 During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, protecting people in high-risk groups was a high priority for every country around the world. Older people, and especially those older than 80, were at higher risk of death from the novel coronavirus infection, and this is hardly a surprise. People with pre-existing conditions are a lot more likely than others to die because of COVID-19. And the older you are, the more likely you are to have multiple chronic diseases. That's probably why the elderly are the most at risk. They are more frail and less resilient than the rest of us. This doesn't apply only to COVID-19. Other infectious diseases, too, are more dangerous for the elderly, because their immune systems are too weak to fight back. They are more likely to catch a disease in the first place, and they don't respond to vaccines so well. Most people find it imperative to protect the elderly from COVID-19 or other infections precisely because they are more likely to die of them. They want to save elderly lives, and not just from COVID-19. They probably be more than happy if Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer, cardiovascular diseases and so on were all cured because diseases are bad, and saving the lives they endanger is good. But to these very sane people, dying of old age is a different story. It's perfectly fine, and they're all for it. The only problem is, there is no such thing as dying of old age. Welcome to Extend, your one-stop YouTube show for all things life extension. If you haven't yet, you can subscribe to our channel by clicking the red button down below, and don't forget to ring the bell and select all notifications to be notified whenever we release a new episode. And in this episode, I would like to focus on the sharp contradiction there is when people want to save the lives of old people from things like COVID-19, for example, but not aging itself. It's not uncommon for people to be actively against curing aging and to have all sorts of objections to it. Some silly, some definitely worth discussing, but that's different from simply not caring. I don't know for sure why so many people seem not to care at all, but I can't think of a few possible reasons. The misconception of the two there is something I came up with, and it's based on the fact that there is no such thing as dying of old age, even though people may think otherwise. In my personal experience, people seem to believe there are two broad kinds of death. A natural, normal kind of death that closes the circle of life, so to speak, and an unnatural, abnormal death that takes you away before your time. The first one happens when you die of old age and it's the right kind of death, while the second kind of death happens because of things like accidents and diseases, including the diseases of aging. Basically, if you happen to die peaceful in your sleep past your 70s, that's the right kind of death, and everything else is premature death. This is a misconception because, in fact, there is only one kind of death, and it happens when something essential in your body stops working. What, how, and why are just details. Sure, if you're dying in your sleep without even noticing, that's better than dying after years of battling cancer or dementia, but the essence is still the same. Something essential in your body went south on you. Having a quite heart attack while sleeping sounds less disease-like than atherosclerosis does, but it's still a medical condition that happens because aging gradually damages your body. Nobody dies of old age. That's just shorthand to say that the processes of aging damage your body to the point it could not function anymore. Maybe they led to a specific disease, like Alzheimer's, or maybe just to the generalized frailty that made you fall into the high-risk group for COVID-19. Either way, aging made you more vulnerable to health threats, and one of them ended up killing you. There are different reasons why people may draw an illusory line between right and premature death. One of them is that dying as a consequence of the frailty caused by aging appears as a smooth process that happens on its own, even though that's not entirely true. Lifestyle choices can induce speed up and slow down that process to some extent, so the idea of a natural death that happens only when you had lived for as long as you possibly could isn't exactly accurate. Another reason is that if you die of aging, you probably had enough time to reach all the traditional milestones of a human life – education, career, family, and so on. Once that happens, you're generally not healthy enough to do much other than look after your grandkids, which might seem to suggest that aging grants us just the right lifespan to do all that is expected in a normal human life. That would be quite a good incidence, and in fact, it's the other way around. The milestones of human life are scheduled around its length. Our lifespans did most definitely not stretch and shrink to perfectly accommodate our favorite milestones. The final reason for the misconception of the two deaths is also a very plausible reason why people don't seem to give a flying about curing aging – they want to ignore the elephant in the room. Let's face it, no matter what people say, nobody enjoys a decaying body and nobody looks forward to that. Despite all the talk about enjoying your golden years, I think things stand in an entirely different way, which was perfectly summarized by actor Michael Sheen when he said, Getting older is a struggle. I always feel that just under the surface of acceptance and enjoyment of the aging process is a terrible hysteria just waiting to burst out. The problem is, we can't cure aging yet, and it's unclear how close we are to being able to do it. Certainly not close enough for most people to be willing to get their hopes up and risk terrible disappointment if anything were to go wrong. If we were a lot closer, for example, if we were already able to fully rejuvenate animal models or if we had achieved even modest but measurable rejuvenation in humans, well, I think most people would switch camp overnight. Just like that. For now, though, I think the majority of people prefer to ignore the whole issue altogether, because acknowledging it might lead them to reconsider their own beliefs, finally see the dumb elephant in the room and realize they don't want to be stomped all over by it, but also face the fact that it's not certain if they can avoid it. They'll let the elephant tap dance in them while telling themselves that they're cool with it rather than take the risk of spending the rest of their lives waiting for an elephant gun that might not even work. Actually, there's something I'd like to ask you. In my experience, most of the time I share anything related to life extension on social media, it's mostly ignored by everyone, unlike other stuff. I don't know, maybe it's the Facebook algorithm, maybe it's my way of phrasing things, maybe I need better social media friends, or maybe it is true that people are trying really hard to ignore life extension. What's your experience? I'd love to hear about that in the comments down below. The third and final reason why people don't seem to care about curing aging might be the Identifiable Victim Effect, or IVE. If you've ever heard the phrase, a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic, that's basically the Identifiable Victim Effect in a nutshell. IVE is the tendency of individuals to more readily offer help to specific victims who can be identified than to larger, more vaguely divine groups. It's a well-known cognitive bias that has been observed not only when it comes to lending a helping hand, but also in reverse when it comes to punishing crimes. For example, a study found out that people can be harsher towards identifiable wrongdoers than generic ones. Researchers note that because of IVE, people are willing to throw all kinds of money, effort and resources to save a single specific victim, even if they're not related to them, while getting people to donate to charity to prevent many potential victims, for example, is a lot harder. The difference between a specific victim and a potential one might partly explain IVE. Typically, nobody will ask you to help a specific victim before he or she is actually in danger, while potential victims, by definition, are not yet in danger, and any help you might offer is preventative. Quite simply, we might be hardwired to worry more about an immediate danger that's already here and affecting a real person than a potential danger that is far in the future and hasn't victimized anyone yet. potential victims are unspecified someone who we predict may be in danger in the future and acting in advance to save them is just a potential gain. Not saving an identified victim is a certain loss, and research suggests that our instinct to avoid certain losses may be stronger than our desire for potential gains, even if they're much larger than the certain losses. Now, what does this have to do with aging? A lot, I think. When life extension advocates talk about the importance of saving lives of old people from aging, they are essentially talking about the largest group of statistical victims ever. The entire world. You can brush it off and say that old people getting heart attacks in their sleep is just the circle of life or something like that. However, if you chanced upon a single elderly man having a heart attack in the middle of the street, the circle of life would probably not even cross your mind as you reached for your phone to call an ambulance. That's why I think that comparing the victims of aging to other kinds of victims might be completely ineffective. No matter how many more die of aging than of anything else, they might be perceived as second-class statistical victims not as worthy of attention as identifiable victims. Of course, the fact that everyone suffers from aging also means that it's not just about statistical victims. Each and every one of us personally knows elderly people who will be killed by aging and we ourselves will be on the checkout list one day. That's when other factors may come into play. Old people you personally know, like your grandparents, are not statistical victims and you also have emotional reasons to care about them. When it comes to their own aging, people may be too short-sighted to care, especially if they're still young. As demographer of aging J. Olszanski once put it, they might be living in a dream world, denying that aging occurs or thinking it doesn't have to, but eventually reality will hit them. Or they might think that they will not have it as bad as other people. Or, as I said before, they might not think about it because they don't want to, so they rationalize it away with the circle of life, the boredom of living too long or something crazy like that. There is also the fact that we are not directly causing aging to hurt anyone. It will do so only if we do nothing to prevent it and inaction may not seem as bad as actively hurting someone, especially at such an early stage. Not donating to aging research doesn't feel as bad as it would feel if rejuvenation treatments already existed and you denied them to an old person. And that wouldn't feel remotely as bad as it would if aging didn't exist in the first place and you artificially inflicted it onto someone. Whatever the reasons why people seem to so nonchalantly ignore aging and what we could do to stop it from killing us, I wish everybody realized that saving the lives of old people, identifiable or not, is just as important as saving those of everybody else and not just from COVID-19 or from cancer. Aging kills only the old, but as the Director-General of WHO said about COVID-19 Not taking the days of the elderly or the senior citizens as a serious issue is one of the moral decays. Any individual, whatever age any human be, matters. Whether it kills a young person or an old person, any country has an obligation to save that person. At the end of the day, it's a human life. Every life matters. Every individual life matters. If we don't care about one individual, whether it's old or young, then we're not serious. And that's why we're saying this is a moral decay if we try to categorize it that way. A moral decay of the society. But what's your take on it? Why do you think people don't pay much attention to aging research and don't seem to care whether it will be cured or not? Let me know in the comments below. Alright, that's all for this episode. I hope you liked it. And if you did, please click the like button and share this video with your friends. If you're new here, you can subscribe by clicking the red subscribe button down below. And don't forget to click the little bell icon to be notified whenever we publish a new episode. Before you go, let me thank the Lifespan Heroes for supporting both this channel and lifespan.io, the charity crowdsourcing the cure for aging. If you'd like to become a Lifespan Hero, go to lifespan.io slash hero to make your pledge. Thank you very much, have a lovely day, and I'll see you next time.