These stats are usually skewed as they don’t remove infant mortality from the data. If you remove people who died before the age of 2 the gap is not nearly as wide.

Modern medicine has reduced infant mortality greatly, for which I’m grateful, but those who survive early childhood really don’t live that much longer.

https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2022/08/conversation-old-age-is-not-a-modern-phenomenon.php

The 35 yo age in 1776 is AVG life expectancy. It is heavily weighted low due to a high infant mortality rate and the smallpox epidemic. Once people escaped childhood, it was not unusual for them to live in their 80s or 90s. John Adams lived to be 90. Thomas Jefferson was 83. Ben Franklin was 84. John Jay was 83. Samuel Adams was 81.

The last 38 years of those lives isn't worth living. And the last 3 years will have hammered that number down at least 5 years if you look at any of the realistic estimates of how many people over age 55 "died suddenly".

Life expectancy ≠ life quality

It’s the same Keynesian mistake they make in chasing higher GDP without any means to assess quality of the products or robustness of the economy.

The comparison isn’t a simple “how long do people live,” there’s a much more important question of “for the people who live to be 70, whether 100 years ago or today, which one still has their mental faculties, how many chronic disorders do they have, how many medications are they on, what can they actually do in their daily lives?”

The large part of life expectancy increase has come form *infant mortality* rates dropping. Which is amazing! But little of it has to do with how long and how well the lives of the elderly have improved. In many ways the opposite has occurred. The statement that “people in their 30s were about to keel over” isn’t true. It’s that people who lived in their 70s were being averaged with a huge number of infants who were dying in the first year. While older ages have increased some, quality of life and health in mid to older ages has been largely terrible.

Worst of all, life expectancy has stagnated and started to *decline* over recent decades.

Lastly, the incredible advances in medicine have been in *mechanical* intervention: surgeries, repairs, artificial replacements, basically the hardware version of human rebuilding tech. I fully recognize the insane advances there — Where I specifically said we have failed is *health,* which isn’t the same thing at all: that’s in how we treat patients, how we think about healing, quality of life, amount of chronic disorders the average person deals with in their daily life, the grotesque amounts of pharmaceuticals the average person is on, and the historically shocking levels of mental disorder and loss of mental capacity with age.