By now, we’ve all internalized that the U.S. is a uniquely difficult place to survive — and the math is only getting darker. Since the pandemic, a concerning trend has appeared in the numbers: Americans aged 25 to 44 (mostly millennials and older Gen Z) are dying way more often than they should be.
You could blame COVID, and you would be partially correct, but there’s something more going on here.
What’s alarming is that, while death rates for older adults are returning to their pre-pandemic levels, the numbers for this younger demographic are in freefall. According to mortality experts writing for Slate, around 62 percent of these deaths wouldn’t have happened if these people had been born in any other wealthy country.
The experts from the Slate article say it’s a result of long-rotting systems. The decline in life expectancy for younger adults began around 2010, after decades of slow progress. Deaths from HIV, cancer, homicide, and heart disease were dropping — then suddenly, overdoses, car crashes, liver failure, and other preventable deaths started stealing those gains right back.
Zoom out, and the picture gets clearer. As Futurism’s Joe Wilkins points out, America’s excess death problem stretches back to 1980, the year Ronald Reagan took office and rolled out a red carpet for neoliberalism. His policies slashed social programs, deregulated industries, gutted worker protections, and handed power to corporations on a platter. Nearly every administration after has been maintaining or hastening Reagan’s destruction ever since.
The result is a shredded safety net, skyrocketing inequality, and a healthcare system that bankrupts people for getting sick. Millennials and Gen Z are the first generations raised entirely under this tattered economic system that cares more about profits than people. They came of age with fewer stable jobs, unaffordable homes, and decaying public services.
Add in a loneliness epidemic and an actual pandemic, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a population that is dying way earlier than they should be.
We’ve created an economic system that is detrimental to human life, and yet so many are still wondering why young people are dying at alarming rates, and why those very same young people aren’t having as many kids as generations past.
The systems meant to protect Americans have been dismantled over decades, sometimes gleefully by Republicans and shamefully, tail between their legs, by Democrats hoping that if they do the things Republicans do, Republicans will like them, but they never will, all the while our bodies keep piling up.
Until we stop treating the death of the youngest among us as an unavoidable fact of life and start calling it what it is — a direct result of political choices prioritizing private industry over public health — it’s only going to keep going, and may get worse.
The post American Millennials (and Elder Gen Z) Are Dying Young appeared first on VICE.
