A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has been doing the rounds lately. It arrived with a finding that should rattle anyone born after 1970. Across heart disease, cancer, and what demographers file under external causes, this generation is dying faster than the one before it.
For decades, American mortality had a villain everyone agreed on. The cigarette. The Surgeon General named it in 1964, and the country spent the next half-decade quitting. The researchers found that lung cancer deaths fell among these younger cohorts. The country won that fight. Smoking rates plummeted. Then Americans sat down, got lazy, and began to feast.
Colon cancer, a disease tied tightly to weight and diet, climbed among Americans barely old enough to rent a car. People in their 30s now get a cancer their grandfathers associated with old men in waiting rooms. America swapped one self-inflicted wound for another.
Food companies hired chemists to engineer a chip you can’t stop eating, and the chemists delivered. Rent swallows half a paycheck. A cart of vegetables and a gym membership aren’t cheap. Many Americans are working two or three jobs at a time. The deck’s stacked. All of it holds, but responsibility covers the rest.
My grandparents survived rationing and worked jobs that turned their joints to dust. They ate less because there was less, and they moved because sitting still meant going hungry. Our catastrophe runs the other way. Our ancestors were killed by scarcity. Today, what’s killing us is the opposite, built to our own specifications and delivered to the door within the hour.
A man who finishes a family-sized bag of something invented in a lab made about 40 small decisions to reach the bottom of it. The chemist was present for none of them.
The same paper tracked the deaths from overdose and despair; those climbed generation over generation, too. The numbers are ominous, and the grief behind each one is real. Still, the habit of treating every younger American as a leaf in a storm does them no kindness. It tells a 30-year-old that his health is weather, something that happens to him on a schedule he never set.
Policy matters here. Cheaper produce would help, as would honest labels and cities built for walking instead of idling in traffic. Nevertheless, the people who lived shorter, harder lives often had healthier bodies, and they managed it without an app counting their steps. They had no oat milk and no standing desk. They had work, hunger, and the dumb luck of being born before anyone figured out how to fit 800 calories into a paper cup.
We know more about nutrition now. We know the perils of sugar, the coach and the bag of nachos. The information's free and relentless, and we scroll past it on the way to ordering a pizza. The researchers are careful, stopping where the data ends. They name the era and the generation, and the slow slide behind every comparable country. What they can’t print in a respectable journal is what most adults already suspect when the elevator fills up while the stairwell sits empty.
Responsibility sounds like blame, and blame sounds heartless when aimed at someone who’s suffering. But the alternative to responsibility is a rejection of responsibility. Worse, it’s helplessness, and helplessness now has a body count. The numbers sort by year of birth. Each cohort carries the death rate its choices bought. Tell a man his decline was set the moment he entered this world, and he’ll live down to the forecast.