Many argue that aging is the ultimate disease and that we should extend human life for as long as possible through medicine and bio-enhancements. This is a fundamental mistake, writes Santiago Zabala. Aging is necessary to make our lives meaningful and so for our very existence .

In this age of disruptive innovation—where only the new, profitable, and productive is valued—aging can become a remedy to a culture excessively preoccupied with the future. Indifference, irresponsibility, and ingenuousness usually result from a failure of memory, which is symptomatic of such supposedly disruptive innovators as Mark Zuckerberg and Vinod Khosla. Even though they believe “young people are just smarter” because those “over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas,” a recent “rigorous study that looked at 2.7 million company founders, economists at MIT, the US Census Bureau, and Northwestern University concluded the best entrepreneurs are middle-aged.” Plato and Kant already contemplated how the order of kinds of knowledge was supposed to follow that of ages. Plato believed that the leadership of the republic had to be reserved to the elders who could contemplate the Good and guide citizens toward a higher degree of humanity, and Kant thought that at least sixty years were necessary to form a philosopher able to write anything original. Leaving aside exceptions— Michel Foucault died at fifty-seven—the issue today is that aging is still treated as a problem, which Simone de Beauvoir noticed half a century ago.