Fight Aging!

It is my hope that, if asked, most people would agree that degenerative aging is not a pleasant, beneficial thing to look forward to. It is a looming years-long tunnel of varying forms of increasing suffering, expense, loss of dignity, and disability. You wouldn't volunteer for the consequences of aging if they were optional. Everyone knows what's coming. Everyone gets a close-up preview of what will happen, in all its painful details via family, media, stories, the common currencies of education. No adult is truly ignorant of where aging leads and what its costs are.

Any yet, and yet. The masses carry on and for the most part put all thoughts of future suffering to one side - even as the young interact with old people day in and day out, and even as those old people live out their lives. The folk who look at degenerative aging and suggest, seriously, with reference to sound science, that perhaps we can and should do something about it are in a tiny minority. Further, they are often castigated for that view, as if it is something that shouldn't be brought out in polite company.

Living in fear of being dead is of debatable rationality, but living in fear of chronic pain and suffering seems eminently rational to me. You'd be terrified if a random thug could credibly threaten you with half the physical harm that aging is capable of. Fear is a great motivator, but unfortunately far from reliable in what it motivates people to do: the various shadings of fear are well characterized by a loss of analysis and control.

So people blithely walk towards degenerative aging and its suffering, and the vast majority choose to do nothing to try to fight against that future. Is that because they have too little fear of what lies ahead, or because they are too terrified to even bring out the topic for introspection, debate, and planning?

I have become perhaps one of the least qualified people to answer that sort of question. I am so far removed from the years in which I didn't think much on the topic, or had only ordinary thoughts about aging, that I have no insight left into what it was like or why I thought that way. The more I learn about rejuvenation biotechnology and the longer I spend observing the world while favoring the defeat of aging, the less I understand prevalent attitudes, and the more of a mystery it all becomes: the concurrent acknowledgement and aversion of degenerative aging; the existence of a vibrant "anti-aging" marketplace next to a lack of support for real longevity science; the signs of fear next to the signs of complacency.