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My Generation Is the First to Believe That Aging—and Perhaps Dying—Is Optional
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Published 6:30, JUNE 1, 2026 A technician at Bespoke Wellness plucks dozens of Alex Cyr’s hairs and places them in a petri dish. From there, they’ll be turned into stem cells.
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?
For this story, Cyr visited Bespoke Wellness Group in Toronto, one of several clinics that partner with preventative medicine start-up Acorn Biolabs.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 twenty-seven: three years younger than my chronological age. I feel momentarily virtuous and nearly hit a “share” button that would have broadcast the news to Instagram.
But the results come with prescriptions. The report suggests I eat more olive oil, seeds, and omega-3s; increase my fibre intake with vegetables, legumes, and whole grains; add more protein at breakfast. It also implores me to monitor my blood lipids once per year as my heart health is not perfect. That line lands with the most weight: heart disease runs in my family.
Staring at the numbers, I see the seduction of health metrics. Loose guidelines—don’t smoke, it’s bad for you—are replaced with decimal points and prognoses about my cholesterol: your LDL-C is 2.76 mmol/L, suboptimal, a key risk factor for atherosclerosis in the decades to come. Once I see it, I cannot excuse it away.
It’s not hard to understand why my generation thinks about death more than our parents did. When aging feels preventable, it becomes incumbent to stave it off. Like others my age, I drink less, rave less, and risk less than most postwar adults did before me. As a distance runner, it comes with the territory, but these are traits my counterparts share. On average, we also have less sex and get into fewer fatal car crashes. Now that we can so easily quantify our health, we want to show off our heart rate variability to our friends, post our meal prep and medals on Instagram, and brandish our marathon finish times on Strava. If ’80s kids romanticized Kurt Cobain’s burning out, many of us have come to prefer sticking around.
So here’s what I do to bolster my chances at a longer life: I visit Acorn Biolabs, a preventative medicine start-up in downtown Toronto. I sit in a cushy office chair as their lab technician plucks about fifty hairs from my scalp and places them in a petri dish, where they will be cultured for stem cells. Those cells are stored in a cryochamber at sub-zero temperatures. Right now, all those cells can do for me is superficial: promoting hair growth and stimulating the repair of skin cells. In the future, Acorn hopes to use them to treat a range of serious health issues.
They’ve already transformed hair follicle stem cells into progenitor cells, a crucial step toward rebuilding a person’s failing pancreas and treating diabetes. They plan to regenerate cartilage, neurons, and other internal organs in the same way. So I pay to store my cells in the hope that, for whatever problem I may have in, say, 2060, Acorn will know what to do. (The annual fee is $190.) At the very least, it quells my FOMO.
According to Drew Taylor, the University of Toronto PhD who co-founded Acorn in 2017, the best time to bank cells is when you are young and healthy, before you start to fear complications around the corner. More and more people in their thirties and even twenties are storing their DNA with Acorn. The company now has more than 200 partner clinics across North America. Even Bryan Johnson is a client, Taylor tells me. Not bad for a business that, to an extent, is built on a gamble.
There are other gamblers. David Sinclair, a Harvard geneticist, has shown that some aspects of aging in mice can be reversed by reprogramming how DNA is expressed, using specific proteins that can turn adult cells into stem cells. In these experiments, older animals began to show signs of younger cellular function, as damaged cells were nudged back toward healthier behaviour, suggesting that aging may not be a strictly one-way process but a biological program that can be reset.
We can think of the anti-aging world as two camps: prophets and wizards, a cleavage borrowed from the writer Charles C. Mann. The prophets believe that a long and healthy life can come only by a thousand cuts: eating healthily, sleeping consistently, avoiding alcohol and drugs for the most part, and doing things like banking cells as a precautionary measure. Prophets are all around us: they consume neuroscientist Andrew Huberman’s health podcast. They’ve likely read Outlive by physician Peter Attia and watched Dan Buettner’s Netflix documentary on Blue Zones—which focuses on parts of the world with an outsized number of centenarians. Prophets are the reason human longevity has improved for centuries. Those who believed in better sewage systems and modern medicine were prophets. Taylor is in this camp.
Then there are the wizards: those who trust that aging will be solved in a zero-to-one fashion, with a magic bullet, much like Ozempic for weight loss. In other words: while the prophets train and groom their horses, the wizards sit back and wait for the invention of the automobile. Sinclair scans more wizard-like.
If the flaw of wizards is a tendency toward magical thinking, prophets are prone to obsession and financial burden. The economy for longevity products and services is expected to break $27 trillion (US) by 2030. Some of it skirts the line of legitimacy: private MRIs costing north of $3,500 and yearly blood panels priced at $400. Then there’s genome sequencing that, at one point, was valued at up to $10,000 (US). These tests certainly have a place in evidence-based medicine, to diagnose an ailment or search for a specific issue. But it’s not always clear how much benefit or disease prevention these tests can really provide for someone who is already healthy.
The industry is also crowded with grifters. “Cryofacials” to protect the skin can go for $1,500, and online pharmacies-peddle $200 “stacks” of fringe products with scant scientific backing, like resveratrol, spermidine, or rapamycin, an immunosuppressant rumoured to have some anti-aging qualities.
As a consumer, I get it: If you don’t know what, exactly, will make the difference, wouldn’t you bet the entire house on everything? I’m already tempted to hedge my bets on Acorn by paying for full-body imaging, to get ahead of any health complications, or calling up one of several avant-garde Californian companies to do some genetic testing and ensure that I’m not particularly prone to a deadly disease. Even Taylor admits that not one treatment will keep people young.
“There is not one pill coming at the end of the day that will all of a sudden reset your cellular clock across your body—every cell, every metabolic part of wear and tear—and take away genetic abnormalities you may have,” he said. In the end, it’s a game of chance, where you’re better off stacking the odds in your favour.
For Cyr, banking his cells feels similar to saving for retirement. At Acorn, the lab manager pulls a rack of patient cells out of a cryogenic storage tank, releasing nitrogen vapour into the air.Many of my friends and colleagues put money into gym memberships, organic foods, and a bundle of life insurance policies. Shouldn’t it follow that they also bet on at least a number of targeted anti-aging protocols? For the most part, they don’t. In fact, I can think of several university-educated friends who would swallow the claim that death might one day be treatable as uncomfortably as they would the proposition that the Earth is flat. I do not tell them that I am hopeful about the former. I am also careful who I tell about the fact that my cells are banked or that I attended Johnson’s Don’t Die Summit in New York last year (for work, but still).
A survey of Americans found that only 41 percent of respondents thought that funding radical life-extension research is a good idea. That seems low, until you realize that anti-aging itself has become a political flashpoint.
Late last year, Johnson appeared on YouTube, sitting in a circle of twenty skeptics, each taking turns confronting him about his lifestyle and beliefs. “It’s easy when you’re rich—caring about not dying,” says one debater, named Chelsea. “You’re telling me, a normal human being, struggling financially, how I should be living my life, and there is something disconnected about that.” Longevity, Johnson argues, does not have to be pursued at his extreme level—it can be as simple as a consistent bedtime or less fast food. But by the end, it’s clear the argument was never just about million-dollar protocols. It was about who gets to imagine a future in the first place.
The anti-aging industry is not red pill but red pill coded. Kind of like Elon Musk going to Mars—or The Joe Rogan Experience. It embraces alternative thinking. It’s all over YouTube. Its loudest proponents are mostly men—women also partake but appear less keen to proselytize. And most importantly: it’s not for everyone.
Extending life is an ethical quagmire. Radical longevity will arrive as most breakthroughs do: unevenly priced, unevenly distributed, and unevenly lived. Not everyone will be able to afford the first drafts of immortality and cobble together -thousands of dollars for MRIs, cell storage, and endless vitamins. The top 1 percent might afford all of it; middle-class Canadians may choose one or two measures that interest them, like cell storage and red-light therapy, or biological age testing and collagen. The others will simply be out of luck. It makes the promise of anti-aging feel anti-egalitarian. We are marching toward a world where health outcomes between the haves and have-nots of society will be far more disparate than they already are. And we hurtle toward this reality at the expense of present-day peers.
I understand the outrage: Why should our best researchers and entrepreneurs focus their time and money on making the most fortunate live well into the 2100s while people right here and now cannot afford medication?
Then there is the industry itself, thriving on the oldest and most reliable of human fears, argues Raquel Correia, a physician and chief medical officer. Any market that claims to delay death, or abolish it altogether, is bound to attract bad actors fluent in the language of hope and anxiety. Correia recently catalogued the movement’s excesses on LinkedIn: expensive protocols, wrinkle-driven panic, endless supplement stacks, and dubious DNA tests—an ecosystem where the line between science and salesmanship grows increasingly difficult to see.
Much of the conversation around longevity now unfolds on social media, where influencers and opportunists often enjoy an advantage over scientists and researchers. The former succeed by being loud—by attaching themselves to new, sometimes controversial, products and turning attention into authority. The latter, by contrast, are constrained by caution and process. In that gap, the algorithm thrives on false certainty and boldness, rewarding sweeping claims and simple answers and serving them back to audiences as if they were consensus rather than conjecture.
But taking an ethical stance on longevity is more complicated than just denouncing it altogether. Academics like Carolyn Baker Ringel, a course instructor at the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, argue that pursuing longevity research has the potential to benefit everyone. Birth rates worldwide are dwindling, so having healthy people around for longer could improve workforce productivity and reduce the burden of care on younger generations. If aging one day becomes curable, perhaps preventing it can appear like a moral imperative—or at least an economic one.
More and more young people are preserving their cells in storage tanks like these. Hair follicle stem cells have already been used to create progenitor cells that can help repair the body.I still find it strange that anti-aging is seen in some circles as a taboo thing. Yes, there is a lot of money to be made and snake oil to sell, but many of these treatments sit on a long continuum of medical experimentation and progress. Not even 100 years ago, lobotomy was considered a reasonable treatment for psychosis. But we still treat psychosis today. We did not abandon the field because earlier interventions were crude or dangerous. We improved the science.
Feeling like we can control our health outcomes will come with weird side effects: people will bankrupt themselves on preventative measures. Some will make themselves miserable forgoing the pleasures of life just to stretch out their time here. Others will become tyrannical about it: shaming those who aren’t with the program, like we’ve already started doing to smokers.
Beyond the ethical issues, I find myself pressed to adopt a philosophy about my own death—or its possible absence. Do I believe that dying is an essential part of being human, or are we wired to keep reaching for more life? Taylor jokes that “Julius Caesar wondered if he’d live to the ripe old age of forty-three,” a reminder that what once counted as longevity has always been in flux. When my father and grandfather were thirty, time was limited. There was little space for glorified hobbies: neither flirted with the financial precarity of freelance writing, much less the indulgence of competitive distance running.
I’d be lying if I said that I visit all of these thought spirals and rabbit holes each time I renew my Acorn subscription, much less when I decide to have a drink. Our perception of what it means to be human risks changing drastically during my time on earth, and yet my motivations for banking stem cells are actually quite simple. I don’t want to die before having kids. I don’t want to die while raising kids. I don’t want my fiancée to be alone.
So I choose to prepare for the possibility that, even if death does remain the same, my strategies for the future will not. Instead of funnelling money solely toward retirement, some of it will go toward postponement of death. Aging may not unfold for my generation the way it did for those before us. And if I have the chance to impact how it happens for me, and be there for my loved ones a bit longer, why wouldn’t I take it? I bet my grandfather would have agreed on that. Our means will always evolve, but our motives remain the same: Aren’t we all just trying to stay alive?
The post My Generation Is the First to Believe That Aging—and Perhaps Dying—Is Optional first appeared on The Walrus.
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