Longevity in the Hellscape

Symonne Torpy is known for crafting concepts that will make you scream (mostly in a good way) and out of office messages you’ll want to screenshot.

She takes pleasure in murdering clichés, condemning mixed metaphors, and defending the Oxford comma.

She currently calls Maison BETC home, where she directs creative and slays a new heel every day. If you want to catch her after 7pm, there had better be wine on the table.

Why are we all trying to live longer in a world on fire?

We live in a hellscape. The world is, if not actively ending, at least deeply unpleasant in ways that feel historically specific and uniquely exhausting. Rent is astronomical. Heat waves arrive earlier, hit harder and last longer. The political landscape resembles a custody battle between people who should not be allowed near children.

And yet, amidst all of this, everyone seems to be spending an extraordinary amount of money trying not to die. The global longevity market is projected to be worth north of $44 billion by 2030 (Allied Market Research). That’s a great deal of money to spend extending our stay on a planet that is, by every available metric, on fire.

The Supplement Aisle at the End of the World

Here is a non-exhaustive list of things you can now purchase in the interest of longevity: NAD+ infusions. Resveratrol capsules. Metformin prescribed off-label by a concierge doctor who charges $30,000 a year. Hyperbaric oxygen chambers you can install in your guest bedroom, assuming you have a guest bedroom, which you cannot afford because, as previously established, rent is too high. Red light therapy panels. Rapamycin. Senolytics. Telomere testing kits. Biological age calculators. Continuous glucose monitors worn by people who do not have diabetes but do have a podcast. There are pills for your joints, your gut, your mitochondria, your sleep, your stress, your skin, your cognition, and your "cellular energy."

Billionaire Bryan Johnson spends roughly $2 million a year in pursuit of a single goal: turning back his biological clock. He sleeps on a fixed schedule, down to the minute. He eats the same precision-engineered meals, day after day. He’s received blood transfusions from his teenage son, with the idea that this "young blood" procedure (which is not FDA approved) will help reverse aging. He's the poster boy. He is not alone.

Meanwhile, the skincare industry has fully merged with the longevity industry, with an attractive promise — live longer, more beautifully. Retinol was the gateway drug. Now the heavy hitters have arrived with their lab coats and the longevity vocabulary to match. Lancôme is building an entire range around Mitopure, a "highly pure" form of urolithin A, the same mitochondrial molecule sold as a longevity supplement, now repackaged as a face cream that promises to lower your visible biological age. Helena Rubinstein will sell you Re-Plasty, a night cream nicknamed the Black Bandage after post-surgical recovery. And if a jar isn't enough, you can graduate to the clinic for a "salmon sperm” facial (purified fragments of fish DNA needled into your face) or a vampire treatment, in which they draw your blood, spin it in a centrifuge, and put the good part back into your skin. We are farming both the salmon and ourselves for parts.

Caremaxxing Is Control

Many of the same longevity lovers believe (quite rightly) that Earth has maybe forty survivable years left, that democracy is a memory, and that the economy is a Ponzi scheme. They’re optimising their C-reactive protein levels so they can be in peak physical condition for the apocalypse.

But humans are going to human. Doing nothing while the world burns is too futile. Longevity culture is, at its core, a productivity hack that gives individuals back the idea of control. It reframes the act of being alive as a project that can be measured and improved upon, which is something most of us no longer believe we can do for the planet.

And this is where it gets complicated, because the longevity industrial complex has understood something the rest of us are still pretending isn't true: many of us don't even want to live longer. We want to look like we're going to live longer. Take Ozempic culture. The pursuit of thinness masquerading as youthful health. If anything, it's the opposite of longevity — a borrowed silhouette with a deferred bill. Clinical trials have shown GLP-1 agonist drugs like semaglutide can lead to a 13.9% loss of lean body mass during treatment. The irony writes itself: the same demographic doing resistance training and downing 100 grams of protein to bank muscle for old age is also injecting a drug that quietly withdraws it. Strategies to help prevent muscle loss include regular strength training, aerobic exercise, dietary protein, and a whole host of other supplements — an entire counter-regimen to offset what the injection takes. Among the side effects is the “Ozempic face," where skin on the face sags and wrinkles. But this, of course, can be treated with plastic surgery. A drug to look younger, a surgery to fix what the drug did to your face. The snake, eating its own tail and billing you for both ends.

Have a Smoke Break

And now, because culture is a pendulum, we arrive at the countertrend. Open Vogue or Newsweek or Forbes, and you'll find the same headline rephrased a dozen ways: smoking is back. Cigarettes are enjoying a cultural renaissance among gen z, decades after smoking bans and health concerns drove many to quit.

The evidence is measurable. Style Analytics, an Instagram account that shares data-driven insights on the fashion industry, reported in November 2025 that searches for the term "smoking pose" on Pinterest had risen by 70% year-on-year among people aged 18 to 24 in the US. There's an entire genre of influencer dedicated to it: the Cigfluencers Instagram account has over 100k followers, and exists, in its own words, to "keep the art of smoking and being cool alive”. The celebrity gravity is real. Rosalía brought a cigarette bouquet to a birthday party in 2024. Charli XCX and George Daniel offered silver trays of smokes at their 2025 wedding. Sabrina Carpenter takes a puff of a cigarette with a fork in her Manchild music video. Cinema and TV are bringing cigarettes back as props, with more than half of the top box-office films released in 2024 featuring tobacco imagery, a 10%-point jump from the year before.

The people lighting up know exactly what they're doing. They are smoking with the deliberate, photogenic nonchalance of a 1990s Calvin Klein advertisement. They know it will kill them. That is, I suspect, part of the point. Smoking isn’t even anti-health. It’s post-health. It is the aesthetic position that the entire wellness-industrial complex is so tedious, so joyless, so fundamentally unsexy, that the only reasonable response is to do the opposite and look fantastic doing it. This is where the two trends converge, and the absurdity of it all is revealed. The longevity crowd wants to be sixty with the biomarkers of a thirty-year-old. The nihilist crowd wants to be thirty with the attitude of someone who doesn't care if they see sixty. In the end, they want the same thing. The methods are different — one cohort does it through obsessive vigilance, the other through theatrical indifference — but the common goal is to project an image of someone who is not subject to the ordinary humiliations of having a mortal body.

For the Love of an Unoptimised Life

There is a secret buried under all of it — the syringes, the serums, the spinning vials of your own blood — and it is so simple it's almost insulting. You already have the thing they're selling. You're standing in it. That is the thing the $44 billion industry does not want you to know, because the moment you know it, you stop buying the supplements. You stop booking the procedures. You stop quantifying and tracking and hacking, and you simply sit there, in your unoptimised body, with your uninvestigated telomeres, eating a piece of cheese and staring out the window like a person from 1953, and for a moment, one brief, unmonetizable moment, you are not a consumer of longevity. You are just alive.