Everyone knows you’re more likely to live a long, healthy life in a wealthy Japanese suburb rather than, let’s say, on the radioactive border of Chernobyl. Average life spans can vary drastically across the world, but many don’t realize stark disparities exist within the United States itself. A new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday discovered just that. Researchers found living in one county versus another could potentially shave a full decade off your life, and the disparities between counties with lengthening life spans and dwindling ones are only getting worse. As University of Washington professor and study coauthor Christopher Murray expressed to NPR’s Rob Stein, “It’s dramatic.”
Counties with some of the highest life expectancy rates have residents living up to 87 years old on average, with residents in the lowest counties only living to about 67 years old. This 20-year gap alarmed researchers, reflecting the fatal effects of income disparity. As you can probably guess, wealthier communities with highly educated residents ranked higher on the lifetime expectancy scale than poor communities with fewer opportunities.
NPR shared an animation illustrating a broad view of what those numbers actually mean county by county over the course of 34 years, showing certain pockets of America gaining years while other locales are lagging behind. The map shows in shocking relief the deep divide between Native American and non-native communities. Though as Fusion’s Katherine Krueger notes, that much has been known for some time.
To reach their conclusions, the study’s authors took a deep dive into health records from every county in the United States. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, that’s 3,141 counties. Among the counties with highest life expectancies are Marin County in California and Summit County in Colorado, while the lowest is Oglala Lakota County in South Dakota where the Pine Ridge Native American Reservation is located. Many of the other low life span counties are located in the south along the southern end of the Mississippi River.
By the looks of this analysis, the gap has only widened and will continue to grow without serious intervention. Murray likens the lifespan differences in America to the disparities between India and Japan. Perhaps Murray and his team have only confirmed what we’ve known all along, that America is neither a first world country nor a third world country, but an amalgamation of the two.
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Pictured: A healthy practice?
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.