We do not know exactly how the new trend of longevity at all costs began. But we know quite well who embodied it, amplified it, and turned it into spectacle: Bryan Johnson, the American entrepreneur who has become the symbolic face of contemporary biohacking, an icon of the new Western obsession with controlling the body, age, and death.

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From that point onward, as often happens, the market smelled an opportunity.

The pharmaceutical industry, aesthetic medicine, nutraceuticals, longevity clinics, wearable devices, supplements, monitoring apps, dietary protocols, investment funds, wellness brands, medicalized resorts: each segment began to offer its own idea of longevity. Ideas that appear different on the surface, yet share one single denominator: money.

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The first consequence is philosophical even before it is economic. A very precise idea takes shape in our minds: longevity can be bought.

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Once this concept has been installed in the collective imagination, especially among an audience already intoxicated by the belief that money can do anything, the game becomes almost banal. An offer is created. A desire is produced. A promise is packaged. Everything is dressed in scientific language. And people are led to believe that, by purchasing the right protocol, the right molecule, the right check-up, the right treatment, the right device, they may gain access to the Olympus of the immortals.

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This is not the place to list all the deceptions into which many fall with enthusiasm. After all, everyone is free to do whatever they want with their money. And stupidity often seems directly proportional to the size of one’s bank account.

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But the problem runs deeper. What is happening is the birth of a new, glossy, technological form of eugenics 2.0: the idea that a privileged group, through money, can separate itself from the common destiny of human beings and move closer to a dimension of immortality through medical, experimental, or pseudo-scientific protocols. All of this, naturally, in the name of science.

Ah, our dear old science! Foucault, in The Archaeology of Knowledge and later in The History of Sexuality, Volume I: The Will to Knowledge, showed with great lucidity how every form of knowledge is also a device of power. Science never exists in a neutral vacuum. It is produced within institutions, languages, interests, economies, and hierarchies. This does not mean denying its value, but recognizing that science, too, sees through its own apparatuses. And often it sees what power allows it, asks it, or funds it to see.

In the case of contemporary longevity, what much of medicine seems to see is, above all, one thing: the market.

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It is enough to walk into a pharmacy and observe the shelves, the products, the promises, the packaging, the recurring words: energy, immunity, anti-ageing, performance, detox, regeneration. Everything seems to suggest that the body is always lacking, always deficient, always in need of optimization, always waiting to be corrected.

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Then, suddenly, true longevity — the real kind, observed and documented in the Blue Zones — emerges and tears through the falsehood of this imaginary. Because none of the long-lived people encountered in the most authentic contexts of longevity relies on the discoveries that the market now sells as elixirs. No one lives to a hundred because they take the perfect molecule, the miraculous compound, the ultimate supplement, or the definitive genetic test.

There is no single “thing” that can guarantee longevity: No isolated food. No molecule. No protocol. No compound. No longevity gene.

 

There is, instead, a "how". A way of being in the world. A way of inhabiting the body. A way of living time. A way of relating to others. A way of belonging to an environment. And this is where the whole discourse changes radically.

Because this “how” does indeed have a cost. But it is a cost with a minus sign. It does not consist in adding, buying, accumulating, enhancing. It consists in removing. Removing everything that is excessive. Yes, remove the make-up, the perfumes, the accessories, the jewels, the car as a symbol of status, useless comforts, processed food, empty chatter, the people who drain your energy, mental schemes, conceptual cages, the superfluous products of modernity.

Remove luxury, even the small, daily, seemingly harmless kind.

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Remove also pressure, anxiety, performance, the cult of the performing body, useless jobs, social media, complacency, the need to appear, the need to please, the need to dominate. Remove the very idea of power. Remove the idea that money can save us. Remove everything that is truly inessential.

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Does it sound utopian? Perhaps. Does it seem impossible? Certainly, especially for those who fear that, once all this has been removed, they will find nothing left. Neither within themselves, nor outside themselves. But this is precisely where the decisive question begins.

 

Longevity, as emerges from anthropological research and from observations conducted in the contexts where it truly manifests, does not arise from accumulation, but from coherence. It arises from the ability to establish a deep relationship between the body, the environment, the community, and time. Longevity is not a product. It is not a performance. It is not a technology.
It is not a luxury. It is not a biological privilege that can be purchased. 

It is an embodied form of coherence.  It is the recognition of ourselves as interdependent, vulnerable, symbiotic beings, rooted in a natural and cultural environment. It is the capacity not to live against our body, against our time, against our place, against our own measure.

 

The Blue Zones show us precisely this: not a recipe, but an ecology of existence. Not a secret to be patented, but a form of life. Not an elixir, but a relationship.

This is why true longevity cannot be bought: it must be freed.

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Life resonates and expands only when we stop burying it beneath layers of superstructure. Only when we remove enough to finally hear what remains. And what remains, if we have the courage to reach it, may be the only true form of longevity possible: a life less full of things, but more full of meaning.