In my Blood Boy era

Archived from Jul 13, 2023:

Eternity is a weird concept, hey? We have a word for it, a vague idea of it, but I’m not sure a human brain can actually fully grasp it. It’s too big, too boundless to be meaningfully understood, neither cognitively nor emotionally. Eternity, in turn, gets tied up with the idea of life in a number of ways. Many religions stand on the foundational idea that there is an eternal peace or an eternal hell after our short mortal stay on the earth, and fiction frequently plays with the idea of immortality. In many instances, these explorations of immortality come to the conclusion that much of the beauty and joy we experience in life is precisely because it’s fleeting. Ultimately, when given some honest though, immortality usually strikes us as a curse.

I like going to the gym. I swear, this is going somewhere. “Like” is a pretty strong word; I will gripe and complain and send friends instructions to take care of my cat if I don’t make it out alive, but I have made a habit of it. Really, I do get a certain satisfaction of watching the weight numbers get heavier, the reps get higher. It’s pretty interesting to have a material indication of how much better you’re getting at something. I may, or may not, really like video games. What I hate is almost all gym related content that lives online. Be smaller, be more toned, blah blah blah. It’s all pretty redundant, particularly when you’re being targeted as a woman. So much of the content geared towards women is about not getting “bulky”, about staying small, about making sure your diet is right, so that you never gain an ounce of fat, but honestly, I work out so I can be hungry enough to eat more during the day. There might be a few other perks, but that’s the main reason. I have written about my love of food and cooking, and I don’t want to shame other people for how they live, but if you’re denying yourself the joy of eating well and indulging in all life has to offer under some idea of “living longer”, what’s the point? To be miserable, longer? To operate under a set of strict rules that deny you happiness for…longer? I dislike so much health advice; basically any time it goes beyond suggesting moving your body in ways that feel good and fuelling your body in ways that feel satisfying, spiritually and physically. I am a firm believer in comfort food, and I am a firm believe in finding joy in your life over seeking validation from strangers.

So what’s up this week? There’s eternity, to a degree, there’s immortality, in fantasy, and there’s people obsessed with denying themselves the experiences offered by life in the name of living longer.

Well, there’s this guy, Bryan Johnson (look, I know this has nothing to do with anything but I HATE that his name is BRYAN JOHNSON. Get a real name, man). He harvests his son’s blood and injects it into himself under some misguided notion it will make him younger. He spends enormous amounts of his limited mortal life having his colon scanned, having his blood tested and eating that saddest smoothies you’ve ever heard of. I am so hesitant to actually link any of this guy’s stuff here. So, here’s a deeply depressing quote:

At 8:30 am, I intake 2,250 calories for my only meal for the day. I call it 1:23:100: one meal, 23 hour fast, 100% optimal nutrition [1].

Please, do not waste your time actually reading his blogs. They’re just that, blogs. It’s not based in science and there’s not really any physical proof for the “blueprint” method he preaches:

That’s a buff 45 year old. It is wild to me he thinks he doesn’t look 45, he looks good for 45, but come on. (Fun update: while I was writing this, and after a lot of articles pointing out how scientifically baseless this whole practice was, Bryan has apparently stopped bloodletting his son.) Now, I’m never actually going to link his scam of a website here, but I do need you to know that it is deeply hilarious. It is laden with nonsense; completely unfounded claims of reversing 31 years of aging. Again, that is a 45 year old, not a 14 year old. Can we be serious, for one fucking second? This man is allegedly so smart he has earned his millions of dollars according to the society we live in, yet he spends it on a fruitless pursuit because he is afraid of the thing that comes for us all. How cowardly, how egotistical, how boring. We divine life from it’s fleeting quality, from the ephemeral state we all live in. Imagine spending all of your potential seeking more time to find potential you could never truly be grateful for. What a waste, the whole thing exhausts me. Don’t so many things? It seems like a theme in these. And you know what, I’m going to do you a favour and not even get into the inherent eugenics of modern weird tech bros. Hell, I’ll even spare you extrapolation about how this dumbass behaviour feeds into baseless antisemitism. Instead, let’s talk about modern vampires.

The process of getting plasma replacements is not new, it’s something people have been doing to save themselves from crippling diseases for a long time. As a matter of fact, there’s a book, Blood Money by Kathleen McLaughlin where she documents not only the deeply predatory business of plasma extraction in the US, but her own experience receiving plasma infusions for the vast majority of her life to treat a rare nerve disease. She makes it abundantly clear she is certainly not aging in reverse. Amongst her own experience, she outlines the very real business that is plasma extraction in the United States, because it is one of five countries in the world where companies are allowed to monetize plasma donations. If you go to the Red Cross in the US, you can only donate plasma a handful of times a year. If you go to a private clinic, you can go over a hundred times per year. The scars of frequent donors, looking for money to make ends meet, are frequently mistaken for track marks. A modern utopia, built upon the foundation of bloodletting. Now, I said I wasn’t going to talk about conspiracies, but it is, indeed, one of the things McLaughlin invariably had to confront. For the blissfully uninitiated, one of the current conspiracies floating about the digital ether is that politicians and the rich harvest the blood of terrified children to drink “adrenochrome”. It’s modern day blood libel conspiracy. Make no mistake, it is nothing more than barely repackaged antisemitism. Yet, when you live as a person who medically needs the (donated) blood of others to survive, it is of course something that will occupy a lot of your time and research. And this is where I find the ridiculous behaviour of the likes of Bryan to move from outlandish to reprehensible. They are so obsessed with avoiding their own mortality that they do not notice, let alone feel remorse, for the larger consequences of their actions. They feed dangerous cultural narratives, they deny science if it doesn’t align with what they want it to be. They are self obsessed, petulant children, so devoid of purpose and love that they can do little but obsess over their own mortality, rather than look at the revolting legacy they carve and leave behind. I find it profoundly repulsive. To seek the heart in such a material way as blood, rather than deeply, delicately and carefully as the very real form of love is something I hope, I pray, I never understand.

A Kafka palette cleanser felt necessary after this week. As always, thank you for joining me, friends. I make no promises that next week won’t be talking about the untethered, nebulous nature of modern cults. I also make no promise it will actually be about that, if I get too bummed out.