* Progress in medicine is credited with extending life expectancy.

* While antibiotics and vaccines certainly did so, it is not clear that most other pills and surgery are adding much to life expectancy

* The other major factor that contributed to extending life expectancy is affordable professional health care. Health care used to be the responsibility of the family, and then shifted towards the state. The state can provide more scientific health care, but it is expensive. When that professional health care became affordable, the general population started feeling the benefits.

* The future promises more medical progress (particularly in biotechnology), which leads many to believe that life will be extended dramatically.

* However, health care has become too expensive for governments to continue paying it for the general population, and the professional health care that the average citizen receives may already have started to decline, and may continue to decline for a long time. It is just too expensive to keep the sick elderly alive forever for all the healthy youth who have to chip in.

* Virtually every society in the world is moving towards a larger base of elderly people and a smaller base of younger people who are supposed to pay for their health care. This equation is simply not sustainable.

* At the same time the tradition of domestic health care has largely been lost. You are on your own.

* This parallel development (unaffordable professional health care combined with the disappearance of domestic health care) will reverse the longevity trend (that was due mostly to affordable professional health care) and lead to a worse (not better) chance of living a long life.

* Furthermore, the rate of suicide has been increasing steadily in most developed societies, and it usually goes hand in hand with a decline in birth rate. This might be an accelerating loop.



* As all countries reach the point of lower health care and accelerating suicide rates, life expectancy might actually start to decline for the first time in centuries.

* There is also be a shift in value perception at work. The idea that the only measure of a life is the number of years it lasted, that dying of old age is "better" than, say, dying in a car accident at a young age, is very much grounded in an old society driven by the survival instinct: survive at all costs for as long as possible. As the (unconscious) survival instinct is progressively replaced by (conscious) philosophical meditation in modern societies, more and more people will decide that dying at 86 is not necessarily better than dying at 85.

* In the near future people may care more about other factors than the sheer number of years they lived.

* The attachment to life and the desire to live as long as possible is largely instinctive and irrational.

* As generations become more and more rational about life, it may not sound so attractive to live long lives if one has to die anyway and be dead forever and be forgotten for the rest of eternity.

P.S. Then there are also many new habits that may contribute to creating a sicker species that will be more likely (not less likely) to die of diseases:

* Breast cancer and probably other problems are much more likely in women who get pregnant after 25, and many more women are having children in their late 30s now (and their children are much more likely to have problems than children of 20-year old moms)

* Antibiotics, filtered water, cesarean section childbirths, smaller looser families and other environmental and behavioral changes greatly weaken the beneficial bacteria that constitute the physical majority of the cells of the human body

* Increased consumption of alcohol and drugs worldwide is probably leading to weaker immune systems.

* Health care in general is resulting in weaker immune systems, which are much more likely to be defeated by unknown diseases than the unprotected immune system of our grandparents.

These factors do not compare with the old health problems of, say, pollution or smoking. They are grounded in global life choices or structural changes that cannot easily be reversed.

At a personal level, i keep finding the younger generations are sicker than my generation, hence the feeling that we are creating sicker and sicker generations. My generation grew up helping older people carry heavy loads, go shopping for older people who were sick with the flu, and so forth. Now it's the young who have all sorts of physical problem that keeps them from lifting heavy loads and who get sick of every passing germ. They need a dentist all the time, they get food poisoning the moment they cross a border, they start taking all sorts of pills in their 30s. I don't see how this bodes well for our race's longevity.