Silicon Valley's Latest Lifehack: Death

In Silicon Valley, going to extraordinary lengths to raise one’s life expectancy is like wearing FiveFinger shoes to work or microdosing LSD during a hackathon: a quirk that barely registers as a quirk.

Even as entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and billionaires invest their time, bodies and fortunes in the project of cheating death, they’re also increasingly finding solace in something else: an ancient Greek intellectual tradition that views the natural rhythms of the life cycle—which is to say, dying—as a central fact of being. Which, most would ar

“The man who fears death will never do anything worthy of a man who is alive,” as Seneca put it.