"Things Could Be Better in Unknown Ways" Bryan Johnson

I saw Bryan Johnson's latest Blueprint post and was going to talk about how our purpose here is not to become Greek Gods. Greek philosophy believed that there was nothing wrong with humankind, and all we needed was to develop. This is why they placed so much emphasis on sports and learning.

I'm always talking about the opposite. How we were intentionally designed with a flaw - the human ego. Without being aware of the need to fight our ego, we keep embracing these self-centered approaches that are essentially about accumulating more wins - just like the Greeks.

I have nothing against making your daily regime your religion - Bryan Johnson actually reminds me of my brother in Vancouver who does a lot of this stuff (minus the tech). I grew up in a family where sports and outdoor activities were our religion. My father was still doing triathlons at the age of 92. I can fully appreciate all the discipline and investment required in choosing this path.

But we've entered a new collective era and there are new forces operating on our world. So if your quest is to "not get sick" and have greater "clarity of thought" as Bryan Johnson says in his video - you need to have a deep understanding of the new forces and how they impact our daily life. Any method that is so self-focused that it turns eating (green goop) into a scientific activity instead of a heart-warming opportunity for human bonding is going against those unifying forces.

And why do we need to slow down the aging process? We would be much better off letting nature manage us, allowing everything to happen in its due course. The loss of physical strength as we age should have no influence over our happiness in life. It all depends on how much we learn to connect harmoniously to nature and let its forces positively affect us. Then we could let life flow naturally and have no regrets.

We should only aspire to be young at heart, through constantly increasing our positive connection to each other and to nature. We would then have an energy and a zest for life similar to children, who constantly discover the world anew, and this would give our lives meaning. We would then see that there is no decline as we age, just more and more of an ascent that brings us closer to the purpose of our lives: a state of complete balance and harmony among each other and with nature.

A Plan for Humanity

So I thought this whole Blueprint thing was about achieving peak physical performance but when I dug a bit deeper, there is a much bigger picture. This entrepreneur is very much aware of the new stage we've reached in our development. I'm quoting from his A Plan For Humanity post:

"For humans to be successful in the future, we must play a multi-billion person sport. Any desirable future we can contemplate hinges upon the cooperation of a large percentage of our roughly 8 billion people. We are all interconnected, our fates intertwined. Our ability to build a future we love depends on our ability to adapt our belief systems to reflect the realities we live in. This means being more flexible and nimble in our response to external circumstances. Entrenchment in old beliefs will prevent us from leveraging the exceptional possibilities we have before us. The faster we can create new belief systems to encourage mass cooperation towards our collective well-being, in this life, the higher our probability that we’ll each get the things we most care about."

He makes a lot of great points in this article, but instead of going point by point - I'm going to say this very simply. None of these great ideas will be possible to implement without understanding the human ego, We need to fully understand its purpose, why we were designed with this "flaw", and how we can only override it together. This was nature's intention all along. So any ideas conceived by a human ego will not include this key to our better future. Why? Our ego really doesn't want us to go down that path. That's why we need to follow nature's guidance. We need to follow nature's laws. We can't trust any human (with an ego!) to accelerate our development. Because it will always be in the wrong direction.

He concluded by saying "Now is the time ... In the past, we didn’t have the sophisticated tools to build the world we dream about and aspire towards. Now we do."

My last comment is about the "sophisticated tools" - he of course is talking about the tech like any talented entrepreneur. I'm always talking about something else. How we're the most sophisticated generation to ever inhabit the earth, and the first to be able to use our human capacities in new and more advanced ways. No tech required. But as I'm always saying, we won't be able to enjoy all the new tech unless we make this transition from focusing on our individual success to focusing on the good of the collective. As long as we remain in our current egoistic system - conditions in the world will continue to deteriorate.

So even if you're the healthiest person on the planet, super intelligent and kind - the only way you can really "protect" yourself is by learning to connect in an ideal way with others. And it's impossible to do that by investing so much energy in focusing on yourself. Investing in human connection is about learning to go beyond the self, beyond the human ego, to connect in an optimal way with other humans who are very different than you. That's what the new era is all about.