Aging

I don't think that living a long life is a good thing. My reasoning behind this is life being suffering, intellectual decline, and the contribution to the formation of a gerontocracy.

In my opinion, life is suffering. I'll make a post on this later, but in summary if we value life based on intellectualism, then emotions are the opposite of that. It is obvious that being emotional is always easier than being intellectual, as the latter requires critical thinking at all times and requires divergent thinking to fend off fallacies, integrate multiple sources, consider personal philosophy, etc. Thus if one wants to be intellectual in life, then you must suffer. Thus the longer you live, the more suffering you will endure. If you don't value life based on intellectualism, then there really is no purpose in living, because death is inevitable and emotions will leave nothing behind after your death. Thus aging is purposeless no matter how you slice it.

As one ages into the elderly stage, you also face cognitive decline. This is obvious just from the cognitive disorders affecting the elderly more, but is also obvious as elderly implies your body is past its prime. Since my theory on the evolution of free-will involves non-independence of mind and body, a weaker body means a weaker mind. Thus the elderly, by definition, have declined intellectually. This means that what will be the point of wanting to live a longer life when you know you are taking away resources from the younger that are better than you? Furthermore, the elderly will need to use more resources in order to live, as their declining bodies will require more resources to upkeep than younger bodies. I can't imagine living with yourself if you know that by living, you are being detrimental to our progress. It would just seem less guilt-inducing if you died a peaceful death just after your prime. Furthermore, as one gets older the more conservative you tend to be (or at least see the appeal of it). The older you get, the more you have to lose from change, whether that be your life, savings, family, career, or anything you have an emotional care for. This naturally lends itself to conservative views, as they seek to preserve the present. As someone with more progressive views, a hatred and disdain for culture/tradition/unwillingness to change even for the better, and who believes in the ability of change to more our world more perfect, this is a very negative thing. Admittedly, I myself have some more conservative views as I think there do have to be some basic limits (otherwise there would be anarchy, a thing not conducive to the basic stability demanding intellectual tasks like science). Also, on a personal level the self-serving bias makes it so that as you get older and the more good and bad things you will inevitably do, there is a sense of self-grandioseness in your ethical/moral ability, distorting your ability to accurately gauge the truth of yourself.

This gerontocracy argument will really only apply to democratic systems. The elderly tend to vote more [1]. I don't really have a satisfying explanation for this, but [2] seems to enumerate various unsatisfactory explanations. Thus in democratic systems, as the voting population ages, there will be a shift in power dynamic to the elderly. As states develop and technology improves, long-term health systems tend to improve and birth rates tend to decrease. This leads to the effect that the elderly are not only living longer, but are more numerous. This combined with their increased political participation will eventually form a gerontocracy as the majority will be the elderly (obviously giving them control in a democratic system). This is the definition of a gerontocracy. This is problematic as it will mean an increase in conservative policies, as derived above. This will generally mean a stagnation in change, but development tends to be exponential as one becomes developed (intellectually/technologically) enough to be able to promote more development. However, this is another problem as the dynamic nature of the exponential growth of development results in a lot of change. Thus a willingness to be able to change with the times is necessary in order to develop appropriate/effective policy. Oh the irony, development leads to counter-developmental growth! This suggests potential solutions to be euthanization, the halting of long-term health developments, and a increased political freedom (to allow for protests or even more drastically, coups, as a way to check extreme conservatism).

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2017/comm/voting-rates-age.html
[2] https://money.usnews.com/money/retirement/aging/articles/why-older-citizens-are-more-likely-to-vote