Biohacking: How Not to Spend Your Life Trying to Extend It

OSOlga Stolyarova

Where does this desire to extend our lives, to hack aging and ourselves, come from? What is it, and what should you do if you notice it in yourself? How do you recognize the line between simply taking responsible care of your body and your health, your physical body, and crossing into an attempt to hack this life?

AVAlexander Volchek

That is a great question. When I saw this topic, I thought it was particularly interesting right now. My sister was visiting, and we discussed how many people now have blogs showing themselves as they get older. She said, "Sasha, I do not think our parents looked like this at fifty, or at forty, the way we look now. So many people show themselves at fifty and say, 'Look how good we look, how young. And this is because...' And the person really does look quite good." I told her, "I think it depends on who you compare them with. You are simply comparing us with our parents as specific examples. But compare our parents with some of their friends, and the picture begins to change."

Or compare us with our old school classmates, and the picture changes too. She said, "I met up with my classmates five years ago, or eight or ten, it does not matter. Many of them seemed twenty years older than me." I said, "That is exactly the point. It is all a matter of perception. Who are we comparing ourselves with, and how?" Of course, biohacking is incredibly widespread now, first and foremost—and this is important—because people have been given more opportunities to talk about it to a wider audience. Think about it: I have three channels on YouTube, plus Telegram and Instagram. There are groups and places to share information. That scale of information sharing simply was not available before.

Take my ToTheMoon channel about technology and artificial intelligence. I released a video yesterday, and fifteen thousand people have already watched it in a day. Can you imagine that reach? What would it have meant fifty or a hundred years ago for fifteen thousand people to see information about you? Television was the only possibility, and even then, when did it appear, and in which countries? That was it. You could fill a hall. Rudolf Steiner traveled everywhere, wrote works, wrote or delivered three and a half thousand lectures, or five thousand, however many thousands it was. How many people came? Two hundred, three hundred. Someone might gain access to the work and read it later. But how could they read it in the first place?

Go to a library, or somehow copy it out by hand? How much effort would that take? The opportunities to tell people about something are much broader now. Far more people consume information, and each of us consumes much larger amounts. It was not consumed on this scale before. Yesterday I was talking with the children about cartoons, computers, and all the rest. My sister asked my wife whether she had played computer games as a child. My wife said, "Sasha played all day long as a child. He talks about it all the time." I said, "Yes, I got a computer in 1991 or 1992, and I really did spend a lot of time on it and playing games."

But that "a lot" is nothing compared with how much access a child today has to electronics. They pick up their mother's phone; they have computers at school; there is television with an incredible number of series and everything else. Did I have Netflix or YouTube as a child? Could I open it and watch eighty-nine seasons of Masha and the Bear, with five thousand episodes in each? Of course not. You waited a whole week to watch one forty-minute episode of something on a little television in the corner. You did not have access to all this information. The amount was limited, and we rewatched films or videotapes six, eight, or fifteen times. Everything was limited. To watch a movie, you had to rent a tape or watch something on TV, where the programming often repeated.

It was not all unique content. Today the amount of content is staggering. You ride in a car and keep watching content; you sit in a chair and keep watching. You do not need a television for that. A television could shut off, the power could go out, the antenna might not work properly, or another family member might be using it. Even then, people would tell you, "Enough watching. Go do something else." Access has a very strong bearing on your question. Has people's desire for biohacking actually increased? If we look at human life expectancy over the past several thousand years, we see that it has already risen.

What is more, far more people on Earth now live better lives and reach a higher average age. Mortality has generally fallen with access to healthcare and better food and nutrition; life expectancy has risen, not fallen. People did not control all of this. That is very important: humanity did not control the number of people on Earth. Now everyone keeps saying that mortality will fall somewhere, that some country will disappear or another will emerge. That is only logical. It has always been this way. We did not control it when there were fewer people either. Who wants to control it now that there are more? It was the same then.

There was the Roman Empire, which owned everything. Or Great Britain, which owned everything until quite recently. We were driving and studying the conflict between Israel and Palestine together in the car. Just seventy years ago, those territories belonged to Great Britain. Seventy years ago. And there is conflict after conflict: someone takes land, receives it, takes it, receives it. A piece for this side, a piece for that side. Did people back then think about improving their lives? Of course. They thought about all sorts of ways to improve their lives, just as they do now. Some thought about seizing territory, others about their health and using the right remedies. Today, too, there is this familiar idea of going to a village, to some tribe, and asking how to rub yourself with a particular plant to extend your life.

Strange, isn't it? Those people did not live that long. They have a very unusual way of life and often do not live within wider society. Today we do not understand the consequences of what is happening. People smoked cigarettes and then switched to electronic cigarettes. They began smoking e-cigarettes fifty times more than ordinary cigarettes. There are no proper long-term studies of what e-cigarettes will do to a person. The world has a problem with research in general. All the studies seem important today, and exactly ten or twenty years later people say everyone used to be stupid, whereas now they are the smart ones: "Now we have made progress." Every year we make progress.

Look at how business develops. Go into most businesses today, and there is an endless race for growth. Everyone is constantly racing somewhere. An enormous number of companies keep racing without getting results, but the race goes on. Where are they racing? What is going to happen? People are now paying a great deal of attention to this; the trend probably began about fifteen years ago. Again, it became a trend because social networks and channels for sharing information appeared, and information became accessible. Of course people began gathering it together and talking about it. Today you can find a blogger on any subject, any profession, any specialization within a specialization, any field and every tiny subfield.

You can find absolutely any kind of blogger. Not just someone explaining how to produce good-quality water, say, but someone showing how to put a label on it or how to pour it. There are bloggers explaining how to pour water into a glass, how to drink it, when to drink it, what to drink it before or after. You can find a person who talks exclusively about that. You can find an enormous number of companies endlessly making things. It is money. Most of these people talk about these things to make money. There are also companies promoting and producing preparations to make money. What are their goals? What are the goals of biohacking startups? As it happens, speaking of biohacking, I live in a house where Elizabeth Holmes once lived, the well-known American entrepreneur in medicine, or you could say biohacking.

She said she could perform all kinds of tests from a simple blood test at home. Now she is in prison. Some people are in prison and others are not. Some have been proven guilty. Opinions differ, even about Elizabeth Holmes: was she doing it intentionally or unintentionally? Was she deliberately deceiving people, or did she intend to make it work and simply fail? But all biohacking is deception, Olya. Someone may just say it was intentional or unintentional. The question is what goal people set themselves when they engage in biohacking. Now we come to the next, most important part of what I am saying: why do people do it?

That is what you were asking. We just need a foundation to build on. Why do people come to this? Why do they become interested in it? Why do they become interested in hacking their health? What for? To live longer? For what, specifically? Does a person understand the causes and effects of living longer? They will live longer, but what will be happening around them at that time? They might say, "My mind will be clearer." But will it be clearer, or will life around them be falling apart? What exactly do you want to hack? And most importantly, why? Imagine, Olya, that people lived not sixty or seventy years on average—I do not know the average life expectancy on Earth—but two hundred.

Do you know the most interesting thing? People would still want to live not two hundred years but two hundred and fifty. They would single out people who lived a long time and say, "A hundred and twenty is no longer interesting, but three hundred and fifty is fantastic." It was exactly the same before. Go back fifteen hundred years, and someone living to eighty was extraordinary, some mythical form of incarnation, an avatar of who knows what. That was supposedly why they lived so long. Read the many treatises describing someone who lived a hundred and thirty years. Age is used to show how developed a person is. Developed in what? And how are they living all those years? Preserving their body so it can lie in some vacuum for five hundred years? There are people who think about freezing their bodies so they can be awakened later and not die.

But that is simply diabolical absurdity. It is not just schizophrenia; having these traits is a persistent illness from the standpoint of sound medicine, medicine within our social world. From the perspective of the spiritual world, a person simply has certain energies, impulses, and states. Come down into the social world, and this is obviously an ill person, a matter for psychiatry. Move into the spiritual world, and nothing terrible is happening. The person is simply within certain energies of perception. There are other people who say, "It does not matter how long I live, because my life has no boundary. I have incarnated, lived this life, and will incarnate again. It makes no difference to me how long I live. Why would I need to extend my lifespan?"

Olya, it always comes down to how a person sees life. If someone thinks life is limited to their physical body and their individual personality, that they personally must live for a hundred and fifty years, they can pursue this. But you should know that these people never think about others. While pursuing biohacking, they do not also consider the word "hacking" itself. If you are hacking into something, are you harming others by doing it? You may be harming another system and other people. Or are you not harming anyone? Of course you are. Socially, in ordinary physical space, you certainly are. But if this same person goes into a church and crosses themselves, attends certain events, or turns even a little toward the spiritual world, then the concept of biohacking is absurd: an absurdity of cause and effect.

Olya, show me even one biohacker in the world. It is like a book I once liked very much. In one sense it looks appealing. I cannot remember the title; The Age of Happiness, I think. It shows many older people doing extraordinary things. I have serious questions about the idea that you need to do extraordinary things in old age, just as I do about doing them when you are young. Skydiving at seventy seems rather strange, doesn't it? The chance of dying is even greater. Is the person doing it out of happiness, or out of complete absurdity and a lack of understanding of what is happening? That is a big question. My nephew told me that at his university in Poland, a fairly serious university in a serious field of study, an eighty-year-old instructor teaches Windows 10 and Windows XP, how to take screenshots.

Someone looking on might say, "Now that is an age of happiness. A university professor has taught all his life and is still teaching young students about technology at eighty." On the other hand, he is damaging their consciousness. You would want to shut this man away and never let him out, because he is teaching young people complete nonsense. Notice how interesting this is: part of society will see him as a distinguished person. How fortunate he is to be able to teach at eighty! A huge part of society will feel miserable and say to someone else, "There you are, helpless at home." At least that person is staying at home and not harming anyone. This man goes out and harms others by teaching things that should not be taught in today's society. It is deception. He is deceiving them. What Windows 10?

Windows 10 should have been taught in 1998, or 2000, I do not know. Those were the years to teach Windows. I do not remember when Windows 10 or Windows XP appeared. I think Windows XP was in the nineties. Of course, this impulse has a dark side to its energy. It increases a person's desire for power: power over nature and over other people. Why is there no central, constant impulse in modern society to love other people, a message broadcast everywhere? What country conveys that consistently as a whole? There are religions that convey it. There are communities that convey it.

What country conveys it? What society? It is clearly more interesting than spending your whole life thinking another nation is bad or that the enemy is right beside you. In that case, your child is an enemy too. For most people in the world, their own child is their enemy, because they do not know how to interact with them. I recently made a video on the channel about finding a justification for another person. "Justification" may not quite be my way of putting it, but it was a phrase from a book. You can go back to that video. It explains this topic quite well: how to see the good in someone else, why you need to see it, and what to strive for.

From the perspective of the spiritual world, an unhealthy increase in causes and effects, a change in a person's lifespan, will reduce their consciousness, their capacity to perceive, by exactly the same span. In other words, it will turn them into an idiot, a simple village fool, to put it in plain Russian. In Russian, we all love Ivanushka the Fool. Notice the underlying attitude toward people, toward the very name Ivan and the word "fool." It is a consciousness instilled by society that will make a person a fool. Last week we were sitting with the children and my nephew. One of my daughters sometimes likes to say she is not smart, that she does not know things, and that there are so many smart people at school.

I told her, "Rate yourself at school on a scale from zero to ten, please." She gave herself a six. I asked my nephew to rate himself at school. He said, "Ten." I asked my younger daughter. She said, "Six. Maybe seven. Actually, thinking about it, I know everything in math." But the daughter who gave herself a six had rated herself strangely. I asked, "What is your reasoning? What do you have in math?" "An A." "What about chemistry?" "An A." "And this subject? How does that make a six? Does everyone else have some kind of A with fifteen stars?" She said, "It is nothing special." I said, "Let us look at other aspects. Imagine a person who does poorly at school but helps everyone."

"What score would you give them at school? Now imagine this person is also unattractive and fat." That is how people usually judge, how society judges. Even the world of spiritual education says, "A healthy spirit in a healthy body." Where did that phrase come from? A healthy spirit in a healthy body. I know plenty of healthy bodies that kill people and live very long lives, then spend another forty years in prison, until they are ninety-five. Those are healthy bodies. I said, "Where would you rank them? What score would you give someone who helps everyone sincerely, truly, straight from the heart, who simply glows with it?"

"But they study terribly, do not study at all, and do not understand anything. They come to class and have no idea what people are talking about." I was at a fairly closed OpenAI conference a few days ago. They gave us a Chromatic, something like an old Game Boy, which you can program with OpenAI. I got a Game Boy in 1991 or 1992; I do not remember the year. It had Mario. My sister remembered, "I never played games, but I did play Mario." My wife picked this thing up, turned it on, and said, "What do you do here?" She looked at the buttons: the directional pad, B, A, Select, Start. She thought it was complete nonsense. Why would anyone need it? And she put it aside.

I took it, connected it to the computer, updated some drivers, did a few things, opened Codex, and created a game. Now it says, "Choose your name: Iveta, Damian, Igor, Sasha, Polina." I choose Damian. It says, "Choose a game." I choose one, and it tells me Damian has a superpower, and so on. Then I handed it over. It was just a bit of fun. I do not play games at all, I am not a gaming enthusiast, and I am not an advocate of gaming when it comes to family life and everything else. But this thing appeared. Notice how easy it is for me to use it. Completely straightforward. I understand it beyond merely pressing a button to play. How can it be unclear that these arrows move you left and right, and you press them? It all makes sense. You press a button.

If that button does not work, another one will. It is all clear. It is like moving forward, left, and right with your fingers on a keyboard. Which fingers do you use? Anyone who has played Counter-Strike or Doom knows how to move forward or backward, left or right. Someone who has not played has no idea how to do it. They do not understand it or grasp it at all. Yet this is just a tiny piece of ordinary knowledge from the material world, something stupidly simple and basic. What I just described, loading a game onto a device, is simple, elementary knowledge. It does not require extraordinary energies.

Then what about knowledge or states embedded in a person's energies? These energies are not under that person's control. An energy appears. They have extended my life. The most important aspect of all this is always how you live, not how long you live. Lifespan is just some parameter in perhaps eight-hundredth place when defining or describing you, or perhaps fifteen-millionth place when describing you as a human being. There is a well-known man in America who does biohacking. I cannot remember his name, so I will not name him. I was laughing about it with a friend: this man spends three or five hours every day working on extending his life.

Why spend forty or thirty percent of your waking day on extending your life into the future, with no guarantee? What is the logic? Let us spend fifty years so we can live another fifty. And will you actually live those fifty years? That raises the question, Olya: how do people die? For what reasons? Do you know anyone who died as a free choice, apart from people who take their own lives? Someone who said, "I think I will die at eighty-three, on October 15 at 4:00 p.m." Do you know anyone like that? Probably not. You have read about them in books. Usually people do not want to die at all. Some wait for death. My grandmother waited for death for a very long time and projected that energy onto everyone.

Some people fear death and live through that fear. But she really was waiting. I think she bought an outfit to be buried in at sixty or seventy. An interesting story: we were driving and talking with a friend who lives in Italy. He said someone had asked an Italian grandmother, or perhaps a Spanish grandmother, "Do you also buy an outfit for your death and set money aside?" She said, "Why? I spend my money. Why set it aside? What is the logic?" They said, "People where we come from save for it because where you are buried matters." She said, "I do not care at all where I am buried." Can you imagine how different the consciousness and perception of people living at the same time can be? What energy led my grandmother to buy an outfit in advance? It does not make her better or worse. An enormous number of people around the world live that way.

Many people have already buried themselves at thirty and say, "That is it. My time is gone." You are young, fairly young by today's idea of youth, yet even you may already have thoughts about lost time: "I lost a year here, or a year and a half." Those thoughts may already appear. What are these thoughts about losing time? A person does not even want to think about how much longer they really have to live, or what that truly means. There is a very good exercise for this. I have mentioned it often; I think I recently gave it to our Life group. Suppose you tell yourself you have three months left to live. Would you start doing different things, or simply continue living the same life? Would you do something else?

With that much time left, would you still make videos with me, and I with you, or would we do something else? Would you say, "No, I will not make any more videos with this man. Let Volchek do his own thing. I am out of here. I have my own things to do"? Would you want to contact someone, call someone, change something, eat something? Someone might say, "At last I will eat croissants. I did not before, but now I have been given the opportunity, the permission. For these three months I can eat croissants." Or would you keep eating as you do now? What would you do? Spend more time with your children, or the same amount? With friends, with parents, visiting places? Would everything stay the same, or would something change? It is very sobering. It really makes you stop and think, although it is certainly not an easy exercise. For us, it really is not easy.