Earlier this year, I traveled to Texas to spend a few days with a few thousand people who were convinced that they were going to live forever. Or, if not exactly forever, then at least for a very long time and in very good health.
How? Through the good graces of biohacking, which a banner on the conference’s elevator door helpfully explained is “the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside you, so you have more control over your own biology.”
Some of the contraptions on display were heavy on both the science and the control. The Ammortal Chamber, for example—retail price $159,500—is a wonder of modern engineering, resembling a prop from the Alien movie franchise. The occupant is treated to everything from 600 milliliters per minute of molecular hydrogen to red light from hundreds of little lightbulbs (at a wavelength of 660 nanometers, if you must know). A twenty-minute session, I can attest, leaves you focused, relaxed, and recharged—which is why the Los Angeles Dodgers keep a few in their locker room.
Other offerings at the conference were less meticulously engineered. I was fascinated by the self-described “conscious DJ” whose workshop focused on “activating the frequency of Earth 2.0,” but I didn’t reach for my wallet. Butter-infused coffee shakes, electromagnetic pulse belts for your dog, and a plethora of pills promising to do everything from tricking your stomach into thinking it’s full to tricking your body into believing it’s young—there was no shortage of offerings that felt, even to the most open-minded newcomer, like hokum at best or a pernicious hoax at worst.
New Age affectations aside, biohacking is no laughing matter, and people of faith in particular should pay attention to and take heart in the movement’s rapid growth. How rapid? Valued at around $24 billion last year, the biohacking industry is expected to climb to a market size of somewhere around $70 billion by 2030, which should come as no surprise. A struggling traditional healthcare system, an aging population in which older adults are projected to eclipse children in the next ten years, and a robust tech sector that finds all areas of human life ripe for disruption: these trends make for excellent conditions to encourage the building of machinery that addresses the most pressing biological challenges of the human species.
But financial returns alone are no reason to cheer on biohacking. Look deep into the heart of the movement, and you’ll find three reasons for wild optimism, suggesting that, maybe, the biohackers herald the coming of a new American Golden Age.
First, better than any other group in recent memory, they embody the all-American self-starting spirit, with their own bodies as the new frontier. While most of us interact with technology by pressing buttons on social media platforms or doomscrolling mindlessly on our smartphones, content to follow the dictates of algorithms we don’t really understand, the biohackers are cut from different cloth. They buy—or, often, build—imperfect tools, download or swap intricate user manuals, and flock to online forums where they share their rigid regimens with each other. Whether or not these tools and regimens actually work is beside the point; what matters is that biohacking is increasingly becoming a spirited alternative to the convenience-addled consumerism that defines so much of modern life. The last time so many tinkerers tinkered with such intensity and such a sense of purpose, we were treated to the birth of Silicon Valley.
The digital revolution, however, was a revolution of the mind; biohacking is, first and foremost, an uprising of the spirit. Had you closed your eyes and listened to the keynote speakers at the conference, you might’ve thought that you were in church. Hal Elrod, for example, one of the movement’s philosopher kings, not only shared the story of his remarkable bout with cancer but also delivered a methodology for life—reflection, gratitude, and all that good stuff—that would’ve caused any priest, rabbi, or imam to nod approvingly. And Martin Luther King III received a big round of applause when he argued that his father was a biohacker, too, teaching people to choose love and goodness over more dopamine-inducing sensations like lust and rage.
The second great virtue of the biohacking movement follows directly: Its members understand and celebrate the fact that biological improvements must begin with the soul. A person who is uprooted from community and tradition may snack on supplements all day long and take cold plunges on the hour and still fail to reach anything approaching true wellness.
Which brings us to the third and most crucial reason to feel grateful for the biohacking enterprise: It puts the focus squarely where it belongs, on the human body. In many ways, the history of the last fifty years has been the history of disembodiment. In the marketplace, sinister corporations have been working assiduously to reduce us to avatars and replace old-fashioned human interaction with virtual pokes, snaps, and chats. In the public square, so-called “progressive” political forces have waged devastatingly effective campaigns designed to contest the inimitable nature of flesh and blood. First, they tell us that abortions are a choice rather than a termination of a body, and then that biological sex, encoded into every cell of our bodies, is a fiction that can be refused and then replaced on a whim with any number of ludicrous fabricated categories, from “pangender” to “agenderflux.”
The lies have been many, but their aim is always the same: to deny the human body its singularity and its sanctity, and to enforce instead a dubious theology that appoints us all as creators unto ourselves, free to pursue ecstasy by any means necessary. Biohacking, though not a conservative movement in any political sense, rejects this fevered notion of gnostic self-creation. The message is consistent: Pay attention to muscles and sinews, limbs and spine, liver and heart. This requires not only admitting that you are an embodied being, but celebrating it as well. The core ambition of biohacking is to learn how to enhance the life-giving potential of our bodies rather than trying to free ourselves from nature’s endowment.
Hillel the Elder would’ve approved. One of the Talmud’s greatest sages—you may know him from such famous sayings as “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow”—may have been a biohacker avant la lettre. As legend has it, one day he promised his students to teach them a very elevated lesson in spirituality before promptly rushing to the bathroom and locking the door. When he reemerged, the students, stunned, asked him precisely what they were supposed to learn from watching their great teacher relieve himself. Hillel didn’t skip a beat. “If I didn’t do what I just did in there,” he replied, “I wouldn’t have been able to teach you anything at all.” Because a body that can’t relieve itself, he realized, also can’t pray. Or, put bluntly, to save your soul, you need to respect the reality of your body first.
Our nascent biohackers are doing just that. They’re monitoring oxygen levels and wearing special shades blocking out blue light, but they’re also thinking seriously about what makes life worth living, and the answers they stumble upon are often the time-honored and correct ones. Spending three days in their midst, I heard more about trusting in a higher power, caring for each other, and keeping away from all forms of corruption, physical and metaphysical alike, than I have anywhere outside of my synagogue. And I felt, too, a strong sense of budding community. All those fit and friendly people may have come to the conference primarily to care for their own aging bodies, but they realized somewhere along the way that aging, if done properly, is a team sport.
Which is a tremendous opportunity for us faithful. Think about it: Tens of thousands of America’s most resilient, optimistic, driven, and—biohacking gadget prices being what they are—wealthy people are sharing our passions and our convictions. We’ve much to offer them, from a warm handshake (in contrast to our self-appointed elites who insist that health and wellness must be left exclusively to the state’s zealous official experts) to an invitation to plug into the millennia-old wisdom that already guides our lives. And they’ve much to offer us, too, reminding us that very little by way of transcendence will occur unless we first get serious about caring for the flesh.
