The wealthiest men all have bad hair and I think that matters
There's a new doc on Netflix about Bryan Johnson, the "Don't Die" guy who spends millions a year to...not die?? I've been peripherally obsessed with him ever since learning that he calls his teenage son his "blood boy" as he gets infused with the kid's plasma. It's an overwhelming metaphor: aging powerful entity drains the youth of natural resources for its own individual benefit, to retain power for longer than nature intended, with no rational or empathetic consideration for the future of anyone or anything beyond itself. But if the goal is to age in reverse and entice a bunch of death-defying hopeful suckers to futilely buy into his system, his hair situation is decidedly not aspirational and actually makes him look older because it's such an obvious dye job. In 2015 I wrote a piece explaining Trump's hair (ugh sorry) and researched extensively, turning up reasonable proof that he dyes it himself, which appears to me to be what Johnson does, or maybe Blood Boy does double duty every few weeks, but whatever's going on there it's cancelling out the $2million a year he spends Benjamin Buttoning himself.
I started writing this on Monday before the LA fires broke out. Watching from afar my whole brain is short-circuiting, like I feel as though we should be there, we were just there. All the specific streets and businesses, gardens, weird special secret places, and important personal landmarks. I really can't comprehend how much is gone and can't be rebuilt. LA chewed me up and spat me out a little bit, and yet I'm here in the relative safety I sought out on the other side of the country consumed with grief, maybe because even though we left thoughtfully and on purpose, this catastrophe shatters the illusion that LA would just always be there more or less how we left it, waiting for us to come back even just for a visit.
My Instagram feed is full of links to GoFundMe pages of people who lost their homes in the fires. The likes of Bryan Johnson could fulfill every single one without making a meaningful dent in their wealth. Though the pandemic stigmatized mask-wearing, the practice remains an act of community care and I see mutual aid and disabilities rights groups - not wealthy organizations or government entities - distributing masks all over the city to protect against toxic smoky air.
Wendy just asked me if I'm obsessed with billionaires, and I absolutely am. In the public imagination obtaining that level of power and wealth is aspirational because it theoretically should provide insulation from the worst outcomes of political unrest, climate change, and economic instability, but also just let you have a chill, fun, easy life. These guys are not chilling and having fun! They're compulsively leaning into endeavors to amass ever more wealth and power in decidedly not chill ways, which I think belies the reality they, and we, all understand at least subconsciously; that there is no sum of money beyond which you're all good. If that's true (it is) and billionaires take up so much space in the public consciousness, what does observing that behavior do to our brains?
The message is that in order to survive, we'd all better hoard resources for ourselves individually, because that's what billionaires are doing, without sharing or collaborating for the public good to a degree that's proportionate to their wealth. Besos overpaid for The Washington Post and Musk overpaid for Twitter to control and destroy spaces of public discourse and information, effectively eliminating the ability for us to have a shared understanding of objective reality.
Which brings me to why their bad hair isn't trivial. When a client is detached from reality they often have difficulty envisioning and describing what they want, as the driving forces behind their requests are external. The image they aim to project to the world is shaped by the oppression of the world. Everybody knows Musk was going bald 20 years ago and went through the pain and expense of hair transplants rather than just being rich and bald. Zuckerberg has gone from tightly shorn tennis ball to tennis ball wearing a mussed merkin. Don't look up Peter Thiel's hair because it's fine which undermines my argument.
Why does Bryan Johnson want to live forever? What does he want to do with that time? It's an almost comically shallow and ironically short-sighted goal, like, game this out for two seconds and any reasonable person would realize immediately that if they really could live forever they'd be surrounded by people who can't. So ok fine, live forever, who are you dyeing your hair for then? Why would you feel compelled to conform to this particular artificial symbol of youth when everybody knows you're old as hell because you can afford to be? Why doesn't that status release you from the constraints of ageism? I just think it gives up the whole gambit. At the end of the day these guys are a bunch of dweebs who reach what they think is the summit of society and find it's just a little gaggle of other duds who thought they could finally be cool once they got up there, but instead they're just balancing precariously on the apex together, still beholden to the obligatory maintenance of a youthful facade. If they had any substance to weigh them down they'd topple sooner.
If a guy can purchase immortality, why would he care about looking older than everybody he's outliving? Wouldn't he revel in his superiority and stop contorting and conforming to a system he's ostensibly in charge of now? Gray hair is beautiful and doesn't always make you look older, if that's what you care about. And if you have everything and don't have to worry about ageism for survival, then a needlessly bad dye job is total loser behavior.
One of these penisheads is going to buy an entire community of charred rubble and proudly stake his claim over the destruction of shared humanity, but his gray roots will emerge relentlessly, an inescapable reminder of his own humanity and mortality and impermanence.
I'm so mad and sad. I've enjoyed starting the new season of The Traitors. If you have a few bucks to spare, This Is About Humanity is matching up to $50k in donations benefitting front/second line farmworkers, day laborers, essential workers and families impacted by fires in Los Angeles. Tell me in the comments places and people you've loved in LA, let's share grief.
Love, Caroline
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