/dep/ - Depression

Working in dementia wards and retirement homes, I've come to wonder if an increased life expectancy is not necessarily a good thing and we're just prolonging human suffering.

It seems like for most of history, if you had something wrong with you, you were quickly filtered off and didn't suffer too long. The congenitally sickly and disabled typically died early on as children, and if you got unwell in your 40s, 50s or 60s you typically died. Even things like Schizophrenia had a much shorter suffering period as you inevitably hurt yourself and got an infection, now schizos are kept alive until they die in their 50s or 60s.

Could it be that modern society has it wrong and having a leaner, meaner filter keeps the population fit and healthy? It seems like the burden of wah wah existentialism comes from living too long as well, as the whole literary movement is correlated with life expectancy starting to rise in Europe.