Time comes for all of us. No amount of wealth, status, or scientific ambition changes that. Yet a growing movement in medicine wants to classify aging itself as a disease — and eventually cure it. It’s an enticing idea. But it’s the wrong one.
Aging isn’t abnormal. It’s woven into our DNA, built into the very fabric of what it means to be alive. Calling it a disease misrepresents a universal human experience as a malfunction — something broken that needs fixing. By that logic, puberty and menopause are diseases too. At some point, we have to acknowledge that not every change the body undergoes is a pathology.
But this debate isn’t just semantic. Labels carry weight, and this one could genuinely hurt people. Ageism is already rampant — 93 percent of older adults report experiencing age-related bias, and nearly 80 percent have witnessed it in the workplace (DeAngelis, 2022; Reid, 2024). Older people are already seen as less capable, less valuable, less worthy of investment. I wouldn’t want my grandparents or older relatives sitting in a doctor’s office and being told they have a disease — simply for having lived long enough to grow old. Stamping a “disease” label on the natural process of growing old won’t spark compassion. It will deepen the stigma. Research even shows that older adults who internalize negative views of aging die sooner than those who don’t (Reid, 2024). We’d be making that worse.
Look no further than the biohacking community to see where this mindset leads. Influencers and tech billionaires are already dosing themselves with experimental drugs, transfusing young blood, and swallowing dozens of supplements daily in pursuit of biological immortality — all while broadcasting their regimens to millions of followers. It’s part science experiment, part spectacle. And it’s built entirely on the premise that aging is an enemy to be defeated rather than a reality to be respected. When we frame aging as a disease, we don’t just change how doctors talk about it — we hand a megaphone to the people selling that ideology and we end up supporting the industries profiting from it.
And suppose we did cure it — then what? Fewer people dying of age-related illness means a population that grows faster than the planet can handle. Food, water, housing, jobs: all of it becomes scarcer. And when resources get scarce, history tells us exactly who goes without. It won’t be the wealthy. A cure for aging, in practice, would likely become the most exclusive luxury ever created — extending the lives of the privileged while the rest of the world bears the consequences.
There’s something else worth considering, too. Death gives life its urgency. The knowledge that our time is finite is precisely what makes it matter. It’s what pushes us to love harder, create more, and stop putting off the things that actually count. Strip that away, and you don’t necessarily get a richer life — you might just get a longer one, more devoid of meaning.
The goal of medicine shouldn’t be to chase immortality. It should be to help people live well for as long as they’re here. That means better care, more dignity, and less suffering in old age — not a war on aging itself.