America’s Working Class Is Struggling to Survive the Gauntlet of Middle Age
New research finds that Americans without college degrees live roughly eight and a half years fewer than their college-educated counterparts. Being working class in America means being ground down and left behind, explaining the rise of “deaths of despair.”
For Americans without college degrees, life expectancy starting at age twenty-five was 49.8 years (almost seventy-five years old) on the eve of the pandemic, down from 51.6 years in 1992 (or seventy-seven). (Gary John Norman / Getty Images)
My brother is only forty-four years old, but most of his best friends are dead.
Three of them made a suicide pact, and all ended their lives over the course of a sorrowful summer in the aughts. Another succumbed to a drug-fueled swimming pool accident. Most recently, his old pal Zach passed away from liver failure at thirty-nine — the result of drinking roughly a bottle of booze a day for years.
I worried that my brother would join the deceased during the COVID lockdown after he shot himself in a moment of rage and hopelessness. But he’s relatively back to normal since then.
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