When tech met wellness. 

“Bryan Johnson believes death is optional”, reads Time’s recent profile of the California-based entrepreneur aiming to be the first human to live forever. With a combination of pills (111 a day), tech (a red light baseball cap) and a complex system of algorithms making every health-based decision for him, Johnson is an extreme example of a wider trend for pursuing health optimisation through radical, fringe or experimental methods, often known as biohacking.

You may think of it as the offspring of the tech and wellness industries: maniacally data-driven with an air of lofty old world lore. 

A common example is intermittent fasting, a practice with ancient roots that has garnered particular interest in the West over the past decade thanks to social media. A less popular example might be surgically inserting a vibrating bluetooth chip beneath your skin to provide an in-built navigation system, as did Liviu Babitz, founder of wearable tech company Cyborgnest. Or the stringent daily routine of the US-based couple aiming to live to 150. 

Corina Ingram-Noehr, a biohacker who takes 20 vitamin supplements a day and walks the freezing streets of Berlin bare legged as a form of cryotherapy, described it to the BBC as “shortcutting your health”. This idea of circumnavigating institutionalised science lies at the heart of the burgeoning biohacking community, whose prominent voices are often seen as pioneers rebelling against a rigid or untrustworthy medical industry. The prevalence of data in biohacking culture also speaks to a particularly 21st Century mindset, where everything, including one’s very life force, can be analysed, optimised and improved. 

What does this tell us about culture?

Despite the seemingly extreme practices of modern longevity seekers, the mentality behind biohacking is arguably as old as culture itself. What’s telling about this modern iteration is the language: ‘hacking’, ‘shortcuts’, ‘optimisation’. This is the Silicon Valley-fication of culture, where human bodies are merely systems to be upgraded and judged on performance metrics.

In some cases the results have been positive. Wearable tech company Skip recently collaborated with Arc’Terx on a pair of hiking pants with motorised knees to alleviate joint pain, a promising sign of brands using biohacking to make a positive contribution to culture. 

But we are standing on the precipice of a huge cultural shift, where technology is advancing faster than the public consciousness can keep up with. As a result, across all areas of public life we’re seeing vanguards break away from institutions, from politics to finance and in this instance, healthcare, where the demand for experimentation is placed higher than the cost of failure. The irony is that by attempting to over-engineer our bodies we risk losing touch with what it means to be human in the first place. 

• We’ll start off lofty, shall we: life extension has all the trappings of becoming a new luxury for the elite, yet if we were to turn the same advanced thinking and technology to helping the 99%, the world would start to feel a little more equal. So our provocation for you is this; what innovation or technology does your brand currently own that could be pointed towards lifting the floor, rather than the ceiling? 
• Fitter, happier, more productive: we never expected to be quoting Radiohead lyrics on Discover, and while we’ve grossly misappropriated those lyrics, they serve the purpose for the point; as the outliers in life extension push the boundaries, it’s highly likely that those advances filter into mainstream health and wellness cultures. Eventually, we’re all going to be fitter, so how can your brand rethink how it perceives, speaks to, and creates products and services for people at retirement age? If we’re all living into our 100s, that’s a lot more leisure time…

To unlock more insights, email discover@culturelab.co 

^{(Sources: CultureLab CultureIndex, April 2025)}