Reversals in life expectancy

node · earth · United States, Russia, global

Evidence that the historical gain is neither automatic nor irreversible. United States life expectancy at birth stalled after about 2014 and then fell in successive years, with drug overdoses, alcohol and suicide among working-age adults as major contributors; it fell sharply again in 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, to roughly 76.4 years in 2021, before recovering to about 78.4 years in 2023 — still below the mid-2010s peak. Russian male life expectancy fell by several years in the 1990s. Globally, the WHO reported that the pandemic erased roughly a decade of gains, returning global life expectancy to about 71.4 years in 2021. These reversals matter to this Journey because they identify what the historical increase actually depended on: social conditions, health systems and infection control, all of which can go backwards. Nothing about ageing biology changed in any of these episodes.