There is a great deal of research and advancements in human longevity beyond lifespan but more focused on healthspan – the amount of time humans are healthy and active. However, we are also facing a time when in most developed countries, the US included, we are experiencing an aging population and birthrates are declining. Should we be extending human longevity is a question worth asking ourselves.
The population in the US is aging, with the median age (half the people are younger than this age and half the people are older than this age) having increased from 35.6 in 2001 to 39.4 in 2025. [1] Nearly 1 in 5 Americans is now 65 or older, up from approximately 1 in 8 two decades ago, and it is projected to be nearly 1 in 3 by 2050. [2] This means that for every senior citizen who is receiving Medicare benefits and also Social Security benefits there are now fewer working-age people supporting them – while the baby boomers (people born between 1946–1964) are aging through retirement, the number of working-age people supporting them is anticipated to drop from roughly 3 workers per retiree at the beginning of this century to 2 by 2050 (the last of the baby boomers will be age 86).
The rate at which the senior population in America has grown has increased over the past century, from less than 1 in 20 Americans over the age of 65 (4.7% of the population) in 1920 to 1 in 6 Americans over the age of 65 (16.8% of the population) in 2020 (and as of 2025 up to 18.0%). Meanwhile the number of people younger than 18 has been declining. Americans below the age of 18 represented 25% of the US population in 2004 and as of 2025 only represent 21.5%. [3] The population of working-age Americans (ages 18–64) is the largest group at 60.5% in 2025 and has experienced a moderate growth of 1.4% from 2020 to 2024 compared to a growth of 13% for senior-age Americans during the same period. It comes as no surprise that with an increasing older population, life expectancy in the US has also risen dramatically in the past century, from 47 years in 1900 to approximately 79 years in 2025. [4] The life expectancy in the US is anticipated to reach 85.6 by 2060. [5]
Americans aren’t having enough children. The total fertility rate (the average number of children that are born to a woman over her lifetime) in the US has been dropping for nearly two decades, down to approximately 1.6 in 2024 from 2.1 in 2007. [6] The replacement fertility rate is 2.1 to maintain a population without immigration. The Great Recession from 2007–2009 seemed to have a significant impact on driving birthrates down and there has been no sign of recovery. [7]
What these demographics are telling us is that we have a population which is already increasing in age and skewing towards older people. Increasing longevity would only exacerbate these trends. It’s interesting to note that of all the cohorts of senior Americans, the group with the highest growth rate is the 90+ cohort, which has a recent growth rate of 4.8%. [3] Improvements in healthcare, medicine, vaccines, and nutrition have already been influencing longevity. What are the impacts of these changing demographics? With age comes health issues, and in the senior community we see chronic conditions such as arthritis, heart disease, obesity, and cognitive decline. This means that seniors are receiving Medicare benefits for a longer period of time than was expected when it was created 60 years ago. This is the same case for Social Security benefits, which were created approximately 90 years ago in a different environment and different life expectancy. These have a burden on the working population who are taxed to fund these social safety nets. I’m not going to get into the policy issues which our legislature will have to figure out to keep these programs stable, but just recognize that there has to be some change so they don’t collapse under the burden of providing benefits to an increasing percent of the population and for more years while the working population growth does not keep up.
Let’s consider the impacts of other aspects of increased longevity. In the workplace, and most recently evident in politics, we are seeing that as older Americans stay actively involved they are not making space for the younger people to move up. This puts added stress on the younger people because they are not getting the opportunities for personal and professional growth until later in their careers, and that also means that they are not getting the income increases that go along with those promotions. Housing is another area where we see that as older Americans are less likely to move and stay in their homes, the inventory of available homes to purchase is constrained, which in turn drives prices up. Older people tend to be less open to new ideas and have less plasticity which enables them to pick up new things quickly and easily. Therefore, the longer they stay in positions of power and influence, the less the society benefits from new and different ideas and perspectives.
As older Americans stay active it crowds out younger people from other aspects, and I’ll use an example from my own life. I’ve been a musician for most of my life, playing in various bands. These bands typically have members ranging from the mid-fifties to early eighties. We all continue to play because we enjoy it (illustrated by all the old rock’n rollers who are still on tour). Most of us are accomplished musicians and don’t need to be paid to play. We’re not seeking careers in music. When we get hired to play in a club, bar, or party it often happens that we’ll take jobs because we want to play and not haggle or spend much effort in negotiating the compensation. That means that we are playing and a band of younger people are not, and that we are helping to suppress the pay rate which also harms the younger musicians.
Amazon Prime released a television show called Upload in 2020 which ran for four seasons, and in the show people can upload their consciousness immediately after death into a virtual afterlife. Living people can access this world and continue to be with their lost loved one by logging into it with a VR headset and body suit. [8] This is an interesting but currently fanciful solution to our longevity problems. If we can upload ourselves and retain our consciousness while no longer being fully engaged in the real world, it relieves many of the problems we’ve identified yet it retains some important aspects. In this solution the people don’t have physical longevity but they have mental longevity, and their ideas and thoughts can continue to contribute to society. Also, by the way the show portrayed the world, there’s a cost to being maintained in the virtual world (and the uploaded can pay for upgrades — better virtual homes, virtual things), which means that they are still contributing to the economy and supporting economic growth but no longer taking from the social safety net programs of Medicare and Social Security.
Increasing longevity is happening and has been occurring for a long time, but now there are some very wealthy people pouring enormous sums of money into the field. I continue to question whether our society as it currently exists can support this. Will a greater portion of the available workforce have to go into the medical and healthcare fields to support the increased demand, as well as the services industry to support the activities of a large portion of the population who is not working but active in leisure? Will the younger generations start to resent the older population? I’m not a fatalist who anticipates an uprising based on age classes, but I believe we will continue to have to deal with many issues of an increasingly older population and a decreasing population of workers to support them.
References
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Source
1
Women Still Outnumbered Men Among the Oldest, but Gap is Narrowing — U.S. Census Bureau.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2026/04/age-and-sex.html
2
Is the US Population Aging? What the Data Shows — ScienceInsights.
https://scienceinsights.org/is-the-us-population-aging-what-the-data-shows/
3
US Population by Age 2025 | Demographics Stats & Facts — The World Data.
https://theworlddata.com/us-population-by-age/
4
Life Expectancy in the U.S., 1900–2018 — CDC / National Center for Health Statistics.
https://blogs.cdc.gov/nchs/2020/11/20/7035/
5
Living Longer: Historical and Projected Life Expectancy in the United States, 1960 to 2060 — U.S. Census Bureau.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020/demo/p25-1145.pdf
6
Final U.S. Birth Data Show a 1% Fertility Rate Decrease — CDC / National Center for Health Statistics.
https://blogs.cdc.gov/nchs/2025/07/24/7819/
7
Kearney, M. S., Levine, P. B., & Pardue, L. W. (2021). The Puzzle of Falling US Birth Rates Since the Great Recession. NBER Working Paper No. 29286.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w29286
8
Upload (TV series) — Wikipedia.