To Dilate Time

Becoming experientially old, not biologically young

Illustration by Antra

Bryan Johnson is aging at a rate of 0.76 years per year. This means that his ‘biological age’ increases by 277 days for every 365 ‘chronological days’ that he lives. His health and longevity protocols cost him two million dollars per year.

You may already know this because Bryan Johnson’s quest to live forever has earned him appearances on the world’s biggest podcasts and profiles in the world’s biggest magazines. Where his desire not to die was once reported with sneering, satirical derision, it is now explored with self-interested curiosity by a popular culture that seems increasingly to share his obsession with the possibility of age reversal. Last month, the top selling book in America was about metabolic health. Last year, the most followed and shared podcast in the world was the densely scientific and health-focused Huberman Lab. 

Bryan Johnson is in the process of becoming a certain kind of household name. With his upright posture, and his milky, wrinkle-free skin, and his flat stare—Johnson now mixes with the Kardashians, now offers a pale and uncanny alternative to the notion of beauty that Kim and Khloé popularized over the past decade. A lot has been written and said about the man and his quest, but one thing that I have not yet heard anyone mention is that there is actually a way to age at half his pace for 1% of the price.

During the past two years—a period during which Johnson has ‘aged’ only one and a half years—I lived five years. Or something like that. Perhaps even more. Perhaps much more.

This is a not totally scientific claim, but let me show you what I mean. 

Over the past two years I: married the love of my life and threw a three day off-grid wedding festival in the Sierra Nevada backcountry with 120 of my closest people. I cycled with my wife for six months across nine countries in Europe, circuitously, along country roads, camping out of panniers, noticing hundreds of discrete things per day, discussing them and writing about them and solidifying them into long-term memories. I moved to a new city, made new friends, and remodeled a century-old bungalow—learning to drywall, tile, paint, demo, and refinish floors. I read 45 paperback books, beside streams and rivers and under groves of Ponderosa Pine. I rafted under the towering red walls of the Grand Canyon with my best friends, and through the white water and ice floes of a Grizzly Preserve in the deepest reaches of the Yukon Territory. I meditated for ten hours per day in the shadow of Mount Saint Helens, over ten consecutive days, without reading, writing, or speaking a single word. I made detailed comparisons of single-origin espresso at fifteen of the finest Melbournian cafes. I hiked 15,000 vertical feet around Mount Rainier and made a point of noticing not just the effortlessly impressive Redwood groves, or the massive dome of glacial ice that towered photogenically over us from nearly every angle—but also of noticing the spore patterns on the mushrooms that grew under those redwoods, and the filtered light through low lying fern, and the life that found a way in the rolling rabble of moraine that filled the canyon floors. I spent two weeks staying with strangers and eating out of roadside farm stands and bicycling across four states in New England during peak autumn, under the luminescent glow of fall foliage. I experienced two winters worth of backcountry ski outings, cross-country ski marathons, and powder filled first runs at alpine ski resorts in the Northern Cascades and the Canadian Rockies. All of this, interpolated by long, late dinners with cherished friends and family, full of stimulating conversations and skin-contact wine. All of this, and frankly much, much more.

Compare the multitude of experiences above to Johnson’s daily calendar flipping routine, in which one day mirrors the next with a sameness that doesn’t merely flirt with but seems to strive for the obsessive compulsive. A daily rhythm that begins at 4:30AM and ends, incontrovertibly, alone in bed by 8:30PM. A rhythm that consists of daily body composition measurements, standardized indoor workouts,^¹ and a two hour evening procedure consisting of skin care, dental care, and ‘relaxation time.’  

Compare the handmade pasta dishes my wife and I ate while bicycling across Italy, the liver patés in Denmark, the pickled herring in Latvia, the beef heart stew in Oregon, and the slices of pizza in Naples and Brooklyn—compare the depth of the associations and memories created by these culinary experiences, to Bryan Johnson’s diet across those two years: a daily ordeal consisting of the same exact thing, always 1,977 calories, always a pomegranate pudding in the morning, always broccoli and lentils in the early-afternoon (sometimes blended), always supplemented by powderized nutrients and always complemented by an AM dosage of more than 100 pills. All of this, consumed by a daily dinnertime of 11 o’clock. In the morning.

In considering our contrasting approach, it seems to me that there are two ways to think about increasing the length of one’s life: the first is to slow down the body clock—to decrease the amount of biological aging that occurs in chronological time by pursuing risk mitigation and health measurement efforts to their extreme limits. And the second is to dilate time—to increase the amount of perceived time that occurs as time passes chronologically, by increasing the amount of memorable experience that occurs over a given period of time. I call this ‘experiential time.’

The modern anti-aging and longevity movement embraces the former approach, and Johnson has been its foremost pioneer and poster child. At great expense, he is in the process of extending his life by aging more slowly—25% more slowly than a normal person. The major trade off is that the further down this continuum you go, the more you must replace experiences with clinical routines and scientific structure. This Groundhog Day-like existence results in far fewer memorable experiences per calendar year, and when there are far fewer memorable experiences for the brain to process, the perception of time contracts. In other words: time passes more quickly. In a best case scenario, someone pursuing longevity through perfectly-dosed monotony will live a much longer life than the average person, while feeling like he lived a very short one.

My approach to living longer is to increase perceived lifespan by living 2.5 years worth of ‘experiential time’ per year. I believe that the best, cheapest, and most thrilling way to live for 200 years is to do it in 80 or 90 experientially rich years, rather than in 400 experientially hollow years. 

Of course, the knee-jerk protest is that I’m just making stuff up—that what I’m proposing is subjective and arbitrary and unscientific—that there is no such thing as ‘experiential time’ or ‘experiential age.’ But maybe there should be, and in fact, maybe we already intuitively know that there is.

We know, for example, that ‘experiencing’ more in life isn’t merely fulfilling; it also leads to the feeling of having lived longer. Research has repeatedly shown that the perception of time stretches when the brain processes more details and emotions—and that rich and rewarding experiences feel longer in the moment and in retrospect than monotonous ones. This perceptual phenomenon is so well-studied and validated that it has its own coinage: the ‘oddball effect.’² It also corroborates research which shows that as people age they report feeling that time passes more quickly. The widely accepted explanation for this is that the number of novel experiences typically decreases as one ages, which means that the brain has less new, rich, and meaningful stimuli to process.

Finally, it has been shown through studies on attention and ‘temporal estimation’ that when subjects are fully engaged in a meaningful task, they overestimate the amount of time that has passed. In other words: when people are working on interesting and stimulating things, they become absorbed in the work and they tend to perceive time as having stretched.

Isn’t it fair to say, then, that a life lived in ongoing contact with new stimuli and rich, challenging, meaningful experiences will feel longer? And if a life legitimately feels longer, how much different is that than a long life that feels short. Again, which is more appealing?

‘Experiential time’ is far from far fetched. It’s the concept that explains why all time is not created equal. Explains why just about anyone would trade 28 safe, ordinary, routine-filled days, for 7 days of exploring a new country with a best friend. It’s the term that explains why we’d readily trade some of our time at 4 to 1. At 10 to 1. Maybe even sometimes at 100 to 1.

What we should want is to be experientially old, not biologically young. There is a way to harmonize the two without becoming deranged by the constant measurement and management of biomarkers, without resorting to a transhuman diet, or an antisocial sleep schedule, or a fear of dying. The way we currently think about longevity mostly misses the forest for the trees. It measures age based primarily on ‘biological time’—on relative organ and ‘biomarker’ health—a proxy for expected lifespan, which can’t even guarantee a longer life.³  ‘Experiential age,’ on the other hand, can guarantee the perception of having lived for longer, through a rich abundance of memories and impressions.

On some level, what I’m getting at is fundamentally about a more considered weighting of quality and quantity.

What is the point, after all, of desiring a long life? The thing to want is a good life—to flourish. And so the thing to do is to be reasonably, but not obsessively, concerned about your health, and to optimize for ‘experiential age.’ 

The way to optimize for experiential age is to pay closer attention to everything. To stop scrolling so much and stop worrying so much and stop planning and empire building so much, and start going on walks around your neighborhood and start noticing things that were always there that you never noticed before. You begin noticing more things, big things and small things, then you begin contemplating those things with childlike awe—you take photos of them, or draw pictures of them, or write about them. And you talk about them with other people. And you keep expanding this circle of noticing—beyond your neighborhood into the next neighborhood over. Into the next state over. Into other countries, other continents. 

Every day, we can compress time by letting our day pass unremarkably, unmemorably; and every day, even during the busiest or boringest days of our lives, there are an infinite number of things to notice, and there is an opportunity to expand the perception of time by noticing and contemplating those things. 

You can get more years in your life by living like Bryan Johnson, in a food-is-fuel, sleep-is-job-number-one, risk-mitigation vacuum—or you can get more life in your years by deeply immersing your attention in the world around you, and by pursuing interesting and rich life experiences. Either way you’ll end up in a similar place perceptually. And, in spite of his objective and his war chest, it is my prediction that eventually Johnson will die. And when his quest comes to an end his biological age will be irrelevant, and his chronological age might look impressive on a tombstone, but his experiential age is the thing that he will be contemplating as he takes his final breaths—and like everyone else in that moment, it is the thing he will wish he had more of.

Thanks to Michael Dean for feedback on this essay.

1

Bryan Johnson working out indoors.

2. It is named the oddball effect after a time perception study where subjects were presented with a series of identical stimuli, followed by a single unexpected stimulus. Subjects were then asked which stimulus lasted longer, and they invariably say that the unexpected stimulus, or "oddball", lasted longer, when in reality the passage of time for each stimulus was the same.

3. It can’t do anything to limit the possibility of a fatal car crash, for instance.