Luxury is health, serenity, and family

Eleventh chapter of the series. Previously: I implemented the Maricarmen Longevity Decree at home, This is my vote in the elections thinking about longevity, A guide for my daughter on housing, victimhood, effort, and longevity, Dad, does left or right mean anything in longevity?, We are vectors of intelligence, What is good. How to know it. Can it be known?, Moral skepticism regarding the singularity, Critiques of subjectivism, relativism, and utilitarianism, Raising children: Montessori, positive psychology, and moral skepticism and Moving to a country where it is legal not to die and not to pay taxes.

Nowadays, almost everything can be bought.

A house with a view. A self-driving car. A trip to the other side of the world. Designer clothes, watches, dinners at Michelin-starred restaurants. Even, as I told you in the previous chapter, perhaps soon residency in a city with its own laws.

But there are some things that cannot.

• Serenity.
• Health.
• Being in good physical shape.
• Low heart rate before going to sleep.
• A family that loves you.

And precisely for that reason, I think they are becoming the new status symbol.

"Resting heart rate is the new thirst trap"

A few days ago, Bryan Johnson published a message that begins like this: "Resting heart is the new thirst trap. It's the sexiest thing about you".

The interesting part is not the phrase, but what he says afterwards. Since 2021, he has posted more than 200 times about that number, with nearly 80 million views on X alone. And he explains that he did it on purpose. His reasoning is brutally sincere: "People will adopt something if it helps them get sex, money, or power".

So, instead of selling heart rate as a boring medical data point, he presented it from more than ten angles: masculinity, fertility, mental performance, discipline, willpower, rebellion against the establishment. He wanted a low heart rate to be a sign of youth, vitality, and, in his words, good genetics.

And it has worked for him. Today, there are people who post their heart rate just as they used to post their car.

For Bryan, the heart rate before going to sleep is "the number that governs all others". It summarizes in a single figure what you eat, how you train, how much stress you have, your routine, and your discipline. And it has a basis: several meta-analyses associate a higher resting heart rate with higher mortality. Of course, with nuances. It is not a magic number; it depends on genetics and age, and a heart rate that is too low can also be a sign of a problem.

Status always follows scarcity

This is not new. What is new is what is scarce.

At the end of the 19th century, economist Thorstein Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption: buying expensive things not for their utility, but to demonstrate that you can. And status symbols have always pointed to what the majority could not have.

When food was scarce, being fat was a sign of wealth. When the majority worked in the sun in the fields, pale skin was a sign of class. When most people started working in factories and offices, a tan came to mean that you had the time and money to go on vacation.

Today, in a large part of the world, food is abundant. Objects are mass-produced. Luxury is imitated in a week. What is truly scarce is something else: a body that functions well at sixty, a calm mind, and healthy life time.

That is why the new status is not money or power. It is longevity.

You cannot skip the line

Health has a peculiarity that makes it unique as a status symbol: it cannot be fully delegated.

You can pay someone to clean your house, cook your meals, or handle your accounts.

But no one can sleep for you.

No one can train for you.

No one can have your low heart rate for you.

The richest billionaire in the world has to do the same squats as you.

It is, probably, the most democratic luxury that exists. It costs almost zero in money. But it costs a lot in discipline, consistency, and sacrifice. That is why it is so scarce. And that is why it is worth so much.

Now, I don't want to romanticize it. Money does buy a part of health. A study published in 2016 in the journal JAMA, by economist Raj Chetty, found that in the United States, men from the richest 1% live on average about 15 years longer than those from the poorest 1%. Better food, less stress, better doctors, safer neighborhoods. Money inequality is already becoming life-years inequality.

And Yuval Noah Harari warns in Homo Deus that the great risk of the future is that this difference stops being economic and becomes biological. That the rich not only have more, but that they live much longer.

Don't Die

Bryan Johnson takes this idea to the end with his motto: Don't Die. That is also the name of his book and his movement.

His argument connects with everything I have told you in this series. He says we are entering the era of superintelligence, and that at a time like this, we can predict almost nothing about the future. We don't know what jobs will exist, what money will be worth, or how we will organize ourselves. The only thing we know for sure is that, to live through whatever comes, you first have to stay alive.

It is, deep down, the same thing I told you in chapter 7: I don't know what is going to happen, but I would like to be here, in good shape, to see it.

Bryan also has an idea that I find very useful for day-to-day life. He talks about an "evil Bryan": the version of himself that at 11 p.m. wants to eat a sweet, stare at his phone, or have a drink. His solution was not to let him decide. Set his habits in advance so that the tired version cannot sabotage the rested one. It is exactly the empathy theory that I told you about years ago: the "self" that decides while rested and the "self" that has to follow through while tired are not the same person.

The jurisdictions of longevity

And here I connect with the previous chapter.

If jurisdictions are going to compete to attract people who contribute the most, what will they offer them? Until now, the answer was paying fewer taxes. But if the new status is longevity, perhaps the most powerful offer is not fiscal, but health-related: access to treatments that in other places take a decade to be approved.

It is already happening:

• Prospera, in Honduras. As I told you in the previous chapter, Vitalia, a temporary city dedicated to longevity, was held there. And a gene therapy that was not approved in the United States was tested there. Bryan Johnson himself received it in 2023.
• Montana, in the United States. In 2025, this state passed a law that allows any adult, not just terminal patients, to pay for experimental drugs that have passed the first safety tests, without waiting for FDA approval. The rules for applying it came into effect this summer, and the first clinic could open by the end of this year. And one of those who helped write the law is Niklas Anzinger, who is linked to Prospera.

Think about it. If tomorrow a jurisdiction offered a treatment that gave you ten more years of healthy life, how many people would move? How much would they pay? Tax havens could seem small compared to health havens.

And such a jurisdiction could become very powerful. Because those who live longer accumulate more: more knowledge, more assets, more contacts, more influence. It is compound interest applied to life. A few extra years of healthy life, multiplied over decades, change the distribution of power.

But with much caution. A Harvard professor, Aaron Kesselheim, summarizes it this way regarding the Montana law: "The idea that a drug has been proven safe because it has passed a phase I is very, very wrong". And as I told you in the previous chapter, the Prospera therapy had many experts very skeptical. Accelerating is not always moving forward.

Has the person who will not die already been born?

About twenty years ago, researcher Aubrey de Grey became famous with a phrase: the first person who will live to be a thousand years old has perhaps already been born. Ray Kurzweil talks about "longevity escape velocity": the moment in which, for every year that passes, science gives you more than one extra year of life. From that point on, in theory, you would no longer age.

What if that person is already among us? What if it is someone like Bryan, who has spent years measuring every organ in his body and spending millions on it?

Being consistent with my skepticism, I'll tell you what I think: today there is no evidence that anyone has slowed their aging significantly. Bryan's biological age numbers are striking, but they are debated, and he is his only study subject. Escape velocity is a hypothesis, not a fact.

But if someone gets there, they will probably do it this way: arriving in good shape at the moment when science takes the leap. That is why it does not seem crazy to me that longevity is becoming the most sought-after status. It is the only wealth that allows you to continue enjoying all the others.

What cannot be bought, is built

So, if the new luxury cannot be bought, the good news is that it can be built. And it starts today, not in any future jurisdiction.

• Low heart rate before going to sleep. Eating dinner early, avoiding alcohol, training regularly, putting away screens at night. It is what I proposed in the Maricarmen decree.
• Good physical shape. Strength, above all. It is what best protects your independence as you get older.
• Serenity. Not letting fear, the noise of the news, or haste decide for you. Low expectations for what you cannot control, maximum effort for what you can.
• A family that loves you. And a network of trusted people. As I told you in chapter 8, the quality of relationships is the best predictor of a long and happy life. And that cannot be bought either. It is cultivated over years.

If you notice, it is the same list as at the beginning. What cannot be bought is exactly what must be built.

You can have the biggest house in the neighborhood. But your heart rate tonight, your calmness, and your children's hug when you get home are not for sale by anyone.

That is the wealth I want for myself. And the one I want to teach my daughters to build.

A hug,

Gonzalo

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