One would correctly assume, with all other things being equal (a large and impractical caveat), that technology and medical advancements are allowing Americans to live longer and longer. From just 1980 to today, the average American is living almost 5.5 years longer (73.8 years to 79.1 years in 2014’s study).
However, in certain stricken areas, there exist factors that not only slow the growth of the population, but also actually reverse the trend, showing falling life expectancies in the face of nationwide growth. Unsurprisingly, these pockets are largely low-income, low-infrastructure areas that suffer from drug and obesity epidemics.
While those descriptors could be used to describe many areas in the United States, the hardest hit locales are clearly concentrated in one area: rural Kentucky.
Of the 10 counties that have shown the biggest drop in life expectancy since 1980, the eight lowest are all adjacently situated in Kentucky:
- Owsley County, Kentucky (-3 percent)
- Lee County, Kentucky (-2 percent)
- Leslie County, Kentucky (-1.9 percent)
- Breathitt County, Kentucky (-1.4 percent)
- Clay County, Kentucky (-1.3 percent)
- Powell County, Kentucky (-1.1 percent)
- Estill County, Kentucky (-1 percent)
- Perry County, Kentucky (-0.8 percent)
The two other counties in the top 10 were Kiowa County in Oklahoma (0.7 percent) and Perry County, Alabama (0.6 percent).
A worsening opioid epidemic, dwindling educational resources, and falling populations in these counties are all factors in their reversal of fortune. In many such areas, more people are dying of heart disease today than they were in 1980, due to financial strain and dwindling medical resources.
Sadly, the trends in the counties show no sign of reversing without extraordinary intervention. Says Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, “Every American, regardless of where they live or their background, deserves to live a long and healthy life. If we allow trends to continue as they are, the gap will only widen between counties.”
The study also identified the areas in the United States with the longest life expectancies, all of which are affluent areas in Colorado: Summit County, Eagle County, and Pitkin County all boast life expectancies hovering around 86 years, thanks to medical resources, clean air, nutritious diets, and copious exercise via time spent outdoors.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.