Is living longer irresponsible?

Having seen this article: how nanotechnology is prolonging life... it occurred to me that repeatedly over the last few years there have been little breakthroughs covered in the media about living longer. It's always reported as a good thing as if we should just take it for granted that the human race as a whole wants and needs to live longer.

Now admittedly I understand the wish for a long life on the personal level and I bet I will be wishing for just a bit more life when my day finally comes but really is it a good idea for us to spend time and resources trying to ensure every human on the planet lives as long as possible (or at least the wealthy few that can afford some of these treatments)?

Shouldn't we be focussing on ensuring the quality of life of all humans instead? Or at least first?

There are many reasons why ensuring we have an increasing aging population is not a good idea, a glaringly obvious one is the fact that we don't have enough resources now for all the people alive to live an equal quality of life with the same prospects so how is it an improvement to ensure there are more resource users (even contributing ones, I'm not arguing that the elderly are just a burden) with more medical needs?

I'm not talking about use by dates for life but if you want to avoid munching on soylent green just a sensible approach to the natural process of life. Don't spend so many resources on making sure that absolutely every last human on the planet lives for as long as possible when you are doing nothing about the rate of production of new humans or the quality of life of those already here.

I don't get the general obsession with prolonging life. The personal one yes, but the scientific/medical communities who could be making progress in artifical limbs, brain repair, even less necessary things like faster learning processes, augmented senses...heck anything but making sure there are plenty more bog standard resource chugging humans for no particular reason other than because we can.

Get creative science! Make the Star Trek lifestyle that little bit closer and we can all live normal length fulfilling lives rather than dragging out crappy ones.

Short answer: yes, don't waste resources on living longer if you are going to waste that extra life just existing. Many people did many great things back when life expectancies were a lot lower than they are today. Maybe the sense of urgency drove them on, maybe they just didn't have time to mulch their minds while being fed plastic.