by Celia Walden, Telegraph
As religion dies out, the elite are turning to ‘longevity’ therapists to cope with their existential questions
Every time my husband and I would pass the clinic – which wasn’t far from our LA home – we would dissolve into fits of laughter. “The Reverse Ageing Centre” (RAC) was always empty, with just a single lonely-eyed receptionist sitting behind a marble desk in its swanky lobby, hoping against hope that there might be big enough mugs out there to pay for the RAC’s services.
Because to be fair, you’d have to be a medium-to-large-sized mug to walk in, hand over a credit card, and say, “Go on then – make me young again.”
It says a lot that even in LA – where the cult of youth more or less eclipses everything else, with the likes of Elon Musk and Bryan Johnson insisting they will achieve immortality – “The Reverse Ageing Centre” didn’t make it. And when we walked past one day to find that it had gone into receivership, that, too, made us howl.
Less predictable, perhaps, was how fixated we Britons have become by mortality over the past few years. Who would have thought that a fatalistic, heavy-drinking, trench-humour-loving country like ours would fall for this stuff?
[…] As with all “wellness culture”, I can’t help but think that this is what happens when religion dies. We have nothing to believe in anymore, nothing to strive towards. No way of reassuring ourselves when we are down. People used to go to church. Now, in an attempt to fill the vacuum, they worship at the altar of their local Equinox, downing green juices rather than the Blood of Christ.