aimed at this defense, from erasing the signs that our bodies exist in space and time rather than a two-dimensional cyberparadise, to cutting us off from the human connectedness that would shatter this illusion.

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As I have explored in this immunity series (here’s part one and part two), our culture pathologizes elements of the grotesque in hopes of making them disappear, with curing, treating, and preventing used euphemistically to talk about this repression. Most famously, hysteria. Most recently, obesity and aging, both of which blend the beauty imperative with the language of medicine to the tune of record-breaking profits.

In 2019, the World Health Organization approved a proposal that aging be recognized as a disease in the International Classification of Diseases 11th Revision, to enter into usage in 2022. The term “old age” was included under “general symptoms.” Following backlash from researchers in the geriatric and gerontological fields (bless them), the WHO replaced the symptom “old age” with “aging-associated decline in intrinsic capacity.”

Similar to how obesity is considered a disease instead of just a risk factor for disease, aging is now a disease state in itself, marking another large portion of the population as diseased based on a single number. Facilitating healthy aging would be a worthy pursuit, but between the lines of anti-aging science rhetoric is a refusal to accept that death is even a part of life. Take this blurb from Fight Aging!, a popular longevity science and advocacy blog: “Aging is an enemy. It saps our strength, cripples us, and eventually kills us.”

The emergent aging-is-a-preventable-disease industry benefits from the interest of tech entrepreneurs like Bryan Johnson, who sold Braintree Venmo to PayPal for $800 million in 2013 and is now dispensing those millions on Project Blueprint, a body project-turned-granola-brand that says the quiet part out loud with its curiously negative slogan, Don’t Die.

Johnson, who is now 46, claims that several years of “biohacking” have allowed him to arrest his body’s aging, even reverse it in some areas: He claims to have the heart of a 37-year-old and the lung capacity of an 18-year-old. He follows a strict vegan diet, orients his entire day around the achievement of perfect sleep, and takes 111 supplements a day. His detailed skincare routine includes weekly acid peels, laser treatments, microneedling, and microbotox injections.

Johnson calls himself “the most measured person in human history” and credits his successful de-aging to his willingness to surrender fully to the algorithm that is building the organ-by-organ prescription for perfect health.

On an episode of the Rich Roll podcast, Johnson demurred when asked if he really believes he won’t die. He talked at length about how the Blueprint endeavor is not a Faustian vanity project but a humanitarian one. He argued that humans’ most basic drive is to stay alive, so devoting ourselves entirely to this goal would bring about the end of war and climate change as well as obesity and wrinkles. The website for the Don’t Die community cries, “We are at war with death and its causes.”

(Human society has always celebrated the beauty of youth because it represents fertility, birth, life. Healthy societies do not find the opposite of youth off-putting since the presence of elders reifies the community’s prosperity. Societies that lack confidence in their longevity find the opposite of youth very off-putting since infertility, death and decay are threatening to a precarious community. At any rate, not dying does not seem like the same thing as living.)

For all Johnson’s evangelism on the potential of data and AI to save us from our own humanity, he is scaling his ideas with a website exactly like every other wellness product website on the internet: Take this quiz to be matched with the right drink powder for your health goals, which are definitely weight loss, more energy, better sleep, and firm, glowing skin.

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In the last fifteen minutes of the 2.5-hour podcast, the host jokes that it must be hard for Johnson to date. He does not eat after 11 a.m., he certainly cannot share a bed with anyone—“too big of a threat to the 100% [sleep score] streak.” Johnson admits that he wants a partner but cannot imagine a person being happy to join him in his intensely structured life. “I don’t know, I can’t imagine anybody putting up with me,” he says. “I must be intolerable on every front.” When I heard this revelation, I stopped where I was on my evening walk, stared into the black eye holes of a 12-foot plastic skeleton, and shed two tears for Bryan Johnson. 

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