I have been thinking about this issue a lot as it is part of my job. My conclusion is that we "won" the battle against disease and poor hygiene and infant morta

I have been thinking about this issue a lot as it is part of my job. My conclusion is that we "won" the battle against disease and poor hygiene and infant mortality and, in general, a lot more people survive to experience the humiliations of old age. But the upside is that we used to experience the humilitation of dying in infancy, of a preventable accident, cholera, or some other problem that we now avoid so that we grow so old our bowels obstruct, we develop an untreatable cancer, or our heart gets tired and stops working well, and our bodies are full of pain, arthritis, we get lonely because our friends died, and people value us less because we have less human capital in our old age. It is simply a trade off. Would you rather die young? As we experience a societal transition to having a ton of old humans, we have a political system where human numbers matter, so the old can vote themselves more money and social benefits, which harms the prospects of the young at a time when family formation and childbearing is already hard and expensive. This is probably one of the most difficult social problems of our time. We do not have enough money or manpower to take care of all these old people, the robots are not good enough to do it for us yet, and yet the same old people can vote in a way that will suppress young human fertility so there are even fewer new humans to help out. Ultimately I am hopeful because the human population will course correct and right size itself, the young growing up now will see their grandparents and great grandparents lonely and ignored in nursing homes and other human storage facilities and know that if they want someone to care for them they will have to have kids (or build the robots) to do it in their old age. ... Every problem we solve as a species will simply lead us to another problem. If the biohackers and longevity gurus are right...and we can live to 200...well what does this mean for our lives if our healthspan (time where we are pain free and relatively able and attractive) is maybe 100 years? Will we be treating 40 year olds as children? Some of our oldest recorded wisdom, like the Epic Of Gilgamesh, was written so that we would understand that old age and death are inevitable, but it was better to live in happiness rather than despair. This smacks of truth.