As I get older (I'm about middle age if life expectancy is ~80), I think more about whether I'm really working on the most important thing I could be working on. I'm almost certainly not...but, I have the conflicting desires of making sure I have a reasonable income, decent savings for when I find myself unable to make a reasonable income, and taking big risks on wholly new things.
I have always spent a lot of my time on learning new things, but I find myself conflicted on whether I should be using what I know to maximize my impact in areas I am already an "expert" in, or self development in new areas where it could be years before I would be able to make any kind of impact but might be more important work.
In short: I'm not the person you're responding to, but I sympathize with both arguments. I think life extension (and disease prevention) is among the most important projects of humanity. But, and this is a big but, I have no background in the science behind it (except as someone that follows the field with interest via popular science channels). So, how would I join the effort? I've had my DNA "done" by 23andme, which probably contributes in some realistic, but small, way. But, getting involved in the actual science would take me years...years in which I still need to earn a living. Perhaps I should be looking into the data needs of this research. That's something I at least know a little bit about, having worked in scientific computing on the IT and data side.
This may be wrong for complex reasons. Similar minds making the same decision for the same reasons do not _causally_ influence each other, but that doesn't change the outcome, nor does it make it any less bad. For a fairly deep view into how one might formally describe this particular aspect of decision making, I strongly recommend: https://intelligence.org/files/TDT.pdf
