Menopause is a glitch in the simulation

Menopause is a glitch in the simulation, an evolutionary adaptation that’s lost all efficacy.

Think about it, ovaries are the only human organ we casually accept will fail.

You don't see a large fellow in line for a turkey leg at Disney accepting that he’ll keel over from heart failure at 50.

The way out is to increase the shelf life of our ovaries and opt out of menopause all together.

Before we chat on how to dismantle menopause, here’s a quick TLDR on how the female reproductive system actually works:

The ovary is like a time machine, aging decades ahead of the body it inhabits. At birth, a million follicles hold immature eggs. By puberty, 700,000 are gone. By 40, the reserves collapse. At 51, when menopause hits, virtually none remain.

That means that when a woman is in her early thirties, when her body is at it’s peak, her ovaries are aging 2.5x faster than any other organ. The medical community literally refers to them as ‘geriatric’.

What a great term for a woman in her thirties.

Our reproductive system is a remarkable paradox, and the system runs deeper than individual lifespans. My grandmother had my mom at 14, my mom had me at 23, and I wish to have a daughter some day. So it’s cool to think that the egg that I came from was already in my mother's ovary when she was still in my grandmother's womb. The eggs that could become my grandchildren are already formed inside the daughter I might have one day.

Russian dolls of time, each woman containing the next.

The most popular theory on menopause's genesis is the grandmother hypothesis: older women stopped reproducing to care for existing offspring, maximizing genetic legacy through survival rather than production.

There’s some truth to this. Children with grandparental support survived at higher rates.

Looking deeper into the data, I found a cheeky asymmetry: more babies died under the care of paternal grandmothers than maternal.

This explains why we instinctively dislike our dad's side of the family 🤯

Your mom's mom knows for certain you're her genetic grandchild since a live birth makes maternal certainty pretty obvious.

Your dad's mom on the other hand can't be 100% certain your dad is your biological father, what if another man's sperm fertilized your mom’s egg?

Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. Females have more skin in the game. So maternal grandmothers focus on keeping existing babies alive, while paternal grandmothers optimize for quantity since some might not even be related.

Makes me wonder how Telegram's Pavel Durov's mom feels about him spreading his $17 billion fortune across 106 kids.

But maybe the grandmother theory doesn’t denote menopause, and it’s the resource competition theory, where older females stopped breeding to avoid competing with their daughters for mates. Freud's Electra complex… but make it evolutionary?

Or perhaps menopause evolved from male preference for younger mates, making late-life reproduction pointless.

Or it’s all the theories combined.

Point is, they all paint menopause as an adaptation, not absolute truth.

Why else then do only humans, along with just three species of whales and one group of chimpanzees in Uganda endure it? Why did menopause evolve just a few times independently across only 3 species?

Menopause is literally encrypted legacy code.

A fucking black box running in our own bodies, and we’re expected to debug it blind.

If you’ve seen The Matrix, think back to when Neo clocked the black cat.

It was the same cat, & the same movement twice.

Reality buffered as the code rewrote itself.

Menopause is the black cat, a maladaptive glitch in evolution.

We outlive our biological programming by decades, so we endure system wide failures manifesting as hot flashes, sleep disruption, cognitive interference.

The estrogen grid that controls our neural pathways, bone density, cardiovascular function dissolves completely as early as 40.

Yet consciousness lingers, processing reality through an entirely different transmission channel laced with static.

The Matrix never planned for human consciousness to evolve beyond their control parameters.

& evolution never optimized for post reproductive decades of female existence.

Now that fertility rates are plummeting, and total population decay impending, there just might be economic benefit to ending menopause.

Just as Morpheus encouraged Neo to break mental limits, to “free his mind” from seeing the Matrix as immutable, we need to see menopause as contingent code and opt out.

So how do we dismantle it?

Think about how we solve most problems in this country. We don't start with the science. We don't start with the data. We start with someone with access and money deciding a problem matters to them personally.

The moment someone with capital and credibility sees the problem reflected in their own body (or their daughter's, their partner's, their friend's) things change.

That's when funding shows up. That's when institutions pivot. That's when researchers get the resources to follow the thread.

Once it does, the sequence kicks in. Capital flows. Institutions follow. What used to be niche gets rebranded as inevitable.

Nicole Shanahan dropped $6 million on the Buck Institute's Center for Reproductive Longevity and Equality. Within a year, her Global Consortium scattered $7.4 million across scientists studying ovarian aging and how to interrupt it. Self-preservation turned philanthropy, very effective.

At Yale, Kutluk Oktay is perfecting cryopreservation techniques that remove ovarian tissue, freeze it at negative 320 degrees, then reimplant it years later. Blood vessels reconnect within weeks, hormone production restarts within months. His models shows that procedures before 40 can delay menopause by decades. The best time to do this is in your mid-20s, which I am in - so I’ve reached out to inquire.

The technique can scale through existing surgical infrastructure like C-sections, meaning no additional procedures + minimal risk. The goal isn't just extending fertility but also preserving estrogen production for better cognition, cardiovascular function, metabolism, and bone density.

Columbia's Zev Williams is testing rapamycin trials on women. The drug, already validated in aging research, slows egg depletion rates. The ovary becomes a testing ground because it fails faster than other organs, providing feedback loops for broader aging research.

Other labs are mapping the full chemical spectrum of ovarian output. Current hormone replacement therapy replaces only estrogen and progesterone while the ovary secretes dozens of signaling molecules we haven't catalogued, much less replicated.

Every research stream converges on the same endpoint. Delay ovarian collapse, preserve system-wide function, make menopause optional.

Menopause adds to $1.8 billion in lost work productivity and creates a $24 billion annual healthcare toll in the U.S.

Extending ovarian function by just 5-10 years could add $120 billion to global GDP. The treatments will fund themselves through the value they generate.

Can't wait till the VCs hear about this.

Consumer adoption of course needs to close this loop. If ending menopause goes viral but fizzles out just as fast, we’re cooked (as are our ovaries).

Bryan Johnson made biohacking for men mainstream. Women need equivalent evangelists.

To build true utopia, we need AI to monitor eldercare, robotics to handle physical assistance, distributed systems to coordinate family logistics. When machines assume these functions, biology loses justification for shutting down reproduction. Technology rids the evolutionary trade-off.

Distribute ovarian cryopreservation and rapamycin therapies through public funding, subsidize it by the productivity gains from extended workforce participation. The treatments will pay for themselves through the economic value they generate.

To recap, the one’s with access fund this, scientists validate it, early adopters demonstrate results, institutions scale access, culture absorbs the change. Then everyone acts like the outcome was obvious from the beginning.

Picture a society where 60-year-old women enter their second prime with the same renewed confidence that transforms 45-year-old men after successful hair transplants in Turkey…