Pixel Brownie SoftwareThe case for preserving living wealth: How death hurts the economy
Hello there!
In this post I will explain why aging is one of our greatest economic losses.
But we first have to understand how money and governance actually function. We won’t look at biology until the final section. To see the true cost of aging clearly, we first need to look under the hood of the physical networks that keep civilization alive.
To lay that groundwork, this post explores:
What actually sustains the world
Money is not a resource itself, it is merely a claim on them – goods, services, labour and productive capacity. When I refer to money, I refer to fiat currencies like the Great British Pound, United States Dollar, Japanese Yen.
The myth of economic independence
Modern society confuses financial abstraction with civilization itself. We mistake earning money, holding assets, or living off-grid for true independence. In reality, no individual is economically self-sufficient. Every life remains utterly dependent on vast, invisible, and highly coordinated networks of human labor called the supply chain. When these physical networks fail, a full bank account becomes completely useless.
The Fragile Journey of Food
Food does not magically materialize on shelves. Its survival depends on a strict, unbroken chain:
- Production: Chemical fertilizers engineer the soil to maximize crop yields and prevent immediate global famine.
- Processing: Crops are extracted and packaged using advanced preservation methods to halt decomposition.
- The Cold Chain: An unbroken network of climate-controlled warehouses, refrigerated trucks, and shipping containers maintains freezing temperatures to stop spoilage.
Because these phases are entirely interdependent, a single failure—like a logistics fuel spike or a fertilizer shortage—instantly ripples through the system. The result is empty supermarket shelves, which no amount of money, loyalty scheme or discount can feed.
The Industrial Precision of Medicine
Lifesaving therapies are the endpoints of a rigid, highly specialized pipeline requiring constant maintenance:
- Discovery: Decades of pharmaceutical research, advanced chemical engineering, and multi-phase clinical trials are required just to prove safety.
- Manufacturing: Production occurs in hyper-clean factories using ultra-precise machinery to eliminate dust and bacteria, ensuring absolute purity.
- Logistics: Vaccines and medicines travel in vacuum-insulated, battery-powered containers. Smart sensors trigger alarms if the temperature shifts by even a single degree, while GPS tracking protects against theft.
The Hospital as a Vulnerable Endpoint
Hospitals are not standalone sanctuaries; they are highly vulnerable industrial facilities. To provide routine care, they rely on both an external upstream pipeline and flawless internal mechanics:
- Air Systems: Operating theaters are engineered ecosystems relying on specialized HVAC systems to maintain positive air pressure and keep bacteria out.
- Sanitation: Sterilization departments require a non-stop supply of purified water to scrub surgical instruments.
- Specialized Staff: A hospital is useless without its workforce. It demands a hyper-coordinated mix of clinical specialists—like surgeons, anesthetists, and nurses—working alongside vital operational staff, including biomedical engineers to maintain equipment, clinical pharmacists to manage dosages, and specialized IT technicians to keep digital health records and monitoring networks online.
When an ingredient shortage hits a factory or an internal HVAC system breaks down, the entire operation paralyzes. Even the most modern, well-funded hospital is left helpless, regardless of your health insurance.
The Hidden Scaffold of Infrastructure
Our built environment requires continuous material extraction and energy inputs just to prevent immediate collapse:
- Heavy Industry: Constructing cities requires feeding massive, energy-intensive sectors like cement and steel production.
- Water Utilities: Clean water relies on advanced treatment plants using continuous chemical inputs to purify raw water, distributed under constant pressure.
- The Power Grid: Electricity degrades over long distances. It must be shot across high-voltage transmission grids, managed by substations to step down the force, and modulated by local transformers to enter buildings safely.
What makes these supply chains possible
Every visible component of modern life rests on delicate foundations—extraction, energy generation, and continuous maintenance—built over decades that degrade quickly when neglected.
Yet, modern economic models reduce production to a closed loop of monetary returns, creating a financial abstraction so potent that we take these precisely coordinated systems for granted. We act as if investment can magically summon physical capacity like workers, infrastructure, and output. In reality, no system materializes from money alone. Civilization is sustained by physical cooperation, not by the symbolic ledger.
No amount of money can buy the utilities you need if:
- A fuel shortage kills the power grid.
- A chemical scarcity paralyzes water treatment.
- A supply crunch halts steel production.
No matter where you live, the failure of these physical networks renders modern life impossible.
The state’s primary function is to manage this complexity. By establishing laws, regulations, and public infrastructure, it creates the structural scaffolding required for large-scale coordination. It allocates resources to build and maintain the vital transport corridors, energy grids, and deep-water ports that private companies cannot fund alone.
Furthermore, because private markets optimize for short-term efficiency rather than long-term resilience, the state must anchor the economy through public buffer stocks—strategic reserves of critical inputs like microchips, energy, or fertilizer.
By absorbing these resources when they are abundant and releasing them during shortages, the state creates a stable baseline platform. Without this active logistical planning, private supply chains would inevitably collapse under systemic shocks.
Money, therefore, serves the purpose of putting these resources to work and being able to claim what is on the end of the supply chain. It has taken us a VERY long time to understand this.
Why we have failed to understand money
How Treating Money as a Resource Fails
Money has gone through a tumultuous journey by treating its primary coordination tool as if it were a physical resource. It has gone through being grain, cattle which have their problems of measurement and or rotting. Metals resolved that issue, but remain a finite resource that would need to be continuously found rather than created.
The main problem is when money becomes the master rather than the servant, it limits the capacity of the economy to the resource itself. Numerous examples throughout history have proven this:
- The Roman Failure: When Rome faced military and financial crises, its economic survival was fundamentally bottlenecked by how much physical silver its slaves could dig out of the earth.
Lacking new mines, the empire resorted to “debasement”—melting existing coins down and mixing them with cheap copper to artificially stretch its supply. Because Rome tried to maintain the illusion of a commodity currency while needing to spend like a modern sovereign state, the trick failed. Once merchants realized the coins lacked real silver content, they adjusted prices upward, triggering catastrophic inflation. - The Golden Shackles: Tying modern economies to the international Gold Standard in the 20th century explicitly meant that a nation’s entire money supply was held hostage by the slow, arbitrary pace of gold mining.
This forced countries into mass unemployment and deflation during economic downturns.
The moment the UK abandoned the Gold Standard in September 1931—breaking the illusion that money was a scarce commodity to be extracted from the earth—it regained control over its money supply. The economy instantly bounced back, fueled by a domestic housing boom and a revitalization of local industry.
The reasoning behind all these methods of money creation was NOT money creation for the sake of it, but to put real resources to work.
By the mid-20th century, money began to outgrow its physical nature, revealing its true nature as a record of wealth. This was proven by initiatives like the UK’s computerized National Girobank in 1968—which turned local post offices into a free, centralized digital payment network.
However, a critical error followed: governments eventually handed the keys of this digital system to private high-street banks, culminating in the privatization of systems like the Girobank.
Empowered to create the electronic money supply through an explosion of consumer loans and speculative mortgages, these private entities optimized for financial profit rather than real-world capacity. This mistake played a large role in generating the asset bubbles that triggered the 2008 financial crisis.
In the wake of this, cryptocurrency emerged as a rebellion against this system, yet it fell straight back into the old commodity trap. By setting a strict maths-based limits on coin supply, cryptocurrencies simply mimicked the artificial scarcity of the Gold Standard, turning them into highly speculative assets rather than stable mediums of exchange.
As well as money, we also embarrassingly get the role of the central bank wrong.
The Myth of Central Bank Independence
Today, the state’s financial power is split into two branches: the Treasury (which controls spending) and the Central Bank (which creates the tokens). We are told that the Central Bank must be independent—run by highly academic technocrats insulated from political cycles to safely manage money, clouded by economic trauma throughout history.
In reality, this independence is an illusion buffered by private high-street banks. The Treasury still sets the core economic targets; the Central Bank merely adjusts the variables to hit them. This artificial splitting hides the state’s true coordination power behind a veil of bureaucracy, making a single sovereign entity look like a cash-strapped household that has to “borrow” its own currency.
“Government borrowing” is effectively an overly pedantic way of saying government spending. What actually happens is that the Treasury spends money into the economy first, and then issues government bonds—essentially risk-free digital savings accounts—to private banks and financial institutions. In a crisis situation like COVID-19, the Central Bank prints new digital money to buy these bonds back from the financial sector, effectively bailing out the banks so they can survive.
This mechanism completely flips the conventional narrative surrounding “government debt”. Rather than a burden for society to pay back in the future, public debt is simply the money supply currently in existence that has not yet been taxed away.
Because all public debt is structurally matched by wealth sitting in private bank accounts and other financial institutions, we face a mathematical reality that is impossible to ignore:
In order for the private sector to have wealth, the government must spend more than it taxes back.
This reality is important to understand because if we see the government as a household in debt, it will distort our views on government spending and taxation.
The curse of the financial goldberg machine
Because ancient civilizations had to collect actual grain, oil, and livestock to survive famines, we inherited a rigid, outdated psychological legacy.
It is incredibly tempting to believe your hard-earned tax money directly builds hospitals and pave roads—it provides a comforting sense of civic duty.
But when a state shares this delusion, it resorts to flat, regressive taxes like national insurance (passed in 1911, when the UK was still on the gold standard) or council taxes. These fees demand a disproportionate percentage of income from the poorest citizens just for existing.
Worse, revenue-focused design can be catastrophic. In 1696, Britain introduced a “window tax” to fund a massive currency crisis during the Great Recoinage. Lacking the administrative tools to measure income directly, the state used windows as a crude proxy for wealth. Landlords responded by bricking up their windows to avoid the ledger levy. The human cost for trying to extract tokens could not be overstated: It blocked fresh air and light, accelerating deadly epidemics such as cholera and smallpox in urban areas.
This leads to the government being deluded to a corporate illusion: believing that public utilities must first invent complex commercial mechanisms to “pay for themselves” before they are allowed to exist.
A prime example is when sovereign states mimic the “Rail plus property” model pioneered by transit corporations. To build a railway without direct state funding, an entity must:
- Buy cheap land.
- Build dense housing.
- Erect stores.
All these capture profits via rent to fund the transport system. Although on the surface self-sustaining, it is a financial Goldberg machine: a needlessly complex connection of many separate commercial revenue streams, collectively designed to get the steel, concrete, tunneling machinery, and skilled labour into productive use.
If one highly profitable source stops working, the whole financial contraption jams. To leave able-bodied workers unemployed, steel rusting, and machines gathering dust, simply because a real estate market crashes or consumer confidence dips, is logistically irrational. This is the core characteristic behind austerity.
If the state recognized its role as a sovereign resource coordinator, the tax system would need to change to facilitate:
- Progressive Consumption: Essential goods would be entirely tax-exempt, while luxury items and speculative financial maneuvers would face heavy taxation to restrain excessive resource consumption by the wealthy.
- Steering Mechanisms: Taxes like a carbon tax would exist purely to protect real-resource capacity by penalizing environmental degradation.
However, a steering tax cannot function in a vacuum. Effective behavioral taxes must always be paired with direct state mobilization—such as building public transport and green energy networks—using the tax system to penalize those who refuse to transition away from destructive models rather than using it to raise revenue.
When a government claims there is ‘no money’ for vital infrastructure or services, it isn’t because our workers have vanished or the Earth has run out of iron ore. It is simply the delusional magic of the financial Goldberg machine at work.
The digital banking solution
The true next step for money is a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), like the proposed “Digital Pound.” A unified public ledger dismantles this entire private Goldberg Machine, allowing money to function as a pure coordinator by collapsing the artificial wall between taxing and spending. By consolidating this architecture, the central bank can act directly as the Treasury’s agent—spending funds into existence to directly match the nation’s real productive capacity rather than waiting for private profit motives to align.
To significantly reduce reliance on private banking middlemen, this infrastructure can power a resurrected National Girobank—accessible for free via a basic app or physically at any Post Office—ensuring a smooth digital transition where no citizen is left behind. Because a state-owned bank is backed by the sovereign currency issuer, it can never go solvent, offering a permanently safe place to park savings. This directly strips private banks of the leverage they use to demand catastrophic state bailouts during crises.
To set a gold standard for privacy across the wider banking industry, this network would rely on Zero-Knowledge Proofs. All personal calculations happen locally inside a citizen’s wallet app, meaning only a verified mathematical proof is sent to the network. This cryptographically proves that an individual has the necessary funds and is a verified citizen, while keeping their identity, balance, and purchase history completely invisible to the ledger.
By reclaiming the digital record from corporate exploitation and commodity illusions, a public CBDC ledger brings money far closer to what it was always meant to be: a transparent utility for direct civilizational coordination.
The physical constraints
What actually causes hyperinflation
Many oversimplify hyperinflation as a government simply printing more money—a misleading narrative used to justify the artificial independence of central banks and switch back to commodity currency.
Yet, Japan maintains a debt-to-GDP ratio of 260% without triggering inflation. True hyperinflation is triggered by severe resource shortages or the catastrophic destruction of a nation’s productive capacity. Excessive money creation during these crises is not the root cause, but a desperate, failed reaction to a physical reality. You simply cannot solve a physical supply failure with financial tokens, whether backed by gold or fiat currency.
Resource Shock: The 1970s Stagflation Crisis
In 1973, an OPEC embargo caused global oil prices to quadruple almost overnight, crippling vital sectors like transport and agriculture. At the time, prevailing economic theory assumed governments could safely trade higher inflation for lower unemployment.
Believing they could protect jobs by boosting demand, central banks slashed interest rates (the cost of borrowing money) and increased spending. Normally, lowering rates acts as an economic gas pedal: borrowing becomes cheap, people take out mortgages, businesses expand, and saving feels pointless, unleashing a flood of spending.
However, because the crisis was a physical shortage of oil rather than a lack of cash, this strategy failed. Cheap money simply chased a dwindling supply of oil-dependent products, driving prices higher. This triggered a psychological feedback loop: workers demanded higher wages to cover rising costs, and businesses raised prices to cover those wages, locking stagflation in place.
Productivity Paralysis: Weimar Germany (1923)
Following World War I, the Treaty of Versailles forced Germany to pay massive war reparations in gold or foreign currencies, creating an impossible financial straightjacket. The crisis peaked in 1923 when French and Belgian troops physically occupied the Ruhr Valley—Germany’s industrial heartland—after the government missed a timber delivery.
In protest, German workers went on strike. The government printed marks to pay these striking workers so they could survive, but because the country’s primary engine of production had ground to a halt, there were virtually no goods to buy. The national energy grid starved without Ruhr coal, factories shut down, and logistics collapsed. In cities, bread vanished because trains lacked fuel to transport grain from farms.
Replacing Expertise: Zimbabwe (Early 2000s)
Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation stemmed from an immediate 50% drop in agricultural output after the government enacted radical land reforms, seizing commercial farms and redistributing them to individuals lacking the training or equipment to maintain them.
As a heavily agrarian economy, Zimbabwe suddenly lost its main export and could no longer feed itself. Lacking foreign currency to import food, the government printed local money in a desperate attempt to buy goods and maintain military loyalty. By late 2008, the banking system shattered. Starving soldiers, forced to queue for hours for worthless paper cash, rioted and looted supermarkets in Harare.
Domestic Neglect: Venezuela (2014)
Venezuela suffered a modern economic collapse brought on by “Dutch Disease.” Oil accounted for 95% of exports, giving governments the illusion of infinite wealth. They used oil revenues—earned in US Dollars, the currency required to trade globally—to directly buy the vital resources needed to run the economy, like food and medicine, while entirely neglecting their domestic manufacturing and agriculture and allowing them to wither away.
When global oil prices collapsed in 2014, Venezuela’s income vanished overnight, exposing a fatal vulnerability: the country could no longer produce its own food or medicine, nor did it have the foreign currency left to import them. As the physical supply of basic goods plummeted toward zero, prices skyrocketed.
One of the best ways to tackle inflation is by investing into the training of people to ensure real wealth is being created.
Developing Real Capacity: The High-Skill Job Guarantee
Stabilizing critical sectors like infrastructure, agriculture, or medicine requires more than just defensive taxes and physical projects; it demands the continuous cultivation of human skill. To achieve this, the state can establish a skill-based job guarantee. Unlike a standard baseline job guarantee designed primarily as a socially useful transition safety net, this structure operates as a permanent network of state-provided, high-skill apprenticeships.
By ensuring that workers are directly employed by the state to continuously upgrade their skills and acquire fresh, tacit knowledge throughout their lives, society can actively dissolve real-world physical bottlenecks—such as shortages of green energy engineers, clinical researchers, or modern agricultural technicians—before they threaten civilizational stability.
If a technological shift occurs or a private market sector contracts, the worker isn’t cast aside into unemployment. While a private market optimizing purely for short-term profit relies on fragmented systems that force individuals to absorb the costs of retraining, this modular state system allows workers to be instantly re-assessed and smoothly transitioned into a new apprenticeship path.
This ensures that anyone who wants to contribute and retrain is fully supported to do so.
However, with training and education we need actual people to train. This gets us to what keeps economists up at night – population decline. What would be the reality of a world in which birth rates continue to fall?
The Reality of Population Decline
Many people worry about the future if we fail to boost birth rates or rely on mass immigration. However, the outcome would not be human extinction. Instead, society would adapt to a shrinking population through ecological relief, rising worker power, and technological reorganization.
Less Pressure on Survival
With fewer people on Earth, the total demand for food, energy, and housing drops significantly. Lower resource demands will make automated systems, like solar-powered vertical farms and autonomous waste processing, highly practical.
Because they operate in closed loops that capture and recycle moisture, vertical farms will use 95% less water than traditional open-field farming.
A lower-demand world makes sustainability an easier baseline to hit. Even if fossil fuels continue to be used as a bridge, their depletion slows drastically. More importantly, a smaller total energy footprint means localized solar, wind, and tidal grids can easily power society without the need for fossil fuel baseloads.
Rather than maintaining sprawling infrastructure for emptying towns, humanity will naturally consolidate into smaller, dense regional hubs. These efficient centers will be connected by high-speed railways, cycle highways, or dedicated transport corridors, allowing the land between them to naturally rewild.
Economic Shifts: Housing and Labour
As the population contracts, the economic balance of power completely flips. Because labor becomes more scarce, workers become a highly valuable asset, naturally driving up wages as companies compete for talent. At the same time, the real estate bubble will deflate. With housing supply finally outpacing demand, property will shift from a speculative investment asset back into a low-cost, universally accessible public utility. The state would then need to provide housing to people as a free service.
The urgency to re-examine pensions becomes undeniable because these programs no longer fit modern demographic reality. They were a historically contingent invention designed for a world where very few workers were ever expected to live long enough to claim them—effectively acting as a longevity lottery. Today, not only is everyone likely to win, but they are expected to.
As should come obvious by now, a pension cannot magically summon physical goods. A society cannot save real resources across time; a retiree’s survival will always depend entirely on the food, energy, and medical care actively produced by the working population in that exact moment.
As I have explained in another post, we are shifting towards a much more multi-stage lifestyle and therefore pensions whichever way it goes are no longer adequate to adapt to such a society. The benefits outlined in this post would be needed to navigate the transition away from pensions.
Preserving Innovation
While scientific advancement might risk slowing down as the population shrinks, humanity will adapt how it stores knowledge. Educational programs and AI would be used to systematically preserve the exact reasoning, insights, and failed attempts of previous generations. This ensures that the next generation may have something to piggyback off of.
The Transition Challenge
Ultimately, the most critical phase is not the smaller endgame, but the transition period. Before the population stabilizes at its new equilibrium—perhaps aided by heavily subsidized childcare—essential services face a severe risk of collapse. High-productivity automation is not a luxury; it is the vital bridge required to sustain society during the shift.
The elephant in the room
The main reason I wrote this section was to try and steelman the population decline narrative. It’s not as bad as commentators may say it is. However, be it mass immigration, increasing birth rates or weathering the population decline storm, there is one unifying factor embedded in all these that I think is worth highlighting:
Every single person will eventually get the sickness of late life and as a result die.
This fact alone is the REAL thing that should be keeping economists at night.
The Only Way to Preserve living Wealth
If I give a public lecture and say I’m trying to cure Alzheimer’s, or cancer, or cardiovascular disease, people are delighted. But if I say I’m trying to cure aging – to cure all age-related diseases at once – there’s suddenly a lot of concern. – Dr. João Pedro de Magalhães
Death is an absolute erasure of human capital. Every time an experienced doctor, structural engineer, or master agriculturalist dies, decades of accumulated tacit knowledge, cognitive skill, and problem-solving capacity are permanently deleted from our societal ledger.
Intuitively, we know this if that person dies from a car accident, cancer, heart attack and a murder. But when it comes to ageing, we seem rather accepting of this, or at best, acquiesced. It’s a very strange sense of cognitive dissonance which, I do not find surprising.
The Cultural Lag of Macro-Biology and MMT
Our systematic mapping of biology is a recent 19th-century development. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is even newer, originating in the early 1990s, while the foundational hallmarks of aging were only categorized in 2013 and updated three years ago. This cultural lag explains why society struggles to intuitively grasp a description of fiat money that only came into existence thirty years ago or the rapid advancements of biology. Because these concepts feel counterintuitive, very few commentators marry them together.
The Limits of Mainstream Longevity Economics
In The Longevity Imperative, economist Andrew Scott links longevity with economics, but his framework operates entirely within the status quo, focusing on the “compression of morbidity” rather than treating the biological root causes of aging.
Mainstream commentators consistently treat an aging population as a demographic numbers game rather than a systemic health crisis. The status quo constantly dances between two false solutions: mass immigration and desperate attempts to increase birth rates. Neither works.
False Solutions: The Lessons of Zimbabwe and Venezuela
- The Zimbabwe Paradox (The Cost of Lost Expertise): Zimbabwe demonstrates the devastating cost of abruptly losing specialized expertise. When capacity is lost, the system resets; people must spend decades relearning the exact same hard-won skills. Biological aging represents an irreversible liquidation. Once those minds are gone, they are gone forever.
- The Venezuela Fallacy (The Fragility of External Inputs): Venezuela exposes the structural fragility of relying on external inputs and foreign dependencies to sustain critical domestic infrastructure. Immigration is a temporary, zero-sum band-aid; if an immigrant returns to their home country, the host nation loses that capability.
The fatal kicker in both scenarios is identical: people still age, and people still die. Those deaths cannot be averted by printing money or reverting to the gold standard. You could tax away every ounce of gold and completely wipe out the sovereign ledger’s debt, but it will never bring a mind back from the dead. Gold does not treat a biological condition.
The Relentless Rise of Geroscience
Over the past twenty years, scientists have quietly constructed an arsenal of tools: biomarkers, senolytics, cellular reprogramming, gene therapies, and AI. While nothing currently extends healthy human life beyond the record of Jeanne Calment, the underlying progress is relentless. Critics use this lack of a current cure to dismiss the entire field as speculative, but using uncertainty as a cop-out to neglect investment is a catastrophic policy error. We remain far more interested in fighting zero-sum political battles over border policies and birth targets than actively investing in developing cures.
The Catastrophe of the Status Quo
Aging is the most visible, universal catastrophe we face. Yet, we are blinded by status quo bias, trapped by the appeal to nature fallacy, and crippled by a lack of imagination when it comes to envisioning a life spanning centuries. Choosing to neglect geroscience is a guaranteed death sentence for billions of individuals, ensuring that highly skilled minds will continue to die of entirely preventable biological decay.
The Frontloaded Education Bottleneck
Our current frontloaded education system is utterly inadequate for developing the specialized expertise required to break this bottleneck. Adults who want to pivot their careers into this field are largely excluded from building the necessary human capital to contribute.
The Failure of the Private Market Imperative
While private capital from billionaires funding Altos Labs or decentralized Web3 initiatives like VitaDAO is welcome, it is highly imprudent to rely on them. The private market inevitably demands rapid, impressive results to appease investors and protect valuations. This market imperative leads to structural gridlock—exemplified by Google-funded Calico Labs spending a decade stuck in basic exploratory research without translating it into scalable applications.
Furthermore, private collectives cannot magically materialize physical laboratories, high-end equipment, or a brand-new workforce. They are forced to build incredibly complex financial Goldberg machines of blockchain tokenomics and private fundraising just to do what a currency-issuing state could achieve with a single stroke of a keyboard. The very existence of these decentralized science groups is the ultimate proof that a massive public demand exists—one that sovereign governments are completely failing to meet.
The Sovereign Mandate for Geroscience
The sovereign state is the only entity with the infinite financial capacity to bypass market logic, cut through academic gatekeeping, and directly mobilize the best minds toward this physical bottleneck. The state must use the lifelong learning infrastructure and the high-skill Job Guarantee model to fund and resource anyone who wishes to transition into geroscience, making this research as heavily staffed and viable as humanly possible.
The Ultimate Demographic Irony
Every adaptive solution proposed to handle a shrinking world can be achieved in an ageless scenario—only far better. We do not need a smaller population to achieve automated efficiency, ecological rewilding, or structural resilience. Instead, by preserving our living wealth, we retain the exact cognitive capacity and compounding expertise required to build and maintain those very systems.
The government deployed this exact sovereign mobilization to give us space flight, digital banking, and the internet. It is fully capable of doing the exact same thing for the biological preservation of our species.
Vive la révolution!
Conclusion
This piece took quite a lot out of me to write. There were sections I had to continually rewrite to ensure I was complementing my previous blog posts rather than simply regurgitating what they already said. I like to think those earlier pieces did the heavy lifting on a number of foundational points for this post. As I’ve gained more intimacy with the topic of geroscience, I have come to realize that it is far more than just a sleek, fascinating invention—it is a fundamental necessity for the survival of the human species.
I’ve also been sharpening my knowledge about economics while writing this piece. I have learned that many across the entire political spectrum seem to be operating in a theatre of economic reality, where reactionary politics are often simply a downstream symptom of strained material conditions. We see the stark consequences of these physical vulnerabilities right now in the supply chain shocks and immense loss of life driven by the wars involving Russia and Iran. When critical shipping lanes like the Strait of Hormuz face blockades, or when vital agricultural and energy corridors are disrupted, the illusion of financial security evaporates; we are instantly reminded that our world relies entirely on the continuous, physical flow of real resources and human labor. Every casualty in these conflicts is not just a profound tragedy, but the permanent liquidation of irreplaceable human capability—the very “living wealth” our civilization depends upon. By focusing on these real resources, I sidestep the vast majority of critiques that come from either side. I want these posts to be a space for anyone, regardless of their political alignment. Movements like extreme nationalism or communism operate on the explicit exclusion of others; I refuse to do that. Division accomplishes nothing but distraction from our true existential threats. To create real change, we must rally behind an objective we can all agree on.
We saw this exact frustration play out in the recent UK elections, and the ongoing shift in our political landscape makes it undeniable: people are sick and tired of a broken duopoly. Voters are exhausted by career politicians offering timid, incremental tweaks that fail to address our core structural issues—least of which tackle biological aging. This stagnation is precisely what has driven the dramatic rise of Reform, the Greens, and the Lib Dems alongside Labour and the Conservatives. People are starved for radical, systemic ideas because the old ways are fundamentally failing to secure our future.
Whether you voted Reform, Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem, or Green—if any of the ideas in this post resonate with you, please share them with your friends and family. Better yet, take these concepts, break them down, and forge your own versions of these arguments.
The one thing I haven’t really addressed here is nature. I plan to give it its own dedicated post in the future, because there is an immense amount of suffering that happens in the natural world. Expanding into a critique of nature may also dismantle the assumption that this post is born out of mere human “vanity”—the idea that I am simply prioritizing our species above all others. But that will be for another post.
That’s all from me!
Stephen Hayes
Dave Volek
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐
Gemma Seymour
