7 ms·

Makes sense and is expected based on how things function in America right now. Opioid prescriptions and abuse Increased traffic deaths + road rage incident

Makes sense and is expected based on how things function in America right now. Opioid prescriptions and abuse Increased traffic deaths + road rage incidents (https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimates-first-quarter-2022) Deaths of despair + suicides (Many sources and discussions about this) Lack of access to basic health care (lack of access to abortion will contribute here soon) Obesity and fast food (self-explanatory) Alcoholism from being bored during the pandemic (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/01/covid-related-drinking-linked-to-rise-in-liver-disease/) (edit) and of course COVID-19 related deaths and illness I mean there are just so many factors going against us, and either neglect or disagreement on how to solve these problems. On the left you have people who are suggesting that being obese is ok (it's not, it's a health problem, doesn't mean you need to be ashamed or be insulted though) and on the right, well, that speaks for itself. Similar to global warming, though, the solutions for these problems are technocratic and unlikely to generate any sort of broad public support or acknowledgement in the sense that people vote for candidates based in something like advocating for decreasing traffic fatalities. So long as partisans continue to bicker and worship ridiculous ideological positions we won't have any pragmatic solutions or attempts to mitigate these problems because the technocrats can't function in an environment where ideological purity and populism are the currency instead of facts and solutions. None of these will cause a downfall of America or anything, we're just going to be a bit more, eh, chaotic?

mercy_dude 4y ago
The biggest underlying issue is the decline of family units. No one talks about it but it’s true. You can’t function as a society when there is no immediate support system left in the form of family and loved ones. We are inherently a social creature.
- bparsons 4y ago
  Cuba, one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere has a longer life expectancy than the US because they have universal healthcare. They also have a higher divorce rate than the US.
  - agileAlligator 4y ago
    Cuban healthcare is a joke, ask anyone actually from Cuba. The numbers are mangled to make it look good.
  - bbojan 4y ago
    Not disagreeing with you, but a lot of this is due to drastically lower traffic deaths, because there's very little traffic in Cuba.
  - npc54321 4y ago
    Cuban healthcare is one of the biggest memes ever. And it's just that, a meme, not a reality.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Citation needed. Does not pass a cursory glance. Meanwhile there are plenty of good stats identifying strong correlates on other factors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_life_expectancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... https://statisticalatlas.com/United-States/Household-Types https://statisticalatlas.com/United-States/Household-Types
  - areyousure 4y ago
    In case anyone is curious, the Spearman rank correlation coefficient between these two provided lists is ~0.32.
- Terretta 4y ago
  From Pew Research (2010), the decline in marriage is offset by rise in new families: The Resilience of Families. The decline of marriage has not knocked family life off its pedestal. Three-quarters of all adults (76%) say their family is the most important element of their life; 75% say they are “very satisfied” with their family life, and more than eight-in-ten say the family they live in now is as close as (45%) or closer than (40%) the family in which they grew up. However, on all of these questions, married adults give more positive responses than do unmarried adults. The Definition of Family. By emphatic margins, the public does not see marriage as the only path to family formation. Fully 86% say a single parent and child constitute a family; nearly as many (80%) say an unmarried couple living together with a child is a family; and 63% say a gay or lesbian couple raising a child is a family. The presence of children clearly matters in these definitions. If a cohabiting couple has no children, a majority of the public says they are not a family. Marriage matters, too. If a childless couple is married, 88% consider them to be a family. The Ties that Bind. In response to a question about whom they would assist with money or caregiving in a time of need, Americans express a greater sense of obligation toward relatives—including relatives by way of fractured marriages– than toward best friends. The ranking of relatives aligns in a predictable hierarchy. More survey respondents express an obligation to help out a parent (83% would feel very obligated) or grown child (77%) than say the same about a stepparent (55%) or a step or half sibling (43%). But when asked about one’s best friend, just 39% say they would feel a similar sense of obligation. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2010/11/18/the-decline-of-marriage-and-rise-of-new-families/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2010/11/18/the-dec...
  - dangus 4y ago
    I think there's a really good argument to be made that the marriage rate was previously inflated artificially by cultural expectations and gender inequality. What kind of life could you expect to make for yourself as an unmarried woman when you didn't even have the right to open a bank account on your own? https://www.flagshipbanks.com/blog/the-history-of-women-and-banking-thanks-to-rbg https://www.flagshipbanks.com/blog/the-history-of-women-and-...
- fellowniusmonk 4y ago
  Family unit decline is a symptom not the underlying cause, it's a small part of the matrix of issues, it's often invoked as a means of blaming something inherently unchangeable, undefinable and unregulateable as a diversion. And everyone does talk about it, I hear about it 3 times a week and it's because it's a useful distraction and a wedge to force legislation of personal moral choice. It's like saying all problems individuals are having are caused by the individual. Somehow society, culture, governance and macro economic forces have no effect. If you think the breakdown of the family unit is the root cause, let me assure you, homeschool familes are facing the same issue in our current environment. Of course if we want to embrace absurdist reductionism the REAL problem is the dysfunction of churches abandoning their societal role for political power in the 80s, family's DO break down and now we have no "generally apolitical" relational safety net outside of the workplace, so social dysfunction can promulgate with no positive feedback loop of increased social cohesion to stop it. We need religious, areligious and apolitical societies that will facilitate mingling of social classes and are focused on the social good.
- jollybean 4y ago
  I think it's 'an issue' but not the major issue, except where it's 'acute'. A lot of couples are not getting married these days, which is 'something' but not like a disaster but in extremely impoverished/violeng ghetto areas you see well over 50% of kids not having any meaningful relationship with their Fathers. Now that is a 'primary' issue but it's also tied to incarceration, violence etc.. Definitely ultra violence (related to universal gun access), lack of healthcare, excessive inequality in some areas, obesity etc. are big factors. I'm not sure if the most recent post-COVID data is hugely helpful because America did 'not very well' on that one despite having vaccines available. I mean, that's a whole other level of sad. But give it 3 years to see where the data sits without the 'COVID' blip.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway743 4y ago
  At a glance this reads close to "families with no father figure". You probably didn't mean the likes or to induce knee jerk reactions, but would replace "family unit decline" as being an issue of concern with "there's little to no social/gov provided safety net" for folks who need it.
  - jonesjoneses 4y ago
    The father becomes the state.
  - mercy_dude 4y ago
    No family is exactly what I meant. More than 1 in every 2 adult are living without a spouse and 15% adult live by themselves alone [1] [1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/families-and-living-arrangements.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/families... No government can replace the support system a family can provide.
- kergonath 4y ago
  Family as we know it is a historical oddity. Before the industrial revolution the social networks were much broader and involved whole communities, or much more extended families than what we consider normal now. We can introduce other social groups that help people in need and provide support and are not based primarily on family ties. This is orthogonal to “family units”, which is more of a conservative dog whistle. There are not fewer families now than there used to be, it’s just that a family is not necessarily the stereotypical married heterosexual couple with their 6 children.
- sfvegandude 4y ago
  Straight people should get their act together. Y’all are so stuck on an image of family that has only existed for two generations at most, and it causes you to be lonely and unable to form relationships of meaningful strength outside that image. I feel sorry for straight people.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
newaccount2021 4y ago
> Lack of access to basic health care the number of Americans with health insurance is at a historic high, Biden bragged about it on Twitter last week it doesn't matter if you go to the doctor...if you don't take the doctor's advice and eat better + exercise...
- malauxyeux 4y ago
  > advice I was under the impression that doctors were getting sheepish about giving such advice in the US. Patients don't like to hear it. And overweight patients require more and more expensive treatments over the course of their lives, creating a perverse incentive in a for-profit healthcare system.
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    >I was under the impression that doctors were getting sheepish about giving such advice in the US. Patients don't like to hear it. Seems like doctors either tell people to lose weight to cure an ear infection or they don't say anything about weight ever because the outcomes are poor so why bother. >creating a perverse incentive in a for-profit healthcare system. Normally private insurers would dump these kinds of people (perhaps leaving them for some government insurer to deal with if such exists). But in a world where insurers' profit margin is regulated to a fixed percentage of the money that flows through insurers they are valuable people to have around.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      Medical staff now get personal satisfaction scores from patients at some hospitals, so now there is also a huge tension about telling patients things they don’t like. Anecdotally, this was a big reason many of my friends left medicine and nursing.
    - watwut 4y ago
      > Seems like doctors either tell people to lose weight to cure an ear infection or they don't say anything about weight ever because the outcomes are poor so why bother. Pretty much. But larger thing is that ... doctors are not nutritionists nor lifestyle experts. They do know their own specialization very well, but they are not able to make people loose weight. They do not have evidence based well know strategies of the "we know that this program/advice makes x% of people to make loose weight long term" sort. Usually, what patient gets is general advice of "eating less" followed by some unsustainable diet that is necessary going to fail and just lead to yoyo cycle. By unsustainable I mean the sort if diet that leads to malnutrition of some sort due to missing stuff your body needs or the one that is too low in calories making the person following it unable to function normally.
backtoyoujim 4y ago
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  ~1% of all deaths. Most of which are suicides.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
saiya-jin 4y ago
I'd say obesity of by far the worst out of those, since its so widespread and covid certainly didn't help there. That Americans are generally way more overweight than say Europeans is something I keep hearing for multiple decades and became a regular meme source, and I keep seeing it regularly. I saw a lot of attempts for normalization of this in US media, ie Hollywood family/comedy movies painting it as something to be OK with, and not a disease that will slowly but surely ruin your life and kill you prematurely, all completely preventable. I wonder how much better US healthcare would be if obesity wasn't such an epidemic there, the costs for treating all those comorbidities that eventually come is staggering, all long term treatments. HFCS must have lion share in this, as overall processed cheap junk food. We don't have it all figured out here in Europe, but at least our approach to food, its quality and quantity is way better here.
- trgn 4y ago
  The average american is just plain unhealthy. Terrible diet, little daily activity. It's in the stats, which people ignore. You just plain see it with your own eyes as well. It's a genuine problem, not a lifestyle choice.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    I agree it's a problem, but how is it not a choice? There are a few exceptions, but most people could choose to be more active and eat better.
    - trgn 4y ago
      I phrased that wrong. Unhealthy habits are often permissively looked at as just a different lifestyle choice ("hey, I just like my burgers and sodas man!"), rather than really being problematic.
    - watwut 4y ago
      Yeah, but the environment does not exactly makes it easier. More like, it usually makes it harder. The way places are build for example - most people have to use car, the option to go by walk. public transport or by bicycle is not there for most people. There are not even sidewalks in quite many places and if you walk somewhere, you are "odd" (I had cops stop at me just because I was walking somewhere. They thought something is wrong.). The expectation seems to be that you wont just have physical movement normally as part of your daily life, you have to use car to go to special place (gym, park further away) to do things like exercising, jogging etc. And Americans work a lot too, there stereotype of lazy American, but that lazy American works a lot more hours then people in other parts of the world. I mean, the amount of physical movement I had definitely changed with how easy and pleasant it was to have some low key movements. And the way America is build, it is fairly often neither. Even the way Americans talk about it - low key going by walk or bicycling or whatever is the first to be sacrificed to minor safety improvement or to general "if you want to do it that much, you can go to bike trail, mountains, etc". That however cuts off everyone except most determined.
CollinEMac 4y ago
According to Axios it's mostly COVID and injuries. https://www.axios.com/2022/08/31/covid-us-life-expectancy https://www.axios.com/2022/08/31/covid-us-life-expectancy

mercy_dude 4y ago

The biggest underlying issue is the decline of family units. No one talks about it but it’s true. You can’t function as a society when there is no immediate support system left in the form of family and loved ones. We are inherently a social creature.

bparsons 4y ago
Cuba, one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere has a longer life expectancy than the US because they have universal healthcare. They also have a higher divorce rate than the US.
- agileAlligator 4y ago
  Cuban healthcare is a joke, ask anyone actually from Cuba. The numbers are mangled to make it look good.
- bbojan 4y ago
  Not disagreeing with you, but a lot of this is due to drastically lower traffic deaths, because there's very little traffic in Cuba.
- npc54321 4y ago
  Cuban healthcare is one of the biggest memes ever. And it's just that, a meme, not a reality.
spywaregorilla 4y ago
Citation needed. Does not pass a cursory glance. Meanwhile there are plenty of good stats identifying strong correlates on other factors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_life_expectancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... https://statisticalatlas.com/United-States/Household-Types https://statisticalatlas.com/United-States/Household-Types
- areyousure 4y ago
  In case anyone is curious, the Spearman rank correlation coefficient between these two provided lists is ~0.32.
Terretta 4y ago
From Pew Research (2010), the decline in marriage is offset by rise in new families: The Resilience of Families. The decline of marriage has not knocked family life off its pedestal. Three-quarters of all adults (76%) say their family is the most important element of their life; 75% say they are “very satisfied” with their family life, and more than eight-in-ten say the family they live in now is as close as (45%) or closer than (40%) the family in which they grew up. However, on all of these questions, married adults give more positive responses than do unmarried adults. The Definition of Family. By emphatic margins, the public does not see marriage as the only path to family formation. Fully 86% say a single parent and child constitute a family; nearly as many (80%) say an unmarried couple living together with a child is a family; and 63% say a gay or lesbian couple raising a child is a family. The presence of children clearly matters in these definitions. If a cohabiting couple has no children, a majority of the public says they are not a family. Marriage matters, too. If a childless couple is married, 88% consider them to be a family. The Ties that Bind. In response to a question about whom they would assist with money or caregiving in a time of need, Americans express a greater sense of obligation toward relatives—including relatives by way of fractured marriages– than toward best friends. The ranking of relatives aligns in a predictable hierarchy. More survey respondents express an obligation to help out a parent (83% would feel very obligated) or grown child (77%) than say the same about a stepparent (55%) or a step or half sibling (43%). But when asked about one’s best friend, just 39% say they would feel a similar sense of obligation. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2010/11/18/the-decline-of-marriage-and-rise-of-new-families/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2010/11/18/the-dec...
- dangus 4y ago
  I think there's a really good argument to be made that the marriage rate was previously inflated artificially by cultural expectations and gender inequality. What kind of life could you expect to make for yourself as an unmarried woman when you didn't even have the right to open a bank account on your own? https://www.flagshipbanks.com/blog/the-history-of-women-and-banking-thanks-to-rbg https://www.flagshipbanks.com/blog/the-history-of-women-and-...
fellowniusmonk 4y ago
Family unit decline is a symptom not the underlying cause, it's a small part of the matrix of issues, it's often invoked as a means of blaming something inherently unchangeable, undefinable and unregulateable as a diversion. And everyone does talk about it, I hear about it 3 times a week and it's because it's a useful distraction and a wedge to force legislation of personal moral choice. It's like saying all problems individuals are having are caused by the individual. Somehow society, culture, governance and macro economic forces have no effect. If you think the breakdown of the family unit is the root cause, let me assure you, homeschool familes are facing the same issue in our current environment. Of course if we want to embrace absurdist reductionism the REAL problem is the dysfunction of churches abandoning their societal role for political power in the 80s, family's DO break down and now we have no "generally apolitical" relational safety net outside of the workplace, so social dysfunction can promulgate with no positive feedback loop of increased social cohesion to stop it. We need religious, areligious and apolitical societies that will facilitate mingling of social classes and are focused on the social good.
jollybean 4y ago
I think it's 'an issue' but not the major issue, except where it's 'acute'. A lot of couples are not getting married these days, which is 'something' but not like a disaster but in extremely impoverished/violeng ghetto areas you see well over 50% of kids not having any meaningful relationship with their Fathers. Now that is a 'primary' issue but it's also tied to incarceration, violence etc.. Definitely ultra violence (related to universal gun access), lack of healthcare, excessive inequality in some areas, obesity etc. are big factors. I'm not sure if the most recent post-COVID data is hugely helpful because America did 'not very well' on that one despite having vaccines available. I mean, that's a whole other level of sad. But give it 3 years to see where the data sits without the 'COVID' blip.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
throwaway743 4y ago
At a glance this reads close to "families with no father figure". You probably didn't mean the likes or to induce knee jerk reactions, but would replace "family unit decline" as being an issue of concern with "there's little to no social/gov provided safety net" for folks who need it.
- jonesjoneses 4y ago
  The father becomes the state.
- mercy_dude 4y ago
  No family is exactly what I meant. More than 1 in every 2 adult are living without a spouse and 15% adult live by themselves alone [1] [1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/families-and-living-arrangements.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/families... No government can replace the support system a family can provide.
kergonath 4y ago
Family as we know it is a historical oddity. Before the industrial revolution the social networks were much broader and involved whole communities, or much more extended families than what we consider normal now. We can introduce other social groups that help people in need and provide support and are not based primarily on family ties. This is orthogonal to “family units”, which is more of a conservative dog whistle. There are not fewer families now than there used to be, it’s just that a family is not necessarily the stereotypical married heterosexual couple with their 6 children.
sfvegandude 4y ago
Straight people should get their act together. Y’all are so stuck on an image of family that has only existed for two generations at most, and it causes you to be lonely and unable to form relationships of meaningful strength outside that image. I feel sorry for straight people.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

newaccount2021 4y ago

> Lack of access to basic health care the number of Americans with health insurance is at a historic high, Biden bragged about it on Twitter last week it doesn't matter if you go to the doctor...if you don't take the doctor's advice and eat better + exercise...

malauxyeux 4y ago
> advice I was under the impression that doctors were getting sheepish about giving such advice in the US. Patients don't like to hear it. And overweight patients require more and more expensive treatments over the course of their lives, creating a perverse incentive in a for-profit healthcare system.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  >I was under the impression that doctors were getting sheepish about giving such advice in the US. Patients don't like to hear it. Seems like doctors either tell people to lose weight to cure an ear infection or they don't say anything about weight ever because the outcomes are poor so why bother. >creating a perverse incentive in a for-profit healthcare system. Normally private insurers would dump these kinds of people (perhaps leaving them for some government insurer to deal with if such exists). But in a world where insurers' profit margin is regulated to a fixed percentage of the money that flows through insurers they are valuable people to have around.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Medical staff now get personal satisfaction scores from patients at some hospitals, so now there is also a huge tension about telling patients things they don’t like. Anecdotally, this was a big reason many of my friends left medicine and nursing.
  - watwut 4y ago
    > Seems like doctors either tell people to lose weight to cure an ear infection or they don't say anything about weight ever because the outcomes are poor so why bother. Pretty much. But larger thing is that ... doctors are not nutritionists nor lifestyle experts. They do know their own specialization very well, but they are not able to make people loose weight. They do not have evidence based well know strategies of the "we know that this program/advice makes x% of people to make loose weight long term" sort. Usually, what patient gets is general advice of "eating less" followed by some unsustainable diet that is necessary going to fail and just lead to yoyo cycle. By unsustainable I mean the sort if diet that leads to malnutrition of some sort due to missing stuff your body needs or the one that is too low in calories making the person following it unable to function normally.

backtoyoujim 4y ago

spywaregorilla 4y ago
~1% of all deaths. Most of which are suicides.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

saiya-jin 4y ago

I'd say obesity of by far the worst out of those, since its so widespread and covid certainly didn't help there. That Americans are generally way more overweight than say Europeans is something I keep hearing for multiple decades and became a regular meme source, and I keep seeing it regularly. I saw a lot of attempts for normalization of this in US media, ie Hollywood family/comedy movies painting it as something to be OK with, and not a disease that will slowly but surely ruin your life and kill you prematurely, all completely preventable. I wonder how much better US healthcare would be if obesity wasn't such an epidemic there, the costs for treating all those comorbidities that eventually come is staggering, all long term treatments. HFCS must have lion share in this, as overall processed cheap junk food. We don't have it all figured out here in Europe, but at least our approach to food, its quality and quantity is way better here.

trgn 4y ago
The average american is just plain unhealthy. Terrible diet, little daily activity. It's in the stats, which people ignore. You just plain see it with your own eyes as well. It's a genuine problem, not a lifestyle choice.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  I agree it's a problem, but how is it not a choice? There are a few exceptions, but most people could choose to be more active and eat better.
  - trgn 4y ago
    I phrased that wrong. Unhealthy habits are often permissively looked at as just a different lifestyle choice ("hey, I just like my burgers and sodas man!"), rather than really being problematic.
  - watwut 4y ago
    Yeah, but the environment does not exactly makes it easier. More like, it usually makes it harder. The way places are build for example - most people have to use car, the option to go by walk. public transport or by bicycle is not there for most people. There are not even sidewalks in quite many places and if you walk somewhere, you are "odd" (I had cops stop at me just because I was walking somewhere. They thought something is wrong.). The expectation seems to be that you wont just have physical movement normally as part of your daily life, you have to use car to go to special place (gym, park further away) to do things like exercising, jogging etc. And Americans work a lot too, there stereotype of lazy American, but that lazy American works a lot more hours then people in other parts of the world. I mean, the amount of physical movement I had definitely changed with how easy and pleasant it was to have some low key movements. And the way America is build, it is fairly often neither. Even the way Americans talk about it - low key going by walk or bicycling or whatever is the first to be sacrificed to minor safety improvement or to general "if you want to do it that much, you can go to bike trail, mountains, etc". That however cuts off everyone except most determined.

CollinEMac 4y ago

According to Axios it's mostly COVID and injuries. https://www.axios.com/2022/08/31/covid-us-life-expectancy https://www.axios.com/2022/08/31/covid-us-life-expectancy