Bryan Johnson, the 49-year-old tech billionaire, is probably the world’s best-known exponent of bio-hacking, part of a wider trend of healthmaxing (and other maxxings) where individuals try to move beyond the limits of their current body to perfect themselves. In the case of Bryan Johnson, they try to live forever. Measuring anything that can be measured is the one inescapable feature of Bryan Johnson’s attempt to evade death, there is no end to his optimisation is complete. His website Blueprint is replete with the metrics generated for his biomarkers, whether it’s levels of muscle, fat, bone, or mineral density, fertility, and so on. In each of these, he scores high points, usually within the 98th to 99th percentile of whatever metric is being measured.
He is not alone. Any cursory glance over well-being influencers on social media will uncover other examples of social actors improving, or supposedly improving, their health by microscopically measuring any aspect of themselves, recording and displaying it.
Bryan Johnson and other biohackers and maxxers have not emerged from nowhere. Biohacking and healthmaxxing overlap in their meaning but are slightly different. The former often implies experimenting with the body to reach some desired end, while healthmaxxing refers to practices that seek to maximise (obviously) a particular trait such as health or attractiveness. Both, though, require constant measuring and datafying of all aspects of the body, health, and wellbeing. It is this measuring, or the quantification of self, that this post will focus on. Though appearing novel healthmaxxing and biohacking possess long historical roots. There is, as Lupton argues, a long tradition of what she terms ‘self-tracking’ of health, bodies, and well-being. That practice can be anything from simply marking lines on a door jamb to indicate that a son or a daughter has grown so much in a year. It could be recording weight, noting it down in a notebook à la Bridget Jones. The current emphasis on measuring and metrics springs from two currents, according to Lupton.
The artist Andy Warhol, made famous through his highly saturated colour pictures of Marilyn Monroe and detailed prints of Campbell Soup cans, was one forerunner of self-tracking. Though he did not use digital tools the same desire as Johnson to archive and make visible is evident. The 1960s artist attempted to record every aspect of his existence, whether that was through phone calls to his friends, with Pat Hackett writing down every conversation, or collecting ephemera from everyday life (such as receipts, bus tickets, pamphlets, and whatever he was given in a day), to carrying around his Polaroid camera to record everything from the mundane to spectacular lunches out or his time with celebrities. At the end of his life, he filled 600 boxes, or ‘time capsules’, as he called them, with this ephemera.
Techies Wolf and Kevin Kelly are the next step in the origin story of self-tracking. In 2008, they set up the Quantified Self website. Both were editors of Wired magazine and were convinced recording data about their bodies, their sleep, and their productivity could help improve their lives. For them, “self-knowledge through numbers” would be the ultimate key to unlocking the perfect, productive, and healthy lifestyle. Embedded heavily within Silicon Valley culture, the new tech emerging from there in the 2000s further allowed that quantification of self. An array of apps are now at our disposal to help record and quantify ourselves, whether it is the tracking apps that one finds on an Apple iPhone, where your steps are recorded, or an Oura ring that, again, monitors anything: how we sleep, the time taken to go to the toilet, or whatever can be measured.
It is this fusion of recording everyday life with tech (Warhol meeting Wolf and Kelly) that lays the ground for what we see now with maxxers and hackers, though with Bryan Johnson it is turned up to 11. What begins as seemingly benign and niche movement does carry significant social and political implications. Fundamentally it is a retreat into the medicalised and individuated understanding of health, where health is cast as within the gift of the human agent and the decisions they make, where various social structures, class, gender, ethnicities, identities, and so on are irrelevant, or the individual can simply rise unbidden above them.
The maxxing and hacking discourse also neatly aligns with neoliberal capitalism in other ways. Now that the body is render as individual responsibility it becomes easier to commodify it. Not far from the health advice or tips on routines to reach your goals lies the grift. A few clicks through a posting reveals an expensive set of supplements, treatments, or a fitness regime you can follow. The supposedly perfected body becomes a marketing tool. It is all part of the influencer economy, as Bollmer and Guiness attest, the self as raw material for selling products.
Perhaps we can also raise other, more existential questions about the trend for hacking and maxing. The focus of life here is not towards some end; it is about a constant process of recording, coding, and making visible results and metrics.
As Deleuze noted in one of his essays, a feature of contemporary societies is that one is never finished with anything. What he means by that is that our society is never about achieving any form of self-actualisation. One is constantly engaged in a treadmill of becoming, but for what purpose? For what end? Ultimately, the constant drafting of the body slips into the cycles of valorisation and profit.
It perhaps speaks to some of the emptiness at the heart of what may be called post-neoliberal culture that we may be stepping into, where measuring is all we can do with our lives, a form of capitalist realism where it is all numbers and profit.
Life should surely be about living, not measuring.
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Healthmaxing, biohacking and the emptiness of the heart
by Chris Yuill Nov 4, 2026Bryan Johnson, the 49-year-old tech billionaire, is probably the world’s best-known exponent of bio-hacking, part of a wider trend of healthmaxing (and other maxxings) where individuals try to move beyond the limits of their current body to perfect themselves. In the case of Bryan Johnson, they try to live forever. Measuring anything that can be measured is the one inescapable feature of Bryan Johnson’s attempt to evade death, there is no end to his optimisation is complete. His website Blueprint is replete with the metrics generated for his biomarkers, whether it’s levels of muscle, fat, bone, or mineral density, fertility, and so on. In each of these, he scores high points, usually within the 98th to 99th percentile of whatever metric is being measured.
He is not alone. Any cursory glance over well-being influencers on social media will uncover other examples of social actors improving, or supposedly improving, their health by microscopically measuring any aspect of themselves, recording and displaying it.
Bryan Johnson and other biohackers and maxxers have not emerged from nowhere. Biohacking and healthmaxxing overlap in their meaning but are slightly different. The former often implies experimenting with the body to reach some desired end, while healthmaxxing refers to practices that seek to maximise (obviously) a particular trait such as health or attractiveness. Both, though, require constant measuring and datafying of all aspects of the body, health, and wellbeing. It is this measuring, or the quantification of self, that this post will focus on. Though appearing novel healthmaxxing and biohacking possess long historical roots. There is, as Lupton argues, a long tradition of what she terms ‘self-tracking’ of health, bodies, and well-being. That practice can be anything from simply marking lines on a door jamb to indicate that a son or a daughter has grown so much in a year. It could be recording weight, noting it down in a notebook à la Bridget Jones. The current emphasis on measuring and metrics springs from two currents, according to Lupton.
The artist Andy Warhol, made famous through his highly saturated colour pictures of Marilyn Monroe and detailed prints of Campbell Soup cans, was one forerunner of self-tracking. Though he did not use digital tools the same desire as Johnson to archive and make visible is evident. The 1960s artist attempted to record every aspect of his existence, whether that was through phone calls to his friends, with Pat Hackett writing down every conversation, or collecting ephemera from everyday life (such as receipts, bus tickets, pamphlets, and whatever he was given in a day), to carrying around his Polaroid camera to record everything from the mundane to spectacular lunches out or his time with celebrities. At the end of his life, he filled 600 boxes, or ‘time capsules’, as he called them, with this ephemera.
Techies Wolf and Kevin Kelly are the next step in the origin story of self-tracking. In 2008, they set up the Quantified Self website. Both were editors of Wired magazine and were convinced recording data about their bodies, their sleep, and their productivity could help improve their lives. For them, “self-knowledge through numbers” would be the ultimate key to unlocking the perfect, productive, and healthy lifestyle. Embedded heavily within Silicon Valley culture, the new tech emerging from there in the 2000s further allowed that quantification of self. An array of apps are now at our disposal to help record and quantify ourselves, whether it is the tracking apps that one finds on an Apple iPhone, where your steps are recorded, or an Oura ring that, again, monitors anything: how we sleep, the time taken to go to the toilet, or whatever can be measured.
It is this fusion of recording everyday life with tech (Warhol meeting Wolf and Kelly) that lays the ground for what we see now with maxxers and hackers, though with Bryan Johnson it is turned up to 11. What begins as seemingly benign and niche movement does carry significant social and political implications. Fundamentally it is a retreat into the medicalised and individuated understanding of health, where health is cast as within the gift of the human agent and the decisions they make, where various social structures, class, gender, ethnicities, identities, and so on are irrelevant, or the individual can simply rise unbidden above them.
The maxxing and hacking discourse also neatly aligns with neoliberal capitalism in other ways. Now that the body is render as individual responsibility it becomes easier to commodify it. Not far from the health advice or tips on routines to reach your goals lies the grift. A few clicks through a posting reveals an expensive set of supplements, treatments, or a fitness regime you can follow. The supposedly perfected body becomes a marketing tool. It is all part of the influencer economy, as Bollmer and Guiness attest, the self as raw material for selling products.
Perhaps we can also raise other, more existential questions about the trend for hacking and maxing. The focus of life here is not towards some end; it is about a constant process of recording, coding, and making visible results and metrics.
As Deleuze noted in one of his essays, a feature of contemporary societies is that one is never finished with anything. What he means by that is that our society is never about achieving any form of self-actualisation. One is constantly engaged in a treadmill of becoming, but for what purpose? For what end? Ultimately, the constant drafting of the body slips into the cycles of valorisation and profit.
It perhaps speaks to some of the emptiness at the heart of what may be called post-neoliberal culture that we may be stepping into, where measuring is all we can do with our lives, a form of capitalist realism where it is all numbers and profit.
Life should surely be about living, not measuring.