LOOKING FOR TROUBLE

TECH TYCOONS, PODCAST BROS AND HOLLYWOOD STARS ARE ALL PILING MONEY INTO FULL-BODY SCANS - WHICH DEPLOY AI, CUTTING-EDGE BLOOD TESTS AND THE OCCASIONAL LASER - IN THE HOPE OF CATCHING EVERYTHING FROM HIGH CHOLESTEROL TO CANCER BEFORE YOU EVEN KNOW YOU'RE SICK. IS THIS THE FIRST STEP TO LIVING FOREVER... OR IS THERE SUCH A THING AS KNOWING TOO MUCH?

- BY OLIVER FRANKLIN-WALLIS

YOU ARE A HEALTHY PERSON. You're getting enough protein, cutting carbs, upping if not quite maxxing fibre. OK, you drink, but less often than you used to. You don’t smoke or do drugs. You exercise, of course: cardio and weights, at least a couple of times a week, and your Oura Ring and/or Whoop band affirms that your blood is richly oxygenated and your REM sleep cycles optimal. You supplement. You can only be described as abundantly hydrated.

You are a healthy person. But you have been tired lately. Sluggish. You feel like you're constantly fighting a cold. (You search “long Covid symptoms” and “do I have iron deficiency?” ChatGPT is inconclusive.) Your back hurts. Your neck hurts. Your doctor says, “It’s probably stress.” Or worse, “It’s ageing.” And you do hear horror stories: influencers diagnosed with cancer in their 30s; a colleague whose relative died suddenly of an aneurysm; a school friend on Facebook fundraising for a transplant operation. Besides, what even is “healthy” anyway, except a brief and subjective reading on an unhelpfully diverse spectrum that stretches from immortality at the far end (still at least a few years away, the podcasts say) all the way up to a shockingly sudden and permanent death? No, the question you really want answered—the question all of us are in fact calculating at every moment in the fight-or-flight depths of our anxious brains—is ultimately: am I going to die soon?

Well, good news: thanks to an abundance of new technologies and tech billionaires having midlife crises, there have never been more private companies willing to take an informed stab at answering that question—which is how I find myself standing in my pants inside the Spitalfields branch of Neko Health in London, as a dozen no doubt extremely high-definition cameras prepare to map every single imperfection on my (I’m now acutely aware, extremely imperfect) body.