Earlier this week, the editors of the Wall Street Journal highlighted “A U.S. Life Expectancy Milestone.” After stagnating for about a decade and then declining, “life expectancy in the U.S. hit a record in 2024 as death rates for heart disease, cancer, Covid and drug overdoses fell.” Children born today in the U.S. will enjoy a record-high life expectancy of seventy-nine years (to the year 2105, a mind-boggling thought).
That’s certainly good news. The Journal took it as an occasion to heap scorn on the “liberal clerisy,” concluding that “America’s private health system isn’t without flaws—which largely stem from market distortions caused by government—but it’s better than the alternatives.”
Perhaps so. But while the eyes of some fellow readers of the print edition (all old folks like me, no doubt, some of them well past seventy-nine) were already shifting to the next editorial item (“Crony Socialism and Rare Earths,” not my territory), I continued to think about “old age.” I’m sure I wasn’t the only reader prompted by this editorial to connect it with a related subject much in the news these days: increasing advocacy for “assisted dying,” in part under the sacred banner of “individual choice” but also very much motivated by governments’ desire to reduce their caregiving obligations. (The oily propaganda in this vein is disgusting.) And of course I think of dementia, a subject with which many readers of First Things will be all too familiar. The reality of this affliction does not negate celebration of increased life expectancy, but it certainly complicates our reckoning.
How long will it be until AI companions for the “elderly” (as we used to say) are commonplace? I’ve already been wondering if a couple of novelists I admire will be drawn to this premise, which could profitably be taken in many different directions. (In some versions, the AI would be exploited for such purposes; in other scenarios, the AI would be benign—“heroic,” even.)
My wife Wendy and I certainly qualify as old (she turned seventy-eight in February; I will do so in June, Lord willing). As you know if you have followed this column for a while, I am her primary “caregiver”; our daughter Katy very kindly moved back home full-time three and a half years ago; and our other three long-grown kids, far-flung, help a great deal too. In addition, we have paid caregivers who come for part of the time each day. It’s a “labor-intensive” enterprise.
Our experience is not uncommon—millions of old people have some form of dementia—but neither is it in any way normative. “Old age” is enormously various, as is true of every stage of life. As a subject (you’ve heard me grumble about this before), it hasn’t been treated from as many angles as it merits, especially in contemporary fiction. Of course, we appear to be approaching a time when the percentage of the populace that counts as “old” is much smaller than it is today. Some of the future scenarios I’ve seen (not in science fiction but in academic studies) project a social landscape so wildly different from our own as to be disorienting.
Meanwhile, here we are in 2026 (a year that once was “science-fictional,” not so very long ago), living by the Spirit-infused words that were collected to become the Bible, read over the centuries in wildly various circumstances yet always applicable to the place, the time, the generation in which they are received. And that “Life Expectancy Milestone” justifiably celebrated by the Journal? Perhaps it will remind us—whether we are very old or very young or even “in the prime of life”—that we are inescapably dependent beings, and that caring for each other is the highest expression of love.
