What to do about the elderly is an age-old question, yes, a pun.  However, when Yale assistant professor,  Yusuke Narita , remarked that elderly Japanese residents should essentially commit seppuku ( the honorable method for dishonored samurai to commit suicide-- I had a dream  about this a long time ago which became a  Huffington Post  article ), he outraged the world. He is 37 years old with an economics PhD from MIT, previously taught at Stanford, and is obviously of Japanese ethnicity, so the issue has relevance and ire.  This euthanasia discussion actually had first occurred with a group of students two years ago about a scene from the Swedish film,  Midsommar , in which a cult sent out one of its oldest members to jump off a cliff.  He then said: Whether that's a good thing or not, that's a more difficult question to answer.  So if you think that's good, then maybe you can work hard creating a society like that. Narita in the past also suggested that the public might