All people are conservative, their first impulse being to preserve the status quo. There are few examples of day to day life that is so terrible it will not be defended against change. Near all change is resisted, viewed with suspicion, and rouses resentment against the effort of will and thought required. This is the case whether or not the change is positive. The greater the change, the more that people dig in their heels. These highly conservative urges are set deep within the core of the human condition, a part of the primate evolutionary heritage of hierarchy and state of mind.

Now consider that we are proposing to up-end everything to do with aging, to change everything in the trajectory of a life through the introduction of rejuvenation therapies. To change the view of parents and grandparents, to change relationships with all older people, to throw out all long term plans for the future and replace them with different ones. The result will be a world made enormously better, in the sense that the disease, suffering, and slow death of later life will diminish rapidly and eventually go away entirely. Yet people are genuinely slow to buy in to this vision: it is a struggle to discard an accepted, known certainty (even if it is of aging, pain, and death) in order to take on the unwanted effort of engaging with future change (even if it is an end to that aging, pain, and death). So people stick with what they know.

This is a deep and serious flaw in our species. Our inherent conservatism strives to kill us in this era of rapid progress in biotechnology, by encouraging us to reject the greatest and most beneficial applications of new life science technologies. It is possible to bring an end to aging in the decades ahead, but that will require the sort of massive funding and widespread support that attends efforts to treat cancer. It requires an acceptance that the new status quo - for now - is to live in a world that strives for healthy longevity, in which the future of a life has an uncertain and unbounded upside. Everything changes for the better, but all planning and assumptions must be reworked. This sweeping change in the public view of aging has yet to happen, and as a consequence funding for rejuvenation research remains anemic.

The Status Quo of Aging