anti-aging, masculinity, and befriending trees

Tethered | January

Feb 05, 2025

You’re reading Tethered Letters, a monthly long-form letter on creative faith and faithful creativity. Everything I write is AI-free. Thanks for reading.

Hello loved ones,

January has been a strange, wonderful, exhausting month. After the disorientation of the holidays wore off, we had about two weeks of semi-routine before we took off for a three-day adventure at the Turkey Run Lodge with the kids and the grands. The trip felt like an opportunity to embrace the best of winter coziness before the grey days hit in earnest. Our treks along Sugar Creek yielded many a bird and mushroom spotted, including a Cooper’s hawk pigging out on a squirrel and a colony of frozen Velvet Foot, which did not survive it’s ride in Nadia’s coat pocket. No feasting was forthcoming, but if I’m being honest, it’s the finding that delights us. And few moments are as wonderful as sinking into a puffy armchair by the fire after a long walk in the snow.

The other highlight of January was the advent of the rats. Yes, Nadia and Louisa are now the proud owners of two fancy rats named Teddy and Tiddles. These two gents are kind of adorable. They are sweet-natured, endlessly curious, agile little animals who instantly stole the girls’ hearts. Everyone who has met them agrees with the “adorable” assessment, until they see their backsides. Their tails are an innate turnoff for folks, regardless of their many uses (climbing counterweight, predator deterrent, and thermoregulator). Despite the posterior problems, the girls are smitten. They won’t tolerate a word against them. And that makes me smile.

Beyond these highlights, the combination of topsy-turvy schedules and gloomy weather had us all feeling a bit of cabin fever by the time the month started to wind down. But here we are in February. By the time you read this, we’ll have already ordered our seeds for the year and begun the task of plotting our garden. Every year we review the successes (loofah, potatoes, garlic) and the failures (pumpkins, watermelon, zucchini). Every year we get excited about trying new things. Every year we are learning more about what it means to nurture the land we’ve been given, the lives in our care, the people around us. Every year is an exercise in hope.

I’ve struggled with what to write to you this month. Some days the world seems so small and mundane, not interesting enough to share with others beyond those in my immediate vicinity. Other days, the world seems so vast and complex that a few paragraphs stitched together feel wholly inadequate. So I’ll write what’s here and see where it goes.

I’ve recently found myself in conversation over masculinity — but not in arguments on the internet over ideas. The dialogue is deeper than this, because it involves men I care deeply about, men I admire, men I have known who have changed, and men who should change who can’t seem to. It involves who my father is, who I am, who my sons are. It’s got layers. It continues, not between talking heads or the visions of manhood on offer from the right and left, but alongside family histories and broken paradigms and biblical transcendence and everyday practicality.

The men I know are offered few options: to accept blame and do penance for the actions of all evil men through the ages, or to embrace their aggressive inclinations and fight as soldiers in the culture wars. The voices that surround men, especially those who are struggling to find their place in the world, are many and loud. The voices within our own heads can be legion.

The masculinity conversation is — perhaps as it should be — really a starting point that reveals a deeper yearning in all of us. Suffice to say that the question “what is a man for?” has little to do with masculinity in the end, and more to do with “what am I for?” This is why the prevailing notions of masculinity on offer in our world fall so devastatingly short of giving men real hope: because they do not help us understand our purpose, or what success in that purpose could look like. Maybe they give us bread crumbs, but little that cuts deep and opens us up.

I recently watched a documentary about a man trying to crack that particular purpose puzzle by reversing his own aging. It was as creepy as it was revealing. I’m not sure I recommend it, but I couldn’t look away. It’s called Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, and it’s focused on millionaire lifestyle wellness guru Bryan Johnson. After making a fortune through payment apps (think Venmo), he found his life lacking any real meaning — whether it was from his family, his religion, or his career. Referring to the Mormon church, he says: “Those answers, the only reality I knew, didn’t make sense anymore.” He became severely depressed. “I didn’t want an afterlife. I didn’t want this life. I didn’t want consciousness at all.” The only thing he wanted was to “make a deal with the devil” so that he could cease to exist.

From the evidence offered throughout this documentary, a case could be made that he actually did make that deal.

In an interview with Rolling Stone last year, Bryan says this:

“I’m a collection of 35 trillion cells. And before Blueprint [his AI-driven health regimen to reverse his aging], I had a wide variety of goals. There was Morning Me, Evening Me, Ambition Me, Dad Me, they all wanted different things at different times — I had conflicting outcomes. And I just ran this experiment to say, could I effectively align my 35 trillion cells to a single objective?”

If you’ve been around here long enough to read my thoughts on Rocket Raccoon, you might recognize the machine-language behind this dehumanizing, disintegrative purpose statement. According to himself, Bryan is not a human; he is just cells. His goals are not fragmented like the normies around him, who have to learn how to reconcile various aspects of their human experience to live whole lives. He does not live anymore, he runs programs the computer told him to run. The emptiness is palpable. Bryan has done everything he can to escape his own humanity, so it’s not really a surprise that the vibe you get from him is “uncanny valley.”

Of note, the experimental treatments and hundreds of pills daily offer nothing substantive or verifiable to the scientific community he claims to want to help. These are not clinical trials with controls for what works and what doesn’t. As one of the actual scientists points out in the documentary, “It’s not science, it’s just attention.” But look! Bryan has surpassed 100,000 subscribers on Youtube. He’s selling $75 bottles of extra virgin olive oil. He’s transfusing his own son’s plasma through himself to see if it reverses epigenetic aging.

The saddest part of the documentary, to me, was the awkward father-son relationship Bryan attempts to have with his son Talmage (the only one of his three kids who has anything to do with him now). According to Bryan, there is too little time before Talmage leaves for college — and yet his “single objective” takes up untold hours of every day with gene therapies, interviews with fitness influencers, and nonstop exercise routines. There's a heart-breaking moment toward the end when Bryan is helping Talmage shop for college. The reality of losing the one person in his life who knows and accepts him cracks through, enough that he drops the mask and weeps into Talmage’s shoulder.

The documentary attempts to show how the followers he has amassed online have since formed a community around him after Talmage left. You kind of hope this is true, but a common objective does not a real community make. One of the reasons Bryan is “sad” about this is because having a community is scientifically-proven to be healthy for you. The fact remains: his pursuit of God-like immortality — his pursuit of himself — pushes out any meaningful relationship.

It’s no secret that men today have difficulty making friends. In some circles, friendship between men is framed as only possible through competition — either in the race to the confessional to prove your repentance, or in the race to the frontline to prove your manhood. Fraternity is that which involves dominance, not vulnerability (and sometimes, ironically, dominance through vulnerability). In other words, achievement in whatever cultural game you are playing is what makes you a man. Your accomplishments thus become the only lens through which you can relate to anyone. What you do becomes who you are.

Bryan is an extreme example, but his quest to reverse aging shows the end game of a life built on wanting “more” — more purpose, more time, more achievement, more legacy, more life. Business success didn’t do it for Bryan. Neither did being a husband or dad, or involving himself in religion. Bryan must ascend from the messiness of “Homo Erectus” to the immortality of “Homo Deus.” The only purpose is evolutionary glory, the only pathway: the algorithm. In service of this objective, he loses everything that makes him human.

Thankfully, there are other visions of purpose out there.

German director Wim Wenders offers us one in his latest movie, Perfect Days. The main character, Hirayama, is played with exceptional depth by Kōji Yakusho (who received the Best Actor award at Cannes this year for this performance). Linnea and I unabashedly loved this film.

Perfect Days follows Hirayama through his mostly solitary daily routines as a Tokyo toilet cleaner. His life is not glamorous. It is almost entirely unseen. But I’ve rarely seen a character in modern cinema inhabit a more purposeful life. The cinematic landscape is riddled with characters who are either aimlessly doing nothing, ambitiously pursuing what they see as their purpose, or discovering that achievement of it doesn’t fulfill them. Hirayama is doing none of these things, and he is happy.

Wim has said in interviews that he wanted to focus on a character “totally devoid of greed.” Hirayama lives in a tiny apartment with just enough room for the necessities, which include a collection of cassette tapes featuring music by Lou Reed and Nina Simone and a small library. He goes to the same restaurant every evening, gets the same food, visits the same bath house, eats the same packed lunch at the same place. He starts his day with a coffee, a deep breath, and a grateful look skyward. He finishes his day reading by lamplight before drifting off to sleep. Obscenely, he does not buy another book until he has finished the one he is reading (horror!)

Similarly, Hirayama does not pursue advancement. He is not discontent with his lot in life, but takes great satisfaction in a well-cleaned toilet. He is open to the world around him: helping a child find his mother, sharing his music with a sad young woman, playing a running game of tic-tac-toe with a stranger, opening his home to his niece when she runs away. He enjoys taking pictures of komorebi, or the way light filters through trees, in the local park where he eats lunch. He is receptive, and maybe that’s part of his ability to live so simply. How can you need more if you receive everything as a gift?

Even given his placid nature (the Japanese surname hirayama means “peaceful mountain”), his life is not idyllic. A younger, foolish colleague takes advantage of his kindness. He yearns for a woman who does not return his affections. Numerous passersby totally dismiss him or treat him like a lesser life form. Wim and Kōji drop hints throughout the film that Hirayama is estranged from his family, that his choice to live in this manner is at least somewhat influenced by past traumatic events. But backstory is not the goal. The past is the past. The future is the future. Hirayama lives fully in the present. As he says to his niece, “Next time is next time. Now is now.”

According to Kōji, this is the crux of the film:

"You can have so little and be so satisfied... So why are there so many people who end up dying very unsatisfied with their life? I think that's the big question that this film makes the audience ask."

Perfect Days goes against our prevailing notions of satisfaction in life. The pundits say you get it from achieving your political aims. Amazon and dating apps say you get it from having options and trying lots of things. The Substack writing gurus say you get it from grinding, building your platform, and other secrets I’ll give you access to for only $9.99/month. The social media influencers offer you likes and follows, from pursuing a beautiful body or expansive fame or artistic originality or the most correct kowtowing to prevailing opinions. Bryan Johnson says you get it by having the heart of a 37-year-old (not for breakfast, although he might be trying that too, who knows).

Hirayama says you get satisfaction from noticing the ground under your feet, and the sky above your head, and light streaming through the leaves of a tree you’ve befriended. You get it from plain work that serves others. You get it from a snack and a song and helping someone out. You get it from accepting what you receive.

In these opposing visions of purpose, we see two trajectories laid out before us: the upward push toward glory, or the downward path to humility.

Jesus was offered this choice. When asked to make a deal with the devil and receive glory, He refused. When tempted to take control and rule as King by His own disciples, He chose the path to the cross. And He calls his followers to do the same.

“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Philippians 2:3-11)

The problem with our pursuit of great purposes is that we are not great. We are not strong. We are flawed and frail and self-deceived, and the only posture that acknowledges this reality is that of humbling ourselves before God.

Any masculine ideal we uphold must begin and end in Christ, without whom there is no hope of salvation, let alone of self-control, strength, or meaning. Yet as men (and women, for that matter) we absorb the idea that the whole world, for good or ill, rests on our shoulders — the lie that enslaves. The truth that heals is this: it doesn’t.

This is such a relief, isn’t it? And it doesn’t preclude meaningful action in our spheres of influence, but emboldens it. The blessing we receive from following God is that of limited agency, the sense that as far as we can tell, our decisions and purposes are our own even when they are smaller than we think they should be. The double blessing is that these decisions are gathered up in the will of God for our lives and for our world. Our actions matter, and they matter because there is a sovereign God.

Our fears for the future (which He has always held) cannot take precedence over what has always been necessary: to sit at the feet of Jesus, who perfectly reveals the Father, and to learn from Him.

Your purpose is right here, in this mundane moment. It is sacred because you have been made holy by the blood of Jesus. It is important because God loves you.

“Here is a prophetic word for you. You are not special. You are a regular person with a job and a daily life. You are not a history maker. You have a destiny but it’s a regular one. You will never be a household name. You are not a revolution. You do not hold the line. You won’t win the argument. You won’t be in the ministry but if you find someday that you are, don’t count on being successful. You will find yourself living in the middle of a temporary kingdom and you will plant a garden. The garden you plant will not be an idealized, romanticized kind. It will be the kind where your lack of a green thumb will hound you for the first few years, where the reality of weeds and pests and ill conceived irrigation systems will force you to surrender some of your original assumptions about the universe. You will be abased and you will abound. Make sure you know how to do both…” (Andy Squyres)

January Favorites:

Kevin DeYoung’s Just Do Something is a breath of fresh air when it comes to finding the will of God for your life.
Reading Brandon Sanderson’s expansive Oathbringer. It’s huge. I like it.
We made tonkotsu ramen in January using bits from this recipe from Brian Lagerstrom and this one from Way of Ramen. I gotta say, it blew our usual shoyu recipe out of the water.
Switchfoot’s The Beautiful Letdown. Again.
Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is a perfect sequel. Hilarious, subversive, and a grand lark from start to finish.
I had a hard time not getting a little excited watching the Fantastic Four: First Steps trailer. Hopefully Marvel doesn’t botch it…
I always love the Mockingcast, but “Episode 272: Running Toward the Ick” was distilled, 100-proof MC. 11/10 recommend, no cap.
Vulfmon’s “Dawn,” and the Fearless Flyers’ “Flyers Funk.”