Why are all these longevity bros such total snowflakes?

Say what you like about the ancient Roman elite, but they made being rich sound fun. Days spent being waited on hand and foot, interspersed with trips to the baths with the lads, before evenings feasting against a backdrop of music and dance. Sure, your largesse likely depended on the backbreaking labour of other people, but what else is new? At least life at the top was a riot.

Fast forward eighteen or nineteen centuries, and the plutocracy seems not only determined to have as lousy a time as possible, but incapable of withstanding the smallest deviation from their spartan-like regimes.

Take Bryan Johnson, for instance, the multi-millionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist who says he’s devoting his life to figuring out how to live forever, and who recently tweeted that he’d had to cancel his morning’s workout due to “wrecked sleep”. The culprit? An accidentally caffeinated cup of coffee he’d consumed the day before.

It’s a poor return for a man who’s spent millions allegedly optimising his health, and claims to have the lung capacity and physical endurance of an 18-year-old. He’s far from alone, though. Back in May, a clip went viral showing 34-year-old Steven Bartlett, the youngest-ever investor on “Dragon’s Den” and the host of the Diary of a CEO podcast, relay the chilling effects of a few glasses of wine after a year of sobriety.

He declared that it had “ruined three days” of his life, leaving him unable to sleep properly, work out, or eat well. He even “podcasted worse”. Similarly, multimillionaire productivity guru Tim Ferriss, who wrote “The Four Hour Body,” a guide to “becoming superhuman,” has bemoaned that a single martini with his brother, whom he doesn’t see often, “shattered” his sleep.

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So why, if they’re such prime specimens (Bartlett’s first port of call in the morning is his supplement cupboard, followed by a blood ketone measurement), do these gladiators buckle at the faintest breeze?

Well, for starters, it’s probably important to distinguish between health and “wellness”. Health is something on which we have had clear and fairly basic guidance for a while now. “Wellness”, on the other hand, is a concept that often masquerades as health, but seems to metamorphose according to the whims of whichever multimillionaire has the mic, or whichever quack they spoke to last.

A BBC investigation found that fifteen “health”-focused episodes of A Diary of a CEO contained an average of 14 harmful claims that contradicted overwhelming scientific evidence, and went largely unchallenged by Bartlett. Johnson micromanages every minute of every day to maximise longevity, consults with teams of doctors, maintains a rigid diet and exercise regime, and has described himself as “the healthiest man alive.” Yet this summer, he announced that he’d been diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis, a condition he characterised as the “stomach eating itself.” That’s awful and merits sympathy – but his attitude about it is telling.

In a follow-up post addressing the cruel schadenfreude-themed response to his diagnosis, Johnson compared himself to other “immortalists” who weren’t appreciated by their contemporaries, like Gilgamesh, Asclepius and Jesus Christ. He concluded: “What if I didn’t deserve it? And what if I am your ally, and not a threat?”

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No one “deserves” to be unwell, but Johnson certainly appears to believe that health is – or ought to be – decided on a merit system. And whether he’s rejoicing in his college-strength nighttime erections or discovering an unpleasant autoimmune condition, it never seems to occur to him that his is not the central experience of all humankind. Again and again, he describes death as the “omnipresent concern of the human race” without stopping to consider that, for most people, many other hurdles lie between us and the final boss.

Why did Ferris dwell on the shattered sleep, rather than the long-overdue catch-up with his brother? Why couldn’t Johnson just get over the coffee? Why wasn’t Bartlett able to accept a briefly imperfect diet as the price for a fun evening? Perhaps because this is a man who boasts about being in a WhatsApp chat with ten friends that tracks how much exercise they each do, then evicts the one that does the least every month. A man who cannot tell the difference between a group of pals and a cult. Perhaps his barometer for what constitutes fun is just deeply broken.

My theory is that when immortality, or even just some nebulous sense of physical “optimisation” feels within touching distance, the little things both cease to matter and matter a great deal. Why not skip that glass of wine with a friend – you can catch up with them in a few decades! Meanwhile, a poor night’s sleep isn’t just a fact of life; it’s a challenge to the belief that you’re a breed apart.

For the super wealthy, there’s little to fear but death. So that fear consumes their days.