LIFE, I mean. What’s your life expectancy if you are N years old? It depends on your age, ethnicity, country, zip code and who you ask. You’ve probably read recent articles that observe that American life expectancies have decreased the past few years. Native Americans and African Americans have lost the most ground, but no ethnic group has been spared. The loss of the elderly to COVID has had some impact, but it is far less than the impact of lives lost among younger, unvaccinated people. Quite simply, we lose more years of potential life when a younger person dies than when an elder does.
Much of the recent decline in life expectancy is the result of the COVID Apocalypse, but there is also a significant loss due to deaths of despair. These are deaths due to suicide, drug overdose and other deleterious behaviors like alcohol use. To the degree that these deaths occur among the millennial and Gen-Z cohorts, they greatly impact life expectancy.
Of the many online resources that discuss life expectancy, I like the insurance perspective best. Insurers have been using actuarial data forever. They have to get the life expectancy calculation right in order to stay financially viable, after all.
If you are in my age cohort (70+), you may want to look at these various tables in order to get a clearer sense of the importance of little things such as:
- Do I need to get that vaccine or booster?
- Do I need to talk to my PCP about my feelings of depression or my substance use?
- Do I need to join a group or repair my friendships and family relationships?
- Do I have my affairs in order?
I don’t mean to be morbid, but the last item is of particular consequence for us who are octogenarians. Do we have a Will, a Durable Power of Attorney, do our survivors know our social media passwords, streaming service passwords, etc.? It’s a long list of contingencies that we all need to consider.
Regardless of what the life expectancy tables say, none of us knows how much more (time) there is.