People nowadays live longer than they used to. What caused this situation? Is it a negative or positive development?

In the 21st century due to increase in medical facilities, undoubtedly, the life expectancy of people had increased. In my viewpoint, this definitely has positive as well as negative ill effects, which I will try to enunciate below.

Nowadays, no doubt, people lives longer compared to the earlier days. This is possible because of multifarious reasons. Firstly, due to better medical facilities and improvements in vaccines, nowadays many serious maladies are easily eradicated such as Diabetes, small pox and Malaria. Secondly, the work which is being done with hands is replaced with help of machines and computers. For example, all the manual files in a bank are now replaced with the help of a computer; even in the post office work is being done with the help of computers. This change had increased the individual productivity and reduces the office work, giving more time to spend in the evening for other activities such as exercise, young and doing gym.

On the one hand, because of all these benefits and living longer, people with old age are now involved in lots of work at the retirement age. For instance, most of the politicians in India are more than 60 years of age which is being considered as retirement age for the public and private sectors. Moreover, earlier at the old age people used to sit home and spend time with their family, however nowadays elderly people take world tour and travel to the different locations.

On the other hand, if all the elderly people will live longer life, there would be various negative ill effects. First of all, the regime of each country needs to increase the retirement age, so that elderly people are less dependent on their families and on the government for their earnings. Although this would have direct impact on the employment as young generation will not get the job until there, would be sufficient positions. Moreover, the government needs to spend extra budget to build more elderly homes in case if the population of elderly people shoots up.

To recapitulate, living longer life has its own positive impact to an individual and to their families. However, definitely for government it is strenuous condition and considered as a negative development.