[rwallace]

There is also a wealth of biological evidence to show that a human's brain and body start deteriorating significantly before age 25; you can pick and choose the evidence that supports the conclusion you want.

In practice, our supposedly rich modern society is becoming mentally unhealthy to a degree that increasingly outweighs the material gains of recent generations; mental illness is common, suicide has become a major cause of death among young people, birthrate has crashed below extinction level. We can fix what we are doing wrong - a large part of which is treating young people like prize animals in gilded cages - or our society can end up in Darwin's bit bucket. We can decide which of these options we prefer, but I don't see the universe giving us the option of "neither".