The breakfast buffet at the Six Senses, Ibiza is served in their showstopping main building. A three-story room that opens fully on one side to the sea, like an airplane hangar built by a sun cult in a stylish horror film in which we will all be required to line up and throw ourselves to our deaths at the end of an ecstatic ceremony scored by Boygenius.
It’s in this hangar, as the sun rises over the Mediterranean warming its death rays, that all the demographic cohorts gather each morning.
There are the young families—freshly scrubbed parents in blindingly white golf shirts scrolling on their phones while their nannies chase after toddlers with smoothies they were only moments ago screaming for. There are the twenty-somethings, in sunglasses and tattoos, leaning over their coffee drinks with their dehydrated heads in their hands vibrating with the last remnants of club music.
But in my mind, there is but a single dominant demographic here at the Six Senses. The olders. The post-fifties. Who appear in their Vuori shorts and OnCloud sneakers, stopping for a quick breakfast on their way to the gym or coming from it. Bright-eyed, silver-haired, psychotically eager to meet the day, perusing the chia-seed porridge and ginger-cayenne shots and beet-overnight-oats. Searching. For something with antioxidants, or turmeric, or the flesh of young fruit—specifically papaya because it’s great for skin.
You could say this is the dominant group in the world, full stop. Those with the assets, the people who won’t sell their houses, or leave the C-suite. Those who have raised their children and earned their money, and now that they have attained their perch, have apparently turned their attention to never dying.
Old (or soon-to-be) people who don’t want to die are just an enormous market force. Attracting them is the subject of countless brand strategy meetings and marketing campaigns. And that is perhaps why the Six Senses, Ibiza has spent so much money on the Rosebar, one of the most renowned longevity spas in the world, and an added attraction in the resort arms race to bring the most rich people to your $1800 a night door.
To be fair, I should note that I am now approaching this target demo. And should by all measures be in the market for anything that might help me reverse whatever’s happening in my body before it’s too late. (It’s not too late, is it?)
And that’s how I found myself waiting in a glowing, windowless subterranean white plaster room that felt like a listening station deep in a mountain where scientists commune with aliens across time and space.
In a few minutes, an attendant with enormous blue eyes appeared and told me his name was Nui. He was beautiful and poreless and seemed to come from a race that had transcended the idea of gender.
Against one wall was a white metal capsule with portal windows that resembled an undersea submersible. This was a hyperbaric chamber. Nui opened the door and explained that once I was locked inside this thing, he’d turn a valve, oxygen would be pumped in, and, over time, the air pressure would be dialed up to two to three times the atmosphere at sea level. Hyperbaric chambers are normally used to treat wounds, decompression sickness, and other acute illnesses I did not have. The Rosebar has one because they are also thought to reduce inflammation and promote longevity.
Nui asked some perfunctory questions (are you ok with small spaces?). I gave some perfunctory answers (no, but I’m really good at burying my most important feelings so they appear only as a nameless and unrelenting sense of anxiety).
Then I climbed in, lay on the white chamois plinth, and he closed the hatch.
I was in that capsule for a long time. It was very white, very serene, remarkably quiet. The silence allowed me to tune into what seemed like a sound, but I began to suspect was really a steady current of nameless anxiety. It seemed to be (apologies to Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections) an alarm, a distress call, that had been ringing for so long, I stopped hearing it.
There were many more treatments that day. Next was red light therapy, a sort of advanced McDonald’s warming lamp that you lie under to receive benefits—skin cell regeneration, better circulation, muscle recovery. And after that was something called Normatec compression boots — giant waders that inflate, from my feet to my thighs, squeezing my flesh northward and then back again in order to promote circulation and stimulate and drain the lymphatic system. Then cryotherapy, where I’d be briefly frozen to help reduce inflammation.
Last, I would spend a few hours receiving a “longevity boost” IV, a cocktail of magnesium, tryptophan, Taurine, vitamins B1, B5, B6, and B12, as well as Glutathione, which the Six Senses guide referred to as the mother of all antioxidants.
I entered the Rosebar in the morning, and by the time I emerged, it was late afternoon. It was almost shocking to remember that I was in Ibiza, on the far-flung edge of an island off the coast of Spain, arrayed along a rocky Mediterranean cliff with views all the way to forever. I walked back to the hotel proper. Down by the infinity pool at the center of the property, people lay motionless beneath the sun like, perhaps, members of a cult that had breakfast in a three-story hangar.
Having been exposed to longevity treatments for the first time, one thing I noticed is that they’re not like going to the gym. They do not require you to be an active participant in making yourself healthy. This is a process of having things done to you. Pure passivity.
This part I liked.
So I surrendered myself to whatever the mother of all antioxidants was doing inside me. When I got to the pool, I collapsed into a chair that had been abandoned moments earlier by a mostly naked couple eating sushi. And just watched the sunset.
It was a similar regimen the next day. The nurses at the Rosebar drew 100 milliliters of my blood and siphoned it into a clear plastic egg, where they mixed it with ozone and slowly dripped it back into my body. This ozone-ified blood would apparently remove free radicals, which we all know by now are a powerful agent of decay, wrinkles and probably death.
I stayed in the IV center for a couple more hours to receive, as my next treatment, a massive dose of NAD+ — nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. It’s an enzyme of fascination among biohackers, because it’s thought to play an important role in your metabolism, repairing DNA and regulating energy. It also apparently makes you feel sick when you get a lot of it intravenously, so it was followed with a chaser of IV anti-nausea medication.
In my last small white room, I was told to remove all my clothes, as well as any metal from my person. Then, naked, I lay on an electrified table where diodes were strapped to my hands and feet in order to restore my body’s electrical balance.
Here’s the thing. Coming in, I fundamentally thought all this stuff was bullshit. Not simply that these treatments may not work – there has not been enough research on a lot of this stuff for us to be certain whether most of it is effective. But bullshit in a philosophical way. In a plastic surgery-adjacent way. Facelifts are a form of vanity, which we all know is a deadly sin. But isn’t longevity some form of greed? Wanting to live past when you’re supposed to? Sucking more marrow from the bone of life than is allotted to you? Not relinquishing your perch because you have the means to anti-oxidize yourself into immortality?
And I still kind of believe some of that is true. At some point, God needs to fling you off the great breakfast buffet of life and into the hereafter, and maybe you shouldn’t be a brat about it.
But on the other hand, getting Alzheimer’s or cancer or feeling like garbage when you get up in the morning – is any of that “aging gracefully?” And doesn’t aging gracefully really mean looking great naturally while you age, which, sorry, is not something available to everyone. Meryl Streep ages gracefully because she looks like Meryl Streep. Would looking like Grandpa from The Simpsons at age 60 make me graceful?
And we’re all using science to extend our, with forgiveness to Andrew Huberman and Dr. Attia, “healthspans.” Aging, even at my current age of 50ish, is already a process of outsourcing bodily functions that your actual body is no longer very good at. Like seeing (glasses) or sleeping (an EightSleep) or regulating your blood pressure (pills).
And at 50ish, one is just getting started. What does the future hold (if you can pay for it)? A continually growing list of functions that, as a body ages, would have to be performed by Nui.
Where the line lies between not being miserable and being a greedy vampire who is one step away from a bloodboy — that’s not a question I could answer just then in the Rosebar.
But I can tell you that I liked having things done to me. Bearing no responsibility. I lay there naked on my back with the diodes on my hand like some kind of deluded cosmic antenna, with nothing to do. No Zooms to endure. No breathing exercises, no downward dogs, no meditation, no HIIT intervals.
When the machine switched off at the end of its cycle, I realized that I’d been asleep almost the whole time. As I got out, it occurred to me what might be beneath that alarm bell that had been going off undetected for so long: the exhaustion resulting from the desperate psychic treading of water required of a human being in 2025.
I put my clothes back on, walked down to the pool, collapsed onto a chair, and fell asleep again. Not the light slumber of an afternoon nap, but a loss of connection to planet earth. I could decide if I needed a bloodboy tomorrow.
Devin Friedman is a Los Angeles-based writer
