why do people who smoke and drink heavily sometimes outlive heathy people?

Question

So people who exercise, eat healthy and never touch drugs or excess of any kind and do all they can to stay fit only to die so soon into their lives?

But then you have people who drink, smoke and do drugs in massive amounts for ages but they last for a long time all things considered and sometimes way older then other average people

This isn’t the case for all of them but it happens enough to be noticed

So how and why does this happen?

Thanks for reading and have a nice day

In: Other

Answer 1

This is basically the poster child for survivorship bias.

You see the people who die early and shouldn’t. You see the people who die late and shouldn’t.

What you don’t see because it’s so normalized it doesn’t register is all the healthy people who grow old and all the unhealthy people who die young.