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Hoping To Reach 100? You're Not Going To Like These New Life Expectancy Projections

Let's keep it 100 — your chances of becoming a centenarian are slim.

Medical breakthroughs, public health achievements and better diets led to steep increases in global life expectancy in the 1800s and 1900s. But startling new research finds this momentum has slowed and the biggest boosts to longevity may be in the rearview mirror.

"Most people alive today at older ages are living on time that was manufactured by medicine," said lead study author S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois Chicago.

"But these medical Band-Aids are producing fewer years of life even though they're occurring at an accelerated pace, implying that the period of rapid increases in life expectancy is now documented to be over," Olshansky added.

"Modern medicine is yielding incrementally smaller improvements in longevity even though medical advances are occurring at breakneck speed," study author S. Jay Olshansky said. Auremar – stock.Adobe.Com

The analysis, conducted with researchers from the University of Hawaii, Harvard and UCLA, includes data from eight countries with the longest-living populations (Australia, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland), Hong Kong and the US from 1990 to 2019.

Life expectancy at birth in the longest-living populations only increased an average of six and a half years since 1990, according to a new study. Master1305 – stock.Adobe.Com

Life expectancy at birth in these countries only increased an average of six and a half years since 1990, according to the study.

"Our result overturns the conventional wisdom that the natural longevity endowment for our species is somewhere on the horizon ahead of us — a life expectancy beyond where we are today," Olshansky said. "Instead, it's behind us — somewhere in the 30- to 60-year range. We've now proven that modern medicine is yielding incrementally smaller improvements in longevity even though medical advances are occurring at breakneck speed."

Olshansky published a paper in Science in 1990 that argued it was "highly unlikely" that life expectancy at birth would exceed 85 because the most significant gains had already happened. The new study findings, charted above, support that theory. Strategic Marketing and Communications / UIC

In the US, life expectancy was 77.5 years in 2022 — a slight bump from 75.4 years in 1990 and a dip from 78.8 years in 2019.

This new study doesn't include data from the COVID-19 pandemic, which Olshansky said would have "significantly" stifled life expectancy gains recorded from 1990 to 2019.

More than 7 million deaths worldwide have been blamed on the virus.

"We did not want to include the effects of COVID on the estimates because this is a temporary influence on survival, and it would have made the percentage changes across time heavily influenced by a one-time event," Olshansky explained to The Post.

Olshansky said we should focus on slowing aging and extending health span, the number of years a person is healthy, not just alive. Pixel-Shot – stock.Adobe.Com

Olshansky published a paper in Science in 1990 that argued it was "highly unlikely" that life expectancy at birth would exceed 85 because the most significant gains had already happened.

In the new findings, published Monday in Nature Aging, Olshansky said we should focus on slowing aging and extending health span, the number of years a person is healthy, not just alive.

"This is a glass ceiling, not a brick wall," he said. "There's plenty of room for improvement: for reducing risk factors, working to eliminate disparities and encouraging people to adopt healthier lifestyles — all of which can enable people to live longer and healthier."

Dr. Maria Torroella Carney, a professor of medicine and chief of geriatrics and palliative care medicine at Northwell Health, also believes the focus should be on improving and maximizing health at cellular and physiological levels from a young age.

"Our organ systems (liver, kidney, lungs, heart, nerve function) peak in function around age 30 and decline over time," Carney, who co-wrote "The Aging Revolution" and was not involved with the latest research, told The Post. "We are just now learning about the cellular and physiological changes that contribute to this decline, such as inflammation, injuries, poor diets and lifestyles that may accelerate aging."

Elizabeth Francis turned 115 in July and said "speaking your mind" can help you live a long life. ABC News

In the US, the oldest living person is Elizabeth Francis, a Houston resident who turned 115 in July.

The Pew Research Center reported that the number of Americans who reach 100 years old and beyond is expected to jump from an estimated 101,000 people in 2024 — 0.03% of the population — to around 422,000 in 2054, about 0.1% of the population.

Olshansky said those centenarian cases will remain outliers that won't significantly increase average life expectancy.

"It would be optimistic if 15% of females and 5% of males in any human birth cohort could live to age 100 in most countries in this century," his report read.

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Olshansky shared some tips with The Post on how to age better:

Avoid behavioral risk factors that shorten life such as smoking, obesity, drugs, a sedentary lifestyle and a poor diet.

Listen to your doctors and take medications to treat disease.

Consider this — how healthy you are at younger and middle ages predicts how healthy you're likely to be at older ages.

Exercise and diet work effectively not just to ward off disease but to enhance quality of life at all ages.

One of the most powerful predictors of life span and health span is educational attainment.

Life Expectancy Around The World Has Increased Steadily For Nearly 200 Years.

Life expectancy around the world has increased steadily for nearly 200 years.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an increase in life expectancy was driven mainly by improvements in sanitation, housing, and education, causing a steady decline in early and mid-life mortality, which was chiefly due to infections. This trend continued with the development of vaccines and then antibiotics. By the latter half of the twentieth century, there was little room for further reduction in early and mid-life mortality. The continuing increase is due almost entirely to a new phenomenon: the decline in late-life mortality.

As you age, your chances of getting heart disease, cancer, and diabetes increase. But what makes the aging adult population so vulnerable? What role do genes play in the onset of these disorders?

Life Span, Health Span, Wealth Span: A More Expansive Approach To Retirement Planning

Until recently, I've never been enamored with the notion of living a longer-than-average lifespan. Perhaps this is because my primary observation was that old age didn't look all that appealing. I'd observed grandparents, great aunts and uncles, and aged family friends face a seemingly hyperbolic hill of discomfort, disease, and, ultimately, death.

Life Span, Health Span, Wealth Span

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Sure, I wanted to live long enough to have grandchildren, enjoy some benchmark anniversaries with my spouse, have a measurable positive impact in my career and community, and check off a host of bucket-list boxes, but the notion of living, say, until 100 wasn't a goal. Two things happened, then, that changed my mind:

First, surprise! My wife and I welcomed an unexpected blessing into our lives in the form of a baby girl, just after celebrating our 44th and 48th birthdays, respectively. Now, we have two in college and one in diapers, so if I do want to be around to enjoy a relationship with all those presumptive grandchildren, I'm gonna need to stick around.

Then, a friend introduced me to a simple truth about longevity. He noted that I'm very dedicated to my personal health and wellness—quality of life—and that if I maintained that focus indefinitely, the likely outcome would be a longer life as well. Huh, good point.

I'm now well down a rabbit hole of books and podcasts on the topic of health and longevity—like Outlive by Dr. Peter Attia, Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, How Not To Die by Dr. Michael Greger, and Young Forever by Dr. Mark Hyman—and the universal takeaway in all is that the goal isn't just life span, it's health span, which Peter Attia defines as, "…the period of one's life spent in good health, free from the chronic diseases and disabilities of aging."

"The goal is not just to live longer, but to live better for longer," Attia concludes. "It's about extending the period of life where we are free from disease, maintaining our physical and mental capabilities, and continuing to engage fully in life."

I get it now. If you stay healthy, you'll have a higher quality of life, and if you have a higher quality of life, you'll likely live longer and enjoy it more. Alright, I'm in.

As I've been learning and wrestling with these concepts, it also struck me that we have a similar dichotomy in the way we look at financial planning—and especially the notion of retirement or financial independence, the phase of life in which you're not reliant on work to sustain yourself financially.

We've been so focused on the sustenance piece—the length of retirement and not running out of money—that we've neglected the quality of the existence we're sustaining financially. My colleague and co-founder of SignatureFD, Doug Liptak, calls it "the 96% problem," suggesting that financial planners have long been so focused on their clients living off as little as possible (4% or less of one's financial nest egg) that we've neglected helping people fully enjoy the wealth they've worked so hard to acquire.

One of the most extreme versions of this is a movement about which I have mixed feelings—the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement. FIRErs save as much as possible as soon as possible to reach financial independence earlier—often decades earlier—than the traditional retirement age of 65. Fundamentally, I'm on board with the notion that our time is more valuable than our money (and the stuff it buys) and that financial independence—working only because you want to, not because you have to—is a good thing. But my observations are that most FIRErs are only able to make the numbers work if they practice a nearly ascetic lifestyle.

Sure, a lot more people could count themselves among the "financially independent" ranks if they lived at or below the poverty line—but what's the point of that? Why not dedicate yourself to work with intrinsic meaning that you find fulfilling, especially if it means you can afford some of the finer things in life that you genuinely enjoy?

Please don't misunderstand me: If you absolutely love the minimalist lifestyle and "retiring" in your 30s or 40s is your genuine life purpose, I'm cheering you on. But I don't think there's inherent virtue in financial independence any more than there is in having a specific net worth—it's what we do with our time and our money that gives it value.

And that, I suppose, is the point. Wealth isn't worth anything until we activate it.

We activate wealth—including our time, influence, money, relationships, and health—by applying a purpose to it (them). A good starting exercise is to apply a simple tag to our wealth-building strategies—is its purpose to 1) live life to the fullest, 2) protect all you've worked so hard to achieve, 3) grow the impact of your wealth today and into the future, or 4) give to the people and causes that are most important to you.

Through this deliberate application of purpose, we can enjoy not only financial sustenance (life span), but also financial wellness (health span).

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