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By Frank Bruni
Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
The fitness chain Equinox recently announced a new peak of pampering, a higher altitude of indulgence. It’s a deluxe membership called Optimize by Equinox, it costs about $40,000 a year and it comes with a sleep coach.
I know what tennis coaches do. They bark corrections at players whose serves stink. I know what football coaches do. They scream at referees about pass-interference calls.
But a sleep coach? I picture a bedside bully with a stopwatch and Sominex, demanding a sprint into R.E.M.: “You can do it! Breathe! Dream!”
According to a recent article about Optimize on CNBC.com, the sleep coach is actually more of a sleep consultant, conducting two private, half-hour sessions a month on snoozing like a pro, and belongs to a crew of coddlers including a twice-monthly nutrition coach and a thrice-weekly personal trainer. Their goal isn’t simply fitness or even wellness. It’s longevity. And that, apparently, takes a village. As well as a fortune.
More than a decade ago, I wrote about how “the places and ways in which Americans are economically segregated and stratified have multiplied, with microclimates of exclusivity popping up everywhere.” I mentioned special passes that sped big spenders to the front of amusement-park lines. About Uber echelons. And about Equinox, where, at that point, there were tiers of trainers with escalating hourly rates, and where eye-scanning technology determined who had paid for admission to special sanctums.
Could we possibly give people even more extravagant and obvious ways to advertise and, well, optimize their affluence? Equinox has answered that with a resounding yes and in a manner that reflects an intensifying obsession among the economic elite: eternal, or at least extended, youth.
It has long been the case that the rich live longer. They have access to better food, better medical care and other ingredients of, and inducements to, better health. But now, as an article in Axios this week explained, there’s a burgeoning longevity industry with “a growing gap between what’s available to wealthy consumers and everyone else.”
The wealthiest consumers of all have hatched or latched on to elaborate, exorbitant immortality schemes. The billionaire tech C.E.O. Bryan Johnson, 46, reportedly spends about $2 million a year on treatments intended to burnish his health and prolong his life; at one point, in the hope of reversing the aging process and in consultation with some 30 doctors, he received a series of plasma transfusions from young donors, including his teenage son. He stopped after not detecting any evidence that they were doing any good.
While income disparities in the United States have been unusually pronounced over recent decades, they’re nothing new. Nor is the awareness of Americans on the lower rungs of the economic ladder that the higher rungs can be fantastically cushy, posh perches.
But the present versions of cushiness and poshness are distinctive in number, variety and specificity: There’s no corner of American life that cannot be gilded, no minor inconvenience or major frustration at which heaps of money cannot be thrown, no service that cannot be tweaked or........