I’m definitely seeing it. I can think of close to 10 people I’ve known (most are acquaintances and some are friends or relatives of acquaintances) who’ve died of drug overdoses or suicides – white males, every one of them. Lost a female HS acquaintance to domestic violence (murder-suicide).
Most are suicides, though. People who felt like financial or social failures, had some alcohol, had a gun nearby. Ended it all. And left everyone else to deal with it for the rest of their lives.
Does it feel that way from where I sit? Nope, not even close. I’ve never seen life this great or so enjoyable. I live in the Dallas Fort Worth area of Texas, and it is literally a boomtown here. We’re growing at a rate of about 340 people per day, and have been since 2010. My house is in a nice area and it’s value grows every week (tripled in value over that time). It’s like we’re the new California, there is a shortage of qualified workers, and companies are desperate to hire if you have the right skills – frankly, the future’s so bright we gotta wear shades. 
Just checked, out of curiosity and this week’s business relocating here? Charles Schwab. Moving their headquarters from San Francisco. Bringing eventually 7000 new people if I read the article correctly. They are joining others who’ve moved headquarters here: Toyota, Frito-Lay, Pizza Hut, Keurig, Dr Pepper, Penneys, to name a few. Just from the Bay Area we’ve gotten Bare Escentuals, Jamba Juice, Krave, Bechtel, Schwab (mentioned above), Core Mark, DJO and Lyft. The Dallas Business Journal claims that most of the 1800 companies that left California in the last few years came here.
My wife just got another raise and a bonus, my kids are making bank like you wouldn’t believe – my daughter wanted to take a month to travel Europe and her company agreed to hold her position while gone (she was out of vacation time). I retired when I realized I’d make more money not working. And my old company has asked if I’d be willing to return since there’s such a shortage. Last month I got a lot of electrical work done on the house, and when the electrician realized I knew what I was doing he offered me a job as well. Almost every business I enter is hiring and has “Help Wanted” signs of some kind.
Every one I know is doing great, new house, new cars, new toys and celebrating substantial investment gains in this market. The malaise you mention isn’t present in my world.
The person this has hit most is my youngest. They lost an uncle and the 50 year old suicide was one of those friends of your parents you are close to that might as well be an uncle. One to cancer in elementary school - and another who survived, but lost his entire family in a fire in elementary school - they weren’t close to either, but when there are 100 kids in your grade in your elementary school, you know everyone. And then to lose a friend to suicide - all before you graduate from high school. There is a reason that there is a lot of anxiety, and it isn’t just my own genetics at play.
Yeah…that’s sort of like saying hunger doesn’t exist because I just ate.
I too am not experiencing “Americans are dying at alarming rates”, but I’m well off and live in an affluent suburb of New York.
The article quotes:
I mostly didn’t experience this either. I graduated college in 1995 and basically worked professional jobs, more or less increasing in income and responsibility. It wasn’t a journey without setbacks, but I didn’t experience long periods of my adult life working “underemployed” jobs. Even people I know who did eventually moved into professional careers.
And if anything, I’ve only seen improvements over that same period in Pennsylvania. At least in the Pittsburgh and A-B-E areas. Although having just made that drive over the weekend, I can’t imagine what it’s like to live in the hilly wooded spaces in between.
Even my high school class of 1991, I can only recall one death (a motorcycle accident) out of 250 students. There may be a couple others who no one knows about because they fell off the radar.
Which is not to say that I am discounting those statistics. Just to point out that I think “America” is very different depending on where you live.
The people I’ve known who died earlier than one would expect have been due to tobacco (lung cancer, lung cancer which spread to colon, throat cancer from chewing tobacco…).
There are significant differences among states. Look at
Understand, this is about class, not geography. I"m in DFW, too–and, as I mentioned above, so many of my students are affected by early deaths. Untreated diabetes and cancer. Work injuries. Heart attacks.
Check out this link. It’s life expectancy in Texas by zip code. In Uptown and the far North suburbs, it’s is over 90–but just to the south, right south of the river, it’s 67–about the same as Ghana, or Papua New Guinea.
Even with low unemployment, poor people can’t afford medical care–not the kind of care that pays for diabetes or cancer treatment.
I too am comfortably middle class, but when I go back to West Virginia for reunions and such, I encounter more of what the OP is talking about.
A few years ago, I was talking with a friend I’ve known since childhood. We were both in our mid-50s. When I mentioned that I was getting ready to retire on a pension in a few years, he expressed surprise that I was planning to do this. He said I probably had enough money already, so why continue working? It was two completely different views on life expectancy, money, and promised benefits.
Although for me, it hasn’t been about class. Its about cancer (where death rates do go up if you are poor and don’t get good treatment - but that isn’t the case here - here its a combination of bad luck and toxic groundwater. Suicide - which can take even the likes of Kate Spade or Robin Williams. The acquaintance we lost to a heart attack a few weeks ago was a middle class white guy in his 50s - a little overweight - but that’s the age where heart attacks can take a relatively “young” person regardless of class - its statistically worse if you are poor, African American, male and overweight, but statistically, heart attacks also go up for middle class slightly overweight white guys in their 50s, too.
So I’m taking the statistical hit for you guys who have never lost anyone.
I think the overall statistics tie a lot to class - the economically disenfranchised (how is that for a politically correct way to say poor people), don’t have good access to heath care, are more likely to commit suicide and are the epicenter of the opioid crisis. But there is also something about just having the bad luck to have friends and relatives die young while someone else is in the statistical anomaly (like my parents) where all their friends and close relatives have lived to be 70 or more.
I’m seeing it. I just saw another former co-worker in the obituaries last week. She died in her early 50s but I don’t know the cause. In the last five years or so I’ve had several former (or current at the time) co-workers die at young ages. Early 20s of an undiagnosed heart condition, mid 30s of liver disease, early 50s of a stroke, mid 40s of cancer, mid 30s suicide.
Going back a bit further my dad died late 50s of complications of diabetes and I had an uncle die in his 30s due to alcoholism.
My high school class (graduated early 90s) I know of several deaths from car accidents, one suicide, and one in military action.
I understand what both of you are saying, but monstro specifically asked how it feels “from where you sit?” I took that to mostly mean my geographic area – so I answered truthfully.
Had I interpreted the OP’s question as you have (about the larger picture), I would have replied with anecdotes from my recent travels. I’ve mentioned before that I’m a sort of “wanderer” and tend to roam around a lot out of curiosity. In the months since I’ve retired, I’ve RV’d through a LOT of Texas and parts of NM, CO, OK, AR, TN, KY, and OH. As much as time permits, I travel via small towns and highways rather than interstates.
I’ve noticed some disturbing trends in small towns with a 5 digit (or less) populations. They always seem to feature a new dollar store and a closed factory or mill. Usually on opposite sides of the town for some reason. I told my wife if I lived in a small town and a Dollar General opened up, I’d sell and move immediately. I spent 9 days in a burg in S Texas so small it had no traffic light, and those places seem to be in dire straits. I went there to fish, but I think a lot of those casting alongside me were hunting groceries instead of passing the time.
I had a student this year who wrote about his realization that they were foshing for food, not fun, when he was about ten. But he was fishing out of some sort of creek behind his apartments in South Dallas. I was like "OMG, you ate fish out of the TRINITY? ! " and he was like “oh no, it was a creek behind our apartments”. You ate fish out of a DRAINAGE DITCH for the Trinity? " He looked all chagrined “I know, I know, we probably overfished it to hell”. No clue that maybe a creek used to dump god only knows what industrial waste for generations migjt not be a great place to eat fish out of. I honestly worry he elevated his cancer odds.
IIRC, most recent stats show average age at death in Canada is now 4 years older than those in the US so your “universal health care” comment definitely has traction.
Canadian life expectancy has been plateauing and trends suggest it could start falling, due to some of the same factors seen in the U.S. (including deaths associated with mental health issues and substance abuse).
I live in Chicago and grew up in a suburb next door. In the past 10-ish years:
Father (actually stepfather, but was more of a father than the actual biodad) of a high school friend, suicide in his late 60s, I think? after stroke, diabetes, and heart issues meant he couldn’t live how he wanted
Suicide of the older brother of a childhood friend, in his early 40s
My sister’s MIL, cancer, I think early 50s? (She lived in Iowa.)
Younger sister of a close HS friend, breast cancer that was discovered on a routine annual gyno exam at stage 4, after it had already spread to her liver and bones, age 43
ETA a HS friend I’d fallen out of touch with, suicide - lay down on the train tracks after carefully leaning his bike against a nearby tree. Early 40s.
All of the people above had access to good health insurance, and only one might be considered non-middle-class.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but for all the wailing about the decline of the average lifespan in the US, aren’t we only talking about a matter of a month or two shorter than the highest point?
In the past 15 years I’ve only known six people who have died:
This feels like a normal amount of deaths to me.
You want to know something sad?
People will still fish out of streams (and consume what they catch) regardless how much signage you put up informing them of their risk. Because if you’re hungry enough, you aren’t going to pass up a free meal…even if that free meal is full of god-knows-what.
When I was in grad school, I’d often catch shrimp out of a little creek in Linden, NJ. The creek was smackdab in the middle of a bunch of oil refineries. On the bridge where I would drop my nets, there was a big sign letting people know not to eat anything they caught. But every weekend that bridge was full of people, casting various nets and traps and poles. And they’d take home a feast, because that creek was very productive despite how polluted it was (turns out that pollution kills off parasites, and their absence allows for more reproduction and growth in fish, crabs, and their prey. But I digress…).
One day as I was hauling in my nets, one of the anglers came up to me to make chitchat. I told him I was a graduate student doing research on the effects of pollution on aquatic life. He said, “Everyone’s always talking about how contaminated this creek is, but I’ve been fishing here for years and nothing bad has happened to me!” But to see this man’s face, you’d know that wasn’t true at all. His eyes were all cloudy and going in different directions, and his skin was all messed up. It looked like a lot of bad stuff had happened to him. But since he was still standing on two feet, he was OK in his book.
I think about that guy all these years later because his attitude (which is very widespread) makes my job more difficult. Even my mother is fond of saying “We all gotta die of something.” I used to have a good response to that, but now I struggle not sounding like a phony. I don’t eat locally caught fish, but I do eat fish every week. And I know that buying them from the grocery store means very little. They are contaminated at levels that are probably just as high as (if not higher than) the thresholds the health department uses for fish consumption advisories for local anglers. Am I going to stop eating fish any time soon? Nope. Cuz nothing bad has happened to me yet and we all gotta die of something. 
And I get out of bed faster in the morning when I know catfish is on the breakfast menu.
Habits are really hard to break, even if when you are well-informed.
Yeah, but when the choice is “eat the fish so I don’t starve today or this week” vs. “maybe get cancer in 20 years, assuming you can get enough to eat so you live that long” it becomes easier to see why people might make such choices. And while his family might not have actually been that desperate, when you’re going to bed hungry you’re not always thinking about long-term consequences.
Alarming would be more than once per person.
I understand why they were doing it. That was the point of the anecdote. In this particular kid’s case, the turnaround point was that they dowcovered couponing. Basically, mom and dad were living like poor people in Vietnam–fishing, enlisting the little kids to work late at night making dumplings to sell. Doing what they grew up doing to get by. When my kid got old enough to sorta read, he brought home a coupon (in Spanish) because he thought it was money. Mom figured out what it did and rhe implications. Soon my kid and his brother were sent out before dawn every Sunday to gather newspapers, strip the coupons, and redeliver them. Mom became an expert at low cost shopping. I suspect she resold a lot. They quit needing to eat ditch fish.
I found it a facinating story of how people adapt. And when my kid is an investment banker or whatever, no one is going to believe this was his childhood.
