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I'm delighted to have co-written this post with Rachel Margolis, an expert in aging and a professor at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a tragic reminder that death can strike when we least expect it. When Pamela Addison’s 44-year-old speech pathologist husband Martin got sick with COVID, Pamela never envisioned that a mere 26 days later she would be a young widow raising her two-year-old daughter and six-month-old son on her own. And fans of the band Fountains of Wayne were devastated to learn that frontman Adam Schlesinger succumbed to the virus, at just 52 years old.
Untimely deaths of people in the prime of life strike a deep chord in us, yet they also detract our attention from a powerful demographic pattern: rising numbers of Americans are living much longer than they ever could have imagined. Life expectancy (or the average age of death) in the United States today is 78 years old, and unprecedented numbers of adults are surviving past their 100th birthday, reaching the coveted status of centenarian. Between the years 2000 and 2020, the number of centenarians increased by 44 percent. Between 2020 and 2060, centenarians’ ranks will multiple by six. More than half of all adults say they want to live past their 100th birthday.
The time-worn adage “nothing is certain but death and taxes” tells us only half the story. Death is guaranteed, but when exactly we die is not. Uncertainty about how many (or few) years we have might lead us to make poor decisions and neglect important tasks that can help us and our families. People who have the misfortune of dying younger than expected often have not made an advance directive, or the document that tells doctors and family members exactly what medical treatments they want at the end-of-life. As a result, they may not get the treatments they want, forcing their family members to make tough decisions about life support. Dying without a will means that your assets might be tied up in court, or your loved ones may be caught up in sticky emotional and legal battles about "who gets what."
Yet at the other end of the continuum, many Americans are living years or decades longer than expected. As a result, they often don’t have enough savings to sustain them in the long-term, especially for women who often outlive their late spouses by at least a decade. That’s why widows are so much more likely than married women to live out their final years in poverty. Very long-lived people also may not anticipate that they will outlive their spouse, kids, and friends, so they may end up lonely and socially isolated.
That’s why it’s so important for all of us—even the young and healthy—to think about how long we’ll live, and plan accordingly. Many calculators and tools are available to help us estimate how long we’ll live. These include Living to 100 and the Healthy Life Expectancy calculators. Of course, nothing is fool-proof; luck and chance most certainly play a role. Even the best crystal ball can’t predict whether tragedies like natural disasters, new pandemics, or wars will strike. Yet decades of research have pinpointed the social and behavioral factors linked with longevity.
While many centenarians attribute their long life to quirky behaviors like “avoiding men” or “eating bacon,” scientific evidence points to more mundane factors like how much we sleep, eat healthy foods, or smoke. Factors that we might be completely unaware of also bear on our life spans, like the social policies in our home state, the environmental hazards in our neighborhoods, and systemic racism which "gets under our skin" and can take a toll on our bodies. Some well-established risk factors in the United States include:
- Age. The younger we are, the more years we have ahead.
- Gender. Women typically live 5-7 years longer than men.
- Where you live. Living in a lower-income neighborhood or a "red state" is linked with shorter lifespans.
- Race. Blacks typically live five fewer years than whites, while Latinx persons live slightly longer than whites.
- Education. More years of schooling are linked to longer lives.
- Income. Having money, and the benefits that go with it like health insurance and safe work conditions, enhance our life spans.
- History of family illness. Some illnesses are partly hereditary, like heart disease and some cancer.
- A healthy lifestyle. Smoking, illegal drug use, sleeping too much or too little, a fatty and salty diet, not wearing a seat belt, failing to brush and floss daily, and heavy alcohol use can shorten one’s life.
- Stress. People with lots of stress in their life, like a bad marriage, an exhausting job, or daily financial worries tend to die younger.
No one likes to think about death, especially their own. But thinking about when we might die is smart for many reasons:
- It helps you plan for how much to save, and for how many years you’ll need to provide for yourself. Organizations like AARP have calculators to help people figure out how much money they’ll need to live on after they retire.
- It’s useful for thinking about how long you might want to work. If you’re born in 1960 or later, your monthly Social Security checks will start at age 67 (rather than 65), and delaying retirement until even older ages means larger monthly benefits.
- You might want to pursue new hobbies and interests that you can do until ripe old age. We’re more likely to learn new things if we believe we’ll have many years ahead for using those new-found skills. And hobbies, especially volunteering, might add more years to our lives.
Thinking about our long-term futures doesn’t have to be gloomy or frightening. On the contrary, it helps us to make choices now that make life longer and more rewarding for us and our families.
