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
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Life is random. Overall the lifespan of people who live like that is shorter, but people aren’t statistics and death happens all sorts of ways
Some have better DNA than others.
I haven’t been sick in decades, not even covid and don’t treat my body well, even at almost 50.
Or more ELI5, not everyone is created equal.
Imagine a Hunger Games style lottery, where everyone you know has to put their name into the drawing. Each passing year, you have to put your name in at least one additional time, with additional entries required for each unhealthy habit.
Some people are going to have so many entries that it’s much more likely their name will be drawn, while some people are going to have the bare minimum. It still won’t guarantee that a given person’s name is drawn, even if they have hundreds of entries.
Healthy habits can extend your lifespan somewhat and unhealthy ones can shorten it, but the ultimate determinants are going to be luck and genetics. You can only manipulate the odds to a degree.
The biggest benefit, in my opinion, is not necessarily the ability to prolong your life but to ensure that you have the best quality of life as you age.
Some people are on a slow, steady decline that takes years, so by the end of their lifespan, their quality of life has been poor for quite a while. People who are fit and healthy tend to have a shorter, sharper decline right before they die, so they maintain a good quality of life for much longer before they pass.
Obviously there are health issues and chronic pain or injuries that can prevent you from being active and degrade your quality of life through no fault of your own, but all things being equal, healthy choices are likely to make the time you’re here much better, until a brief bad stretch at the end.
Many factors are outside our control and those that are in it do matter…. but only so much. Its very humbling
Bc life AINT FAIR MOTHER FUCKERS!!!
Sorry I am one wine glass deep and it doesn’t take much.
My father who never smoke, barely drank, lived an “ok” lifestyle got pancreatic cancer and was gone by year four. WE WERE SHOCKED he got four years. That cancer ravaged everything about him until he was just an angry bitter dying shell of himself.
My stepdad has smoked a pack of cigarettes almost a day since he was 15, he is 72 now. And is still just trotting along. He doesn’t have cancer but he has COPD, dementia, blocked arteries, diabetes, etc… and he is still just trotting along. I call him- everything but cancer!
So yeah… it doesn’t make sense.
One of the healthiest people I ever knew dropped dead while out on his regular evening run.
Genetics. Chance. Fate. Karma. Whatever.
You can increase your chances of surviving by eating right and exercising, but you ultimately can’t control how Lady Luck decides to roll the dice.
Disease and death come down to luck.
Getting sick, and dying, is like winning a terrible lottery.
Every bad choice you make, every bad lifestyle you life, is like buying extra tickets to the “Lottery of Disease and Death.”
It’s still a lottery though. The person who buys one lottery ticket might win, while someone who buys 10,000 lottery tickets doesn’t.
Your chances of getting cancer might just be 1%, but that still means 1 out of every 100 people in that group will get it. Someone else might have a 75% chance of getting cancer. But that still means some of those people won’t get it.
All we can do is work to improve our odds.
Worth noting that while you’re improving your odds by being healthy, you’re also GREATLY improving your quality of life.
I’m older, and exercise every day. My friends my age are all heavier, and all complain about chronic issues, about daily aches, pains, and joke that just getting out of bed is a pain. I don’t have any of those issues.
I might have a heart attack and kick it at 75 just like them though, or even before them. But whatever the case is, my quality of life from today until then is absolutely going to be better than theirs.
Let me suggest this way of looking at it: all scientific principles are ‘ceteris paribus’ principles, that is, it’s an “all other things being equal” situation. That’s why when you design an experiment you try to eliminate as many variables as possible, so that you know what “other things” are affecting your testing. Medicine presents a unique problem in that the kind of testing that would enable us to control some variables are unethical and inhumane. As a result, we can’t eliminate all the variables. So it’s quite likely we will never completely understand most causes of death until after the person is dead. The only way to truly understand them is to mistreat living people with the condition.
Luck essentially. You have nature and nature going on; both the aspects out or your control (genes, diseases, injuries, environment) and aspects in your control (exercise, diet, making healthy choices) will affect your health and ultimate death. If nature gives you an amazing hand you can probably live a long life without nurturing your body as much as someone who got a really shitty hand dealt to them.
Aside from that, it’s also about quality of life. Someone might die from a random stroke 10 years earlier than an obese, alcoholic, chain smoker. However, the former is more likely to have a litany of health issues, probably some that are pretty horrific (liver failure, emphysema, diabetes) while the healthier person probably had a much higher quality of life while they were still kicking.
An easy way to think about it is this example of my dad. He was a lifetime runner, didn’t smoke/drink, always super active. He had a heart attack at 65, and not too shocking because his father died of a heart attack around the same age. Now, the interesting thing is that even though he actually blacked out because he had a complete blockage, because he was in such good shape he had enough collateral arteries where he came too and was able to recover. A lot of the damage his heart sustained even started to heal because he kept active and was health conscious.
You play out that same scenario with someone that treats their body like crap, they may not be healthy enough to survive that heart attack. Comparatively someone who didn’t have a genetic risk of heart disease or any other fatal health risks would obviously be less likely to even have a heart attack in the first place.
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.
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