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My Generation Is the First to Believe That Aging—and Perhaps Dying—Is Optional

Longevity influencers promise to extend our lives with a mix of evidence and shady science. I’m willing to give it a try

HEALTH / JULY/AUGUST 2026

My Generation Is the First to Believe that Aging—and Perhaps Dying—Is Optional

Longevity influencers promise to extend our lives with a mix of evidence and shady science. I’m willing to give it a try

PHOTOS BY BRANDON ALLEN

Published 6:30, JUNE 1, 2026

The email lands in my inbox and I immediately get nervous. It’s the same anxiety I remember from checking university exam scores or waiting for the verdict of a job interview. But this result feels even more personal; a negative outcome would be much harder to outrun. I am about to learn my biological age.

It has been a week since a nurse showed up to my Toronto condo, pricked my cubital vein, drew five vials of blood, and tagged me with a Band-Aid. I didn’t think I’d worry much about what she would find. I’m an elite athlete who runs the half marathon in one hour, three minutes, and ten seconds. My pace per kilometre felt like more than enough evidence that I’d live just about forever.

And then, last year, that stopped feeling like enough. I turned thirty in August, which puts me at the tail end of a generation of millennials who are officially considered old, or at least middle aged. Our health insurance premiums are rising. Bald heads dot my friend groups. One of my old college roommates, a national track and field champion, has arthritis. I once thought clipping myself into a harness 1,168 feet above the ground and doing the CN Tower EdgeWalk would be neat; it now sounds like a stupid idea.

These Father Time flybys remind me of my own mortality. But my generation is also the first to believe that aging—and perhaps even dying—is optional. Previous cohorts of adults hoped not to die. I feel like I can delay it. Others my age think they can prevent it altogether.

Death is being rebranded as a disease that can be treated. Harvard scientists are rejuvenating rats à la Benjamin Button. Companies are banking stem cells in cryotherapy, doing full genome testing, and offering blood transfusions to those willing to pay to stay young. A clip of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin musing about living to 150 circulated on X last fall. Tech entrepreneur and biohacker Bryan Johnson plans to live forever, and the extreme lifestyle (including taking more than 100 pills daily and doing blood transfusions with his father and son) he documents for millions of followers is making him one of the most influential cult leaders of our time.

Less esoteric is the availability of preventative medicine: full-body MRIs that detect diseases before they attack, hormone therapies, and companies like NiaHealth, which I trusted with my own blood work, analyzing your every metric to generate recommendations.

All the while, the benefits of exercise, healthy eating, and alcohol and cigarette ditching have been impressed upon the population. A combination of these factors has increased life expectancy in Canada by nearly fifteen years since 1950.

If you are alive and reading this, you are participating in the same race as I am: the one between your rate of aging and the speed of scientific discovery. Science has lagged behind the diseases it tried to cure: scurvy sufferers, diabetics, and lepers from centuries ago would have probably enjoyed different outcomes today.

Perhaps someone dying of cancer or complications from Alzheimer’s right now would fare better with access to the technology that might be invented twenty years into the future. To win the race is to live long enough for whatever problem we develop to be curable by the time it happens.

But here is the catch: much like in a running race, each participant invests differently. Some spring for the lightest, most expensive shoes; others pay a premium for cleaner nutrition and better coaching. A few, inevitably, take questionable performance-enhancing drugs. Others spend time, energy, and money on stuff that ends up not really working.

Soon, technological advancements may make it so that how long one lives depends almost exclusively on how much one spends—or cares to spend. For early-ish adults like me, this turns longevity into a philosophical problem as much as a biological one. How much control do I believe I have over the number of healthy years I’ll live—my so-called health span—and how much time, money, and attention am I prepared to devote to extending it?

Do I think humans will one day reach 130? 150? Beyond that? And if some of us do manage to stretch life toward the horizon of the infinite, the question lingers: Do I want to be among them?

I click to open my biometrics dashboard. The NiaHealth report—built from a stack of heart, metabolic, and blood data—informs me that, biologically, I am........

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