Sprinting on the Hedonic Treadmill with Aubrey de Grey

By Mark Bünger

I first heard the phrase “the hedonic treadmill” in a conversation with Aubrey de Grey in 2023. Having just turned a spry 60 years old, he used the metaphor to explain why, even as our lives keep growing vastly better than they were in the past, we tend to settle back into a stable level of happiness or discontent. We don’t walk around euphoric because we can fly from New York to Tokyo in 45 minutes, that starvation is vanquished, or that we can live a very long, maybe even indefinite time. While that might be seen as a sign of human foolishness or futility, it’s worth remembering that running - even in place - is great for the heart, bones, and brain.

It’s appropriate, then, that at 80 years old now, he looks, talks, and thinks like a man half his age. Briskly jogging on a literal treadmill for this interview, he and I reminisced over the many conversations we’ve had since he changed the way science thought about aging, and talked about his current thoughts on longevity now in 2043. We’ll keep in touch for decades to come in the future - if we keep up the exercise.

Mark Bünger: So you wouldn’t remember this, but the first time we met was in 2005. It was at a conference, and you made some bold forecasts about longevity that captured my imagination. Specifically, you talked about the “trance” that the world was in surrounding the topic of aging.

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, the proaging trance was about the lack of understanding of the nature of aging scientifically, and not looking at it as though it were a kind of curable disease. This pro-aging trance is what stopped us from agitating about these things.

Mark Bünger: Right. You made a reference later that people thought they understood aging in the same way that they know what color the sky is, but clearly, they did not understand aging in such an obvious way. It took until the Regenerative Revolution for society to view aging as curable.

Aubrey de Grey: But it’s as clear as the sky is blue now!

Mark Bünger: Ha, indeed! You also stated back in 2005 that you believed “a lot of people alive today [were] going to live to 1,000 or more.” With 20/20 hindsight vision, we can say that you’re almost rightor maybe still are. The first 125 year old is alive now, and cures for aging are regarded as prudent care, not quackery.

Aubrey de Grey: We have only 875 years to go, right?

Mark Bünger: Then about ten years later, I organized an event called “Launching Longevity: Funding the Fountain of Youth” at the StanfordMIT VentureLab (VLAB). It was quite a lineup: Sonia Arrison who wrote “100+”; Brian Kennedy at the Buck Institute for Aging, who went on to become the Director of the Centre for Healthy Longevity at National University Singapore. Daniel Kraft from Singularity University; William Eden from Thiel Capital; Joseph McCracken, from Alkahest…

Aubrey de Grey: They cured Alzheimer’s; first longevity Unicorn.

Mark Bünger: Thomas Rando, Stanford … got the Nobel Prize. And of course, you.

Aubrey de Grey: I remember it well.

Mark Bünger: For such a seemingly far-off idea, what I remember most was you and the other experts in the field discussed the growing number of startups addressing longevity, life extension, healthy aging, and other variants on the theme.

Aubrey de Grey: Startups don’t usually have that much vision.

Mark Bünger: But they were very practical, specific. They were experimenting with giving the diabetes drug metformin to non-diabetics, transfusing “young blood” into older people, rapamycin, gerostatics, senolytics, hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT), and telomerase expression. Not only had anti-aging, “negligible senescence,” and other concepts leapt into mainstream science, they were on a commercial path as well.

Aubrey de Grey: And so many of them solved a piece of the puzzle.

Mark Bünger: Then we talked again in 2023, with a global pandemic fading from memory. We covered some recent technological advances in the field, and specifically how AI was changing the world. Now, AI is much more advanced than it was, but in 2023, it was revolutionary. I asked you, ‘In the last decade, looking back, what are some of the things that have surprised you about the whole biogerontology and aging field?”

Aubrey de Grey: Right. I remember I said that almost all the surprises had been good surprises. AI had started to play a very big role. Again, probably the most prominent thing that applied across the whole of medical research, was the solving of the protein folding problem, the advent of AlphaFold. But there were more isolated, narrowly defined advances across the board. Like the development of drugs that selectively kill senescent cells, these things called senolytics, That was a bombshell really.

What had been disappointing over those years was the slowness of the wider world to get with the message, and realize how medicine was on the brink of bringing aging under control. And there was still this extraordinarily deep seated, entrenched fixation on the idea that aging is somehow not a disease (another way of saying “off limits for medicine”). It was changing, but was changing awfully slowly.

Mark Bünger: What are some of the other leaps that happened within the application of AI, and in a particular generative AI, to the field of science? I’d also like to hear what you think about people that think of digital immortality as equivalent or superior to biological immortality.

Aubrey de Grey: AI was how companies like Insilico Medicine and BioAge Labs identified existing drugs that can be repurposed for aging. Even so, few of use believed that small molecule pharmaceuticals would be enough on their own to bring aging under medical control. We needed gene therapies and cell therapies in order to get to the real Holy Grail, but definitely in the meantime there was a lot of benefit that came from AI.

As regards digital immortality, yeah, I’m not really into that. I quite like being made out of meat, and I’ll stick with it for as long as that kind of thing exists.

Mark Bünger: Continuing on this subject in 2033, you talked about the societal mentality surrounding aging, the “pro-aging trance” that we had been stuck in, and the nomenclature in the longevity space.

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, some people are still in the trance.

Mark Bünger: You’ve mentioned before about how some of your colleagues have been unwilling to stick out their necks to make predictions. You’ve said that they “don’t want to be accused of being irresponsible,” and the center of gravity of the research community has to shift towards the direction of optimism. Was there anything that happened in the 2020’s that shifted that model for the community or are they still stuck in that space mentally?

Aubrey de Grey: Not many of them are still stuck. The most practical way to deal with aging, to bring aging under medical control, would be to reverse it rather than slow it down. That was a big paradigm shift and I’m actually quite pleased that since about 2013 it’s been very much a mainstream concept. What was wrong in the 2000’s was that experts were mostly pandering to the fact that society was stuck in what I called a pro aging trance, that people were putting themselves into this extraordinarily irrational frame of mind about aging for the purpose of putting it out of their mind and getting up with them miserable and making the best of it. Such a horrifying thing, the idea of being sick and suffering so much before you die. It’s a horrifying thing that most people can only cope with it by tricking themselves into believing that it’s some kind of blessing in disguise.

Mark Bünger: Right. So, many years ago people referred to immorbidity as ‘immortality.’ Back then, we didn’t know the harm that the word “immortality” caused and how dangerous that labeling was. Can you speak a little bit about that?

Aubrey de Grey: People using slightly incorrect language is a standard tool to distort people’s understanding. We used to talk about immortality in order to kind of reassure people that this is actually not real, because they know perfectly that immortality itself is not technologically achievable. Only when someone coined the word “immorbidity” that we were more accurately naming what it is. It’s the freedom from getting sick, however long ago they were born and thus stopping people’s likelihood of dying from going up as time goes on.

People misuse words all the time. You know, people used to use the word “death” to mean “aging.” They would say ‘Can Google Solve Death?’ That was the front page of Time magazine in 2013. This misuse is a very insidious thing.

Mark Bünger: “Solve” death sounded new, but most of humanity’s history, we have had spiritual beliefs that we would live forever - maybe in an afterlife or through reincarnation. So some people are elated they could live a very very long time, but others see it as just - no pun intended - their birthright.

Aubrey de Grey: Somebody coined a term a long time ago, the “hedonic treadmill.” Basically it says that each of us humans always seem to return to our own average set point of happiness. Bad surprises take us below that and we recover. We get philosophical about them, and even if they don’t go away, we learn to cope and move on. Similarly, good surprises make us happy for a while, until we get blasé. So we avoid nuclear war or climate catastrophe, but we worry about something new. We fly to the moon or double our lifespans, but we soon take it for granted and start longing for Mars or living another century. That’s the treadmill - no matter how fast or slow we run, or even if we stand still, we are in roughly the same place, happiness-wise.

People are already calling our time the Regenerative Revolution. We’re regenerating our bodies, our planet, and our society. When people look back, they will see it as a pivotal time in history. But to us, it’s just what we’re doing day after day.

Mark Bünger: So what are some of the promising ideas in 2043, that used to be magical, implausibly science fiction stuff?

Aubrey de Grey: Today, we’re at this threshold that I’ve called longevity escape velocity. No, we haven’t fixed everything about aging. But we have fixed enough that the age at which people start getting sick, is being postponed faster than time passes. So as long as they’re getting state of the art therapies, they can stay biologically useful however long ago they were born.

Mark Bünger: What are some of the questions people should’ve been asking in 2023; things people should’ve been thinking about 20 years ago?

Aubrey de Grey: Well, they should have seen this paradigm shift that we know all about rejuvenation, damage repair, and slowing aging down towards zero. The biological science was strong and growing; yet the experts in sociology and governance and regulatory and so on just didn’t listen. Think of all the conflicts we could have avoidedpersonal, geopolitical, societal - if we just knew what lay ahead!

Mark Bünger: It seems every time we talk, you drop a new phrase or concept that lights up my brain for another ten years: pro-aging trance, immorbidity, hedonic treadmill, longevity escape velocity. Now at 80, I hear you are training for a marathon - literally, maybe metaphorically too. What is a phrase that keeps you going?

Aubrey de Grey:“I don’t run to add days to my life, I run to add life to my days.”