I have been thinking about two men who have almost nothing in common, and I cannot stop thinking about the one thing they share.
The first is Robert Pirsig, who in 1974 published Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and then spent most of the rest of his life wishing people would stop asking him about it. The book sold five million copies. It is about a motorcycle trip across the American West, except that it isn’t. It is about a man trying to define a concept he calls Quality — capitalized, because he means something specific by it, something that resists easy definition but that everyone recognizes when it is present and everyone notices when it is absent. Pirsig’s Quality is what separates the mechanic who changes the oil because the schedule says it’s time from the mechanic who changes the oil because he has listened to the engine and heard something shift. The first mechanic is performing maintenance. The second mechanic is performing care. The distinction is not sentimental. It is functional. The first mechanic will keep the machine running. The second mechanic will keep it running well.
The second man is Bryan Johnson, who sold his payment processing company Braintree to eBay for $800 million in 2013 and has since dedicated his life — and approximately $2 million per year — to not dying.