What’s a Reasonable Age to Expect to Live?

This is the sort of thing you recalibrate when getting older.

This is Lucile Randon, a French nun who currently holds the designation as the oldest person in the world. This February, she will turn 119 years old, putting her within three years of Jeanne Calment, the oldest person who ever lived. (Calment died in 1997 at the age of 122.) One of the things I like to tell my kids to blow their mind is that my great-grandmother, whose house I used to spend weekends at as a kid, was born in 1899. “You knew someone who was born in the 1800s?” they say. Randon was born in 1904.

I turned 47 in October, and, like everybody else getting older (which is to say, uh, everybody), the higher that number gets, the more you start thinking about your own mortality. (Particularly when friends your age start dying.) My father turned 69 four years ago, and it was a birthday that rattled him, because his own father, who died in 1988, never made it. My grandfather smoked four packs of unfiltered Pall Malls for 40 years and had suffered multiple heart attacks before he died, and my father is much healthier than that, but still: It’ll get in your head. It gets in mine: I worry about him, and my mom too, who is two years younger.

My dad, who turned 73 in August, is still younger than the national life expectancy. Even with the Covid-19-related drop in the rate, the national average is 76.1, though he’s getting closer to the average for white, non-Hispanic men.

I feel confident, knock on wood, that he and my mom have many years still with us, and I feel fortunate as such: Life expectancy was a full 13 years shorter when they were both born.

You will note from that chart that life expectancy has always risen except for two periods: The 1918 Flu, and Covid-19. (It’s worth noting that Lucile Randon got Covid-19, and survived it. Vaccines, people!) The two-year drop in life expectancy is thought, hopefully, to be likely to rise in the coming years, and it’s not unreasonable to think, by the time I am my parents’ age, in 2050 or so, it could be over 80, or even higher.

Is that a reasonable expectation? When I celebrated my 40th birthday in October 2015, I commented that, if I was lucky, I’d made it halfway. If I made it to 80, I wouldn’t be able to complain too much after that. That seemed reasonable at the time: After all, I was 40, and imagining that you could take the sum of my life’s experiences and then get to do it all again, as an adult from the get-go, didn’t seem so bad to me. I’d take it. But now, seven years later, I’m 17.5 percent into that stretch. I think I want some more time. Will I get it? Or will I get hit by a truck tomorrow? After all, these are averages. I could make it to 90. Or a piano could fall on my head any minute. It seems as good a reason as any to make sure I’m living the best I can, while I can. I can expect to live to a certain age. But “expect,” in the end, doesn’t mean much. Better enjoy what I’ve got, while I’ve got it.

Still: I’m not sure I want to get to Lucile Randon’s age. But that’s easy for me to say now. Let’s see how I feel when I get there.

Will Leitch writes multiple pieces a week for Medium. Make sure to follow him right here. He lives in Athens, Georgia, with his family and is the author of five books, including the Edgar-nominated novel How Lucky, now out from Harper Books. He also writes a free weekly newsletter that you might enjoy.