The Shocking Death Toll of American Millennials
- Kevin Lankes
- Aug 31
- 5 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/nNkhqM9rQwI
In the early 2000s, until about 2010, all Americans in every generation were benefitting from a constant annual increase in lifespan. Rates of terrible diseases like cancer and heart disease were all falling. We were sitting pretty back then. The world was our ever-increasingly immortal oyster. But then something happened.
If you’re a Millennial like me, then we are now 70% more likely to die at any given moment than we were in the 2000s. And that’s from multiple causes across the board. We’re not just talking about any one little thing, we’re talking pretty much everything. And if you’re an American Millenial like I am, then we’re also over twice as likely to die than our peers who live in any other high-income country. You might say American Millennials are suddenly an endangered species. It’s a truly terrifying and really alarming trend. The word “alarming” is being way overused in all the headlines that sprouted up about this but rightfully so, because I think that’s the most appropriate word to describe it. What’s mind-blowing to me is that nobody put this together until now. All of this comes from a new study that analyzed data over the span of forty three years, from 1980 to 2023. So unfortunately, this is very real, and very well documented.
What in the actual holy hell is happening and should you buy a portable fallout shelter immediately and just live in that forever? I’m Kevin Lankes, and I’m definitely personally falling apart, so I completely believe all of this is true. Let’s go through it and see exactly what the research says before we all panic so much that we just live in a big bubble together.
The new study comes from three authors, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field of the University of Minnesota, and Andrew Stokes and Jacob Bor of Boston University.
The trio found that Americans in general are dying at a higher rate than citizens of other high-GDP countries. Three million of us die each year, and a quarter of that number wouldn’t happen if we’d lived anywhere else. So that’s really disturbing on its own. But then when you divide that up by generation, and you lower the maximum age value, you find that number grows exponentially. So more extra Americans are dying who are younger, which realy is not how life is supposed to work, according to all those Discovery channel specials I remember watching as a kid. But those are all dead now too, and it’s all just reality tv on education networks anymore, so maybe our brains are just giving up, you know, having to watch all that all the time.
Looking at Americans under the age of 65, if the death rate matched our peer countries, then we’d be seeing 50% less deaths annually. That’s half. Like, half of all of those people in that age group are dying because they live here. But more astounding still, when we look at early adults, or Americans between the ages of 25-44, which are mostly Millennials and some older Gen Z, then the percentage of people who are dying that probably wouldn’t elsewhere skyrockets up to 62%. Nearly two thirds of younger Americans are dying who simply shouldn’t be.
One of the craziest things about this research is that the authors can’t point to a single cause. It would be one thing if we found rising rates of some type of cancer or if Covid was simply more deadly here than we thought, but we’re looking at rising mortality rates from multiple causes. And not just from illness. Accidents, car crashes, and drug overdoses, too. Not only are mortality rates from diseases rising, but they’re rising from external factors, also.
When Stokes, Bor, and Wrigley Field (her name is Wrigley Field?), when they drew up this study, they thought they were going to look at fatality rates from Covid in America vs the rest of the world. And they did do that, and came away with some insight. For instance, they confirmed again what we’ve seen in research before now, that because the U.S. response to Covid was worse than other countries, we had a higher death rate from the pandemic than other high-income nations. Overall, Americans died at a rate of three people for every two elsewhere. And younger people in particular had a big mortality spike during the American flavor of the pandemic.
Anything I say about a causal relationship to the data would be total speculation. But a lot of research out there has been pointing out just how difficult life is for younger Americans. I remember the sub-prime mortgage lending crisis when speculators crashed the housing marketing, because I graduated into that in 2008. And there was a ton of research done on the effects of that on the Millennial generation. We were said to make less over our lifetime as a result. And that wasn’t the only once-in-a-century event that hit us. We had the pandemic, which is still doing a lot of damage economically to generational prospects. We have a completely upside-down economy, and I detailed all of the completely terrible effects of that in this video I did recently about what factors truly matter to everyday people. Wages are stagnant, inflation is insane, corporate profits are skyrocketing and greed is our God. Unfortunately, the communion wafers are made of Millennials.
What’s deeply concerning and that the study authors point out, is that all the data stops before trump gets back in the White House. We’ve seen his administration now cut funding for healthcare and safety nets for Americans who need them, and we’re seeing RFK Jr. push for funding cuts to research for vital medical services like vaccines, and push to ban everyday medicines that help millions of people every day. At the same time, we’ve lost the ability to track health outcomes accuractely. This is going to be a complete disaster.
Usually I have something funny to say about now or I have like a thing you could try to do to help a little bit, but I don’t have any of that this time. I am genuinely exasperated and very, very worried. As a cancer survivor, I have a long history of struggling with my own mortality from a young age, and I find it genuinely difficult to engage with this. So yeah, it’s bubble time. Bubbles all around. And let’s get the shit out of America. Sea bubbles. Big, ocean-going bubble vessels. Come on, let’s start a new thing somewhere in the ocean where we eat green sea sludge and stay far away from whatever it is that’s disintegrating the U.S. population from the inside out. Let’s do some f*cking good off in the ocean somewhere. Because here might just be a deathtrap. I’ll see you in the next one.
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