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WHY OUR OBSESSION WITH EXTENDING LIFESPANS IS A DISTRACTION  
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Jatinder Hayre
October 14, 2026
Jacobin magazine
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_ Life expectancies have risen for most people across the world. But
the gap between how long people live and how long they will live
healthily is widening. Poor labor conditions and lack of health care
are to blame. _

While billionaires like Bryan Johnson are investing large sums of
money into speculative research to help them live forever, the quality
of health of the average American has fallen behind that of their rich
peers. , (Kyle Grillot / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

 

For just over five years, Bryan Johnson has been spending more than $2
million
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a year trying not to die. The American technology millionaire has
turned his body into an elaborate — or, depending on your
perspective, recklessly extravagant — experiment in human
longevity, subjecting himself to extensive medical testing, controlled
nutrition, rigid sleeping schedules, and experimental interventions.
At forty-nine, he employs an entire medical team to scrutinize the
smallest changes in his physiology. A whole ecosystem is organized
around preserving his health, with varying degrees of success. In July
of this year, he announced that he had been diagnosed with an
incurable autoimmune gastritis.

Millions of people share a distantly related version of Johnson’s
ambition. But rather than living forever, they would simply like to
reach retirement without being debilitated by chronic illness. There
is something revealing about a society in which even biological
certainty has a class dimension. Although the wealthy are devoting
millions to preventing the deterioration of their bodies, for much of
the population, the prospect of growing old in reasonable health is a
luxury.

We have long understood that poverty shortens lives. A growing body of
gerontological research now suggests that disadvantage may also
accelerate the biological processes by which people grow old.

The Body Keeps a Different Clock

Chronological age advances at precisely the same rate irrespective of
income, occupation, or circumstance. The more complicated phenomenon
is biological aging. Our organs and physiological systems do not
deteriorate uniformly. Two individuals of the same chronological age
can differ substantially in cardiovascular health, immune function,
and susceptibility to disease. One may remain independent into their
eighties, while another develops chronic illness decades earlier.

Researchers have attempted to quantify these differences using
biological aging markers, including changes in DNA chemical
modification, called methylation. Methylation influences gene function
and underpins so-called epigenetic clocks, some of which estimate
physiological deterioration or predict subsequent disease and
mortality.

A 2025 longitudinal study [[link removed]]
published in The Journals of Gerontology examined disadvantage during
childhood and adulthood alongside epigenetic measures around the age
of fifty. Both were associated with faster aging on certain measures.
An unequal childhood may leave DNA signatures that persist for
decades, although circumstances in adulthood continue to matter too.

In May 2026, researchers
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JAMA Network Open examined nearly 3,800 adults and conditions across
267 American counties. Those raised in areas characterized by greater
poverty, educational disadvantage, and racial segregation subsequently
exhibited biological signatures associated with accelerated aging and
inflammation. Some associations remained after accounting for
individual and family socioeconomic circumstances. The wider
environment in which someone grows up may leave measurable traces in
their biology twenty years later.

Poverty does not make every disadvantaged person biologically older by
a predictable number of years. What the evidence increasingly supports
is that biological aging is socially and politically patterned and
cannot be understood by examining individual behavior alone.

The Unequal Distribution of Time

Lifespan is the number of years you live. Health span is how many of
these years you remain healthy. According to the World Health
Organization
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(WHO), global life expectancy reached 73.3 years in 2023, compared
with healthy life expectancy of 62.8 years. This means that for most
people, living longer is decoupled from living well.

The WHO’s 2025 report on the social determinants of health
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people born in countries with the highest life expectancy could expect
to live thirty-three years longer than those born in countries with
the lowest. But mortality describes only part of the inequality. The
years preceding death determine whether someone can work without
debilitating pain, remain physically independent, and enjoy the
ordinary freedoms that reasonable health makes possible.

In Britain, the figures are particularly damning. For 2022 to 2024,
the Office for National Statistics
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estimated that men in England’s most deprived areas could expect
just 49.8 years of good health, compared with 69.2 in the least
deprived areas. For women, the corresponding figures were 48.2 and
68.5 years. These are estimates of healthy years across a lifetime,
not the ages at which everyone becomes ill. Nevertheless, the gap
approaches twenty years within the same country, under the same health
care and retirement arrangements.

Across the Atlantic, a landmark American study
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the American Medical Association found that among those reaching
forty, men in the richest 1 percent could expect to live 14.6 years
longer than those in the poorest 1 percent. Among women, the
difference was 10.1 years. From 2001 to 2014, life expectancy
increased substantially among the wealthiest Americans, while gains at
the bottom were small. Longevity was improving, but its benefits were
being distributed along familiar economic lines.

Australia offers another illustration. For 2020 to 2022, official
statistics
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estimated that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men had a life
expectancy 8.8 years shorter than nonindigenous men; among women, the
gap was 8.1 years. These inequalities cannot be reduced to income
alone. Structural discrimination, geographical disadvantage, and
unequal access to resources help explain why the benefits of a wealthy
society remain so unevenly distributed.

Politically Accelerated Aging

There is a term for the process through which social disadvantage
contributes to premature deterioration of health: “politically
accelerated aging.” This does not mean governments determine the
biological age of every citizen. It describes how political and
economic arrangements influence the conditions under which aging takes
place, systematically exposing some populations to greater
physiological harm than others.

There is something deeply perverse about a society that can
investigate whether the wealthy might live beyond the ordinary limits
of aging yet tolerates conditions that leave millions debilitated long
before old age.

Consider the accumulation of disadvantage across an ordinary working
life. A child grows up in overcrowded housing, exposed to damp,
pollution, and material insecurity. Employment brings unpredictable
hours, physically demanding work, and limited protection against
illness. As adulthood progresses, disturbed sleep, financial anxiety,
and difficulties accessing timely health care become familiar
companions.

None of these exposures guarantees premature deterioration.
Cumulatively, however, they may increase the risk of ill health
through chronic stress responses, inflammation, metabolic dysfunction,
and cardiovascular disease. What appears in a medical record as
hypertension, diabetes, or premature functional decline may reflect
decades of circumstances over which the individual exercised
remarkably little control.

Housing standards, employment protections, wages, environmental
regulation, social security, and health care provision are not natural
phenomena. They are shaped by legislation, economic priorities, and
public spending. Though governments are not responsible for biological
processes, they are responsible for political ones: whether low-paid
workers can afford to be ill, whether homes are habitable, whether
workplaces are safe, and whether preventive care is available before
disease becomes disabling.

The language of personal responsibility becomes particularly harmful
here. Individuals are encouraged to improve their sleep, reduce
stress, exercise regularly, and make healthier dietary choices. Much
of this advice is sound. But its practical application depends upon
resources that are unequally distributed. Adequate sleep is difficult
when employment requires irregular night shifts. The instruction to
reduce stress offers little assistance to someone facing eviction.
Nutritious food requires not only knowledge but money and time.

To the Bryan Johnsons of the world, aging is a process to be
rigorously optimized. For many working people, daily life must be
organized around the demands of earning enough to survive.

The Business of Growing Old

Johnson’s experiment reveals the extraordinary resources now being
directed toward extending healthy life. Much of his program rests upon
established principles: physical activity, sufficient sleep, sensible
nutrition, and attention to cardiovascular and metabolic health. Other
interventions remain experimental, with uncertain long-term benefits.
There is no secret elixir of youth. There are, however, immense
privileges and resources to operationalize these principles. These
advantages cannot be reproduced merely by instructing someone on a low
income to follow the same protocol. Yet the increasingly
commercialized longevity industry presents aging as a problem of
personal investment, selling biological age testing, supplements, and
specialist clinics to those able to afford them.

Advances in geroscience, the field of medicine that investigates how
biological aging drives chronic disease, may eventually produce
substantial public benefits. The contradiction arises when the promise
of longevity is detached from the circumstances that determine who
becomes ill early and who can obtain effective treatment. A society
that struggles to provide adequate preventive health care to
disadvantaged communities can apparently sustain a flourishing market
in personalized interventions for the affluent.

Consider retirement. Governments increasingly discuss longer working
lives in the name of pension sustainability, as though chronological
age adequately measures everyone’s capacity to remain economically
active. Someone who has spent decades in physically demanding
employment, developed chronic illness in middle age, and received
limited preventive care is not entering retirement in circumstances
comparable to an affluent professional with autonomy over their
working life. Both may reach the same statutory pension age. Their
capacity to enjoy the years that follow can be profoundly different.
Extending working lives, without confronting these inequalities, risks
imposing further costs upon those already carrying the greatest
burden.

Aging Well Must Become a Collective Entitlement

The political response cannot consist solely of widening access to
commercialized, fad-driven longevity technologies. Decent housing,
secure employment, adequate incomes, safer working conditions,
accessible public spaces, and properly funded health care can prevent
avoidable deterioration. These things are important beginning in
childhood [[link removed]], not at
the threshold of retirement. By the time someone reaches old age, much
of their lifetime exposure to disadvantage has already occurred, and
we have simply missed the boat.

Understanding the processes of aging should make the politics of their
unequal distribution more urgent. If researchers can identify
biological signatures associated with poverty and chronic stress,
policymakers can no longer plausibly treat these conditions as
separate from population health. The ability to measure aging must be
matched by a determination to prevent its avoidable acceleration.

There is something deeply perverse, Dickensian even, about a society
that can investigate whether the wealthy might live beyond the
ordinary limits of aging yet tolerates conditions that leave millions
debilitated long before old age. Bryan Johnson’s extraordinary
efforts may improve his health, though I am willing to bet my medical
license that his lifespan will be firmly ordinary. The more immediate
concern is for those experiencing material deprivation: lives are
being shortened, independence restricted, and, increasingly,
biological deterioration appears to be accelerated.

The challenge is not simply to discover how humans might live longer.
It is to confront why the opportunity to grow old in good health
remains so unequally distributed. A longer life should not depend upon
the ability to purchase protection from the conditions that make
others age prematurely.

_Jatinder Hayre is a junior doctor and academic researcher with an
interest in health inequalities and the social determinants of health.
He is a campaigner and national spokesperson for Keep Our National
Health Service Public._

* aging
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* Inequality
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* Sickness
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