It’s safe to say most people would like to live as long as possible — but Jesse Eisenberg’s not buying the whole longevity moment.
“To me, a lot of these things, when I read them, just seem like narcissism masquerading as health,” the “Social Network” star said at the second annual Men’s Health Lab on Tuesday.
“It’s this feeling that ‘I should live forever‘… To me, it’s just insane,” he added, taking shots at a few trends in particular — and the people who are obsessed with them.
Longevity products and services have taken hold of the wellness industry, with Forbes estimates the longevity-focused market will reach $610 billion this year. As opposed to feeling or looking good today, the shift has been to focus on looking and feeling good over a lifetime.
Folks like Bryan Johnson exemplify an extreme approach to this. A self-proclaimed “biohacker,” he believes with disciple and the right habits, he can cheat death.
It’s not just getting enough sleep and eating whole foods. He’s spent millions on medical interventions and testing to help him stay young, and said he wants to achieve immorality by 2039.
He even named his book and Netflix documentary “Don’t Die.”
Though Eisenberg doesn’t call him out by name, he’s unimpressed with the whole idea.
“How could you see that people are starving in other places and decide that you need to go in a cold thing, and then a hot thing, so that your whatever is something different,” Eisenberg said. “To me, I read this stuff with just absolute mystification.”
That “cold and hot thing” is probably contrast therapy, frequently done today by alternating between saunas and cold plunging. Celebs like Hailey Bieber and Harry Styles, plus athletes like Naomi Osaka and Steph Curry, reportedly do it regularly.
Research does point to the practice having some benefits for stress regulation, recovery and resilience — and sauna, in particular, has been linked to better brain function, sleep and immunity.
Eisenberg also said he also doesn’t “do anything like” the VO2 max workouts touted by Johnson and fitness fans. These workouts seek to increase the maximum amount of oxygen the body uses during exercise, and the VO2 max number is associated with heart health and lung capacity.
“How is it useful? Explain to me how what you’re doing helps the world or helps anything besides your own vanity and your own longevity,” Eisenberg said.
“And if you had a good answer, I would say fantastic. But my sense is that 99% of the people doing that stuff do not have a good answer.”
It’s no surprise that he’s concerned about helping others. Last year, Eisenberg donated blood and got “bitten by the donation bug.” He ended up donating a kidney to a stranger at NYU Langone Health last year.
The problem, Eisenberg said this week, is that optimizing one’s health is seen as a moral good.
“We’ve conflated it with some ethical way of living, which I think is just a total mistake, and kind of just takes us further and further into a kind of selfishness as a culture. And, so, I don’t like that stuff,” he said.
“I understand if it’s, like, a hobby, and it’s fun for you — then it’s fine. It’s like playing a board game, or whatever. But to conflate it with some kind of ethical way of living just seems to me so misguided and incorrect.”
Eisenberg has also been candid about having obsessive-compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. Becoming a parent in 2017, he said, helped him focus on the tangible in the world.
“Like, oh, this is a real thing. This person needs to eat, and to be dressed,” he said. “Suddenly, all these fantastical fears that would keep me up at night are now related to a real thing, and that’s much healthier.”
