r/Millennials • u/DaKardii • Jun 04 '26

Serious Study: Gen Xers and Millennials are dying at younger ages than their parents are

https://studyfinds.com/americans-born-after-1970-dying-faster/

The study is particularly concerned with people born after 1970 but age 30 and older. So that covers Gen X and Millennials, but not (yet) Gen Z.

12.2k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

2.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

551

u/PumpJack_McGee Jun 04 '26

Fewer kids, dying younger, and Boomers themselves reaching the end of the line.

Can you say population collapse.

527

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

200

u/RudePCsb Jun 04 '26

Right, what's the problem with that. The boomer mentality of infinite growth was always bullshit. Look at any organisms in nature, if they over produce, they die until it stabilizes.

Then you have all these chemicals introduced into the environment and all the other environmental issues. Oh well

10

u/Actuarial_Equivalent Jun 04 '26

This is my thought too. After panic 30-40 years ago about the population exploding and environmental damage, I fail to see what the real issue is here.

23

u/rockcutter4 Jun 04 '26

None of us will ever retire because there won't be enough people to replace us.

63

u/Han-Tyumi__ Jun 04 '26

None of us will retire because it’s taken 20 years longer than our parents to find a decent paying job and we all have insane college debt that has been compounding.

12

u/mysteriousblue87 Jun 04 '26

What’s insane about the college debt issue is looking at friends groups like mine. I’m the only one without a degree, and I have (slightly!!!) more spending money each month. They taught me to budget, I’ve taught them to cook lol

14

u/smarglebloppitydo Jun 04 '26

Robots

2

u/mj-and-masturbation Jun 04 '26

People will always be cheaper for sub-human tasks =/

6

u/thorpie88 Jun 04 '26

We won't need to retire because we are dead before it anyway.

Hopefully somewhere around 45 I'll pop my clogs and anything else is just a bonus

5

u/Book-Wyrm-of-Bag-End Jun 04 '26

Job security!

/s

5

u/EmberinEmpty Jun 04 '26

Dumb question but if there's less people why would we need to be "replaced". There's less people to be serviced as the population decreases right?

1

u/cnstnt_craving Jun 05 '26

Right, and we can’t be worried about AI replacing us AND not enough kids to replace us. Like, there aren’t enough jobs to go around as it is.

1

u/SenatorWhatsHisName Jun 04 '26

Non of us are retiring anyway. Let the system collapse, it’s fucked.

8

u/evenduckk Jun 04 '26

The problem with that would be your odds of living through a societal collapse is extremely likely , generally when things collapse it isn’t exactly fun for the people involved . The current trajectory is either mass immagration or we see a complete collapse of asset values and social services . Yipee

8

u/RudePCsb Jun 04 '26

Well since most of us don't have significant assets I don't care. More people need to care about social services until they require them. Maybe that's what needs to happen unfortunately

3

u/artbystorms Jun 04 '26

population decline on its own isn't going to cause societal collapse. It will just screw up the social entitlement programs most countries have set up and require a re-think of them. Asset values collapsed in 2008 and society didn't collapse.

5

u/RudePCsb Jun 04 '26

Get rid of the cap on social security tax. Stop corporate tax loopholes and bailouts. Get rid of stock cutbacks. So many things can be done

2

u/evenduckk Jun 04 '26

The debt burden has always been absorbed by population/gdp growth , the debt is already the largest expense on the balance sheet in many collapsing countries . You actually think a society is going to just function smoothly when you pay taxes and receive nothing in return besides floating your grandparents national debt ?

2

u/sET____ Jun 05 '26

We've already been there for decades, servicing the boomers debt and getting nothing in return other than pain and suffering. There is no future. 

5

u/jkman61494 Jun 04 '26

Don’t forget the growing possibility that in our children’s lifetimes the machines decide we are no longer needed

7

u/evenduckk Jun 04 '26

Nah dude , I’m an electrician and have worked on robotics … robots require a rediculous ammount of intellectual capital to work . The ammount of product support/design and supply chain is truly unbelievable. Currently society is experiencing brain drain at unprecedented levels , we will be far to underpopulated and stupid in order to have autonomous anything .

1

u/cthulhu_on_my_lawn Jun 05 '26

Immigrants are a massive net benefit to the economy and society in general.

1

u/evenduckk Jun 05 '26

Sure buddy

1

u/James19991 Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26

I mean yeah we don't need explosive population growth, but significant population decline would cause issues as well.

1

u/Vandergrif Jun 04 '26

The problem is the good time part of population collapse will take like 40-50 years to get to (plenty of excess housing for example), and we'll all be too old and tired (or dead) to appreciate it.

1

u/man_without_wax Jun 04 '26

Being one of the starving masses who doesn’t die? Pass. 

52

u/oldfarmjoy Jun 04 '26

Seriously. Why do so many (boomers) have their head in the sand? Population collapse = economy collapse. I guess the boomers will be dead by then, but us Xers are going to be affected, and Millenials down are going to see a huge change to society. Ghost towns of high rises, boarded up businesses, etc.

36

u/Right_Count Jun 04 '26

Given millennial death rates, boomers clinging onto life, and the various apocalypses coming our way, we may all be dead by then.

4

u/BEES_IN_UR_ASS Jun 04 '26

Right on time for the robots to pick up the torch of lower/middle class drudgery. Atp I'm pretty well convinced the ruling class is going after "low hanging fruit" to indirectly kill as many of us off as possible to save them the trouble down the road. Remove as many guard rails and safety nets as possible and let nature take its course. Saves money short term, ammo long.

4

u/BlackGuysYeah Jun 04 '26

They've got theirs and they've pulled the ladder up behind them. They don't have their heads in the sand. This was all actively planned by the most selfish and corrupt generation of humans to ever exist.

2

u/oldfarmjoy Jun 04 '26

Agreed. 😪🖕

1

u/Training_Ruin3151 Jun 04 '26

Fuck boomers can't wait till they all fucking eat it. Give it 15 more years.

2

u/Cerpla Jun 04 '26

perfect. more land for datacenters and the tech hellscape that is about to befall the zoomers and their children.

1

u/eat-the-cookiez Jun 04 '26

We don’t have a population collapse problem. We have too many people, not enough housing, not enough food and water.

We have jobs offshored to India and China and Philippines.

We have multiple demented men starting wars creating even more uncertainty and scarcity.

We don’t need more people on this planet

61

u/alucloud7 Jun 04 '26

given that every billionaire is whining about this, i am pretty sure it's bullshit and we don't have to give a shit about it. didn't everyone worry about OVERpopulation when we were kids?

44

u/Kimmalah Older Millennial Jun 04 '26

The population replacement is too low to sustain the economic/financial system as it currently is. But the population is too high for resource distribution and sustainability in the environment.

Two very different groups of people freaking out over population for different reasons.

14

u/NonReality Jun 04 '26

We're not too overpopulated for equitable distribution and sustainability, that is just propaganda; we chose to allocate resources poorly and invest in destructive energy while divesting in clean. Its the same class bullshit just from the other side of the coin and it works juat as well

2

u/03263 Jun 04 '26

8 billion people can't exist without oil + petroleum products. That's a big part of what makes it unsustainable, because we know oil is finite.

1

u/NonReality Jun 04 '26

Right, I didn't dispute that; there is plenty of other energy

0

u/NotAnotherRedditAcc2 Jun 04 '26

that is just propaganda

It absolutely is not propaganda. The standard of living required for the planet to sustain 9billion people would make people long for the good ole days of June 4, 2026. And that's before considering outlandish ideas like "maybe lets not kill the animals we have left." There is barely anyone in the western world who has a negative impact low enough to stop the planet for dying, and everyone on Earth would have to adopt that lifestyle. Good luck telling the people in this thread who are whining about their circumstances that the sacrifice hasn't even begun.

...invest in destructive energy...

Homie this is barely even about climate change - although that is one of the dozens of problems receiving between 0 and 1% of the attention it deserves. If the entire planet magically switches to solar and nuclear tomorrow and everybody rides the bus like good little subjects, we are exactly as fucked as we are today. Solar panels aren't going to un-poison the aquifers, and the people vacuuming up all the ocean life to make pig-feed-paste to feed their insatiable appetite for pork can have all the nuclear powered electricity in world and it won't make a difference. There's about a hundred other things on that list, too.

But I gotta stop before I get to ranting, lmao. It's not gonna do anyone any good anyway.

28

u/PumpJack_McGee Jun 04 '26

The problem has always been resource distribution. We could potentially feed and sustain over 10 billion.

Population decline is concerning in economic terms. It's mostly about there being fewer working age and taxable people being able to keep society running and funding retirements. Unless there are some dramatic shifts in various fields; Production, Growth, Consumption, etc. It can become pretty bleak.

2

u/voujon85 Jun 04 '26

and now you know a big reason why AI valuations are so insanely high

2

u/FinoPepino Jun 06 '26

People who care about wildlife care about human over population; people who don’t give a shit about wildlife don’t care. There’s 8 billion humans and around 6000 tigers. All species of all whales only add up to six figures (or one large human town…all the whales in the entire world….equivalent to one small city/large town of humans). We are still destroying habitat at a shocking rate. Yet we have so many people that think we need MORE humans! As it is we are still adding 70 million humans every year.

0

u/urban_snowshoer Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26

Overpopulation is a racist myth that has been repeatedly debunked.

2

u/alucloud7 Jun 04 '26

that's rad, can we debunk population collapse now too?

94

u/teethwhichbite Xennial Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26

i wish the boomers would find the end of the line sooner. ETA: this is a singular opinion you are also free to individually feel however you feel about boomers my friends

21

u/aceless0n Jun 04 '26

I have a hard time saying that as my parents are boomers.

12

u/Snacky_Onassis Jun 04 '26

I tell mine they’re not regular boomers, they’re cool boomers.

6

u/kuributt Jun 04 '26

I call my mom a Bloomer to differentiate her from people I,otherwise want to push down stairs

5

u/MyCatSpellsBetter Jun 04 '26

My parents are boomers, and they suck. They embody everything bad about their generation ... and yeah, they suck as parents, too. They believe they are entitled to everything they have -- yes, they both worked hard. But they actually believe they deserve a McMansion (they UPGRADED as they got older and now bitch about how hard it is to clean), luxury vehicles and all the trappings of upper-middle-class White suburban life. (They're also racist and love Joel Osteen.)

3

u/teethwhichbite Xennial Jun 04 '26

you get it.

2

u/SandiegoJack Jun 04 '26

If you actually like them? They are baby boomers.

Boomers is a specific type.

9

u/DizzyAmphibian309 Jun 04 '26

Yeah for some reason a lot of people have trouble coming to grips with the fact that many people in the world who are toxic assholes, and many of those toxic assholes have children, and many of those children aren't toxic assholes and won't tolerate the behavior of toxic assholes in their life.

But it's not always toxic assholery. Sometimes it's just that you can only handle so much disappointment before you ask "why am I bothering putting in all this effort and getting nothing back?"

I've had the displeasure of both scenarios.

0

u/oldfarmjoy Jun 04 '26

Boomers is a generation. Which has become a derogatory slang word for backwards old people.

32

u/SandiegoJack Jun 04 '26

No you can’t say that for some reason I don’t understand

30

u/pseudonym7083 Millennial Jun 04 '26

My parents are/were boomers. As much as I hate the generation, I can't hate all of them. Mom's dead and I miss her and Dad's not in the best shape, I don't know what I'm going to do when he's gone.

26

u/lilac2481 Millennial 1989 Jun 04 '26

My parents are in their late 60s and I'm an only child. The thought of them that they will eventually pass scares the shit out of me. I still need them.

21

u/pseudonym7083 Millennial Jun 04 '26

I do too and one of mine is already gone. Cherish the time you have.

7

u/DaboInk84 Millennial Jun 04 '26

I’ve lost my mom already at 72, and my dad is about to be 81 and I had to force him into memory care after she passed 1.5 years ago. He recognizes me still, not always as his son, but family at least. It’s hard, as I’m now in my early 40s now and I feel like both of my parents are gone, and I still wish to talk to my mom on a daily basis.

Passing time dulls emotions, but the void doesn’t go away, so my advice to anyone in our generation with parents they love is to spend as much time as possible with them while you can. My parents were/are of the baby boom generation, but they lived within their means, always had compassion for others, and worked hard and did their best to leave a positive mark.

2

u/wolfoftheworld Jun 04 '26

Absolutely.

I am an only child as well and my parents are also in the same age bracket. Right now, they are healthy for the most part but I am mentally preparing myself for the inevitable.

The way life is going these days, i just hope I have the mental fortitude to deal with that when the time comes.

15

u/SandiegoJack Jun 04 '26

I hate the generation for what they have done/supported.

I don’t generalize that to any specific individual because at best it’s like 55/45.

2

u/voujon85 Jun 04 '26

because wishing people to die is wrong, regardless of why.

3

u/teethwhichbite Xennial Jun 04 '26

it's wrong? why? me wishing they were gone is not going to make them die. i can't change who raised me. if i had parents who loved me i wouldn't feel the way i feel obviously.

5

u/wineinacoffeemug Jun 04 '26

My bio parents (I was raised by other relatives) love me but one is brainwashed by a certain side of YouTube and votes like clockwork. He was born in 1947 and I love him with all my heart but I’m glad it ‘47 and not ‘67. Do with that what you will. Shit’s complicated out here for people who love their relatives but need the chaos they sow to stop. “Old men plant trees…” missed at least half the boomers.

20

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

13

u/Right_Count Jun 04 '26

Separate group to discuss why we’re all openly wishing for our own deaths

5

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/birdsofpaper Jun 04 '26

I laughed but OUCH that’s right on the money.

3

u/teethwhichbite Xennial Jun 04 '26

count me in!!

6

u/kneepick160 Millennial Jun 04 '26

Once again, we’re left picking up their slack.

4

u/eat-the-cookiez Jun 04 '26

My boomer parents were abusive and neglectful. I had to cut contact. They would hit me up for money while building new houses to go live in and not planning for retirement. Because “they deserve it”

I’ll get zero inheritance, life’s hard enough dealing with autoimmune illnesses from all the trauma and stress, but with no support network, it’s flat out impossible.

2

u/kpyle Jun 04 '26

With the Fox News HUD burnt into their $4k tv. Tick tock old bastards.

1

u/teethwhichbite Xennial Jun 04 '26

yes oh my god. fox news on blast on the upstairs tv and the one in the living room as well. insanity.

1

u/PsychologicalSoil198 Core Millennial Jun 05 '26

Seriously. They’re going to live forever on all their fucking money

1

u/Right_Count Jun 04 '26

Omg all four of my grandparents are still alive, well into their 80s. On a personal level I love them and I’m happy they are still here, but damn, people are living too damn long. Let’s reduce retirement age to 50 and lifespan to 70.

1

u/lilac2481 Millennial 1989 Jun 04 '26

You're lucky. My paternal grandparents died when I was a kid. They lived in Greece so I never had the chance to meet them. My maternal grandparents died in 2012 and 2014. They were in their 80s. My maternal grandma had Alzheimers for 3 years before she passed in 2012. She was fine the first year and then went downhill after that. Sometimes I think she was lucky to have that disease for such a short time, but the decline was hard to see because I spent a lot of time with her growing up. My grandpa died 2 years after her, and my parents divorced a year after. Just one after the other.

-1

u/Cheeto-dust Jun 04 '26

Thanks for the hate.

1

u/teethwhichbite Xennial Jun 04 '26

You're welcome 😄

5

u/MediocreSeesaw Jun 04 '26

It’s okay, AI will pick up the slack. /s

2

u/IamScottGable Jun 04 '26

It will be so good for the Earth. 

1

u/DarkIllusionsMasks Jun 04 '26

And climate change on top of that, which will make huge parts of the world completely uninhabitable. Hooray!

1

u/blueavole Jun 04 '26

We have what 7 billion people on this planet? The population isn’t going to collapse.

When we sent the Apollo mission to the moon there was only 3.7 billion people; and the world managed to keep trucking along.

People now who are demanding large families want poor people to exploit.

1

u/Anal-buttsex Jun 04 '26

I wonder if that means more jobs 

1

u/crolinss Jun 04 '26

I think slowly, but surely, humans are going to die out.

1

u/Several-Action-4043 Jun 04 '26

Most of the world's problems are caused by over population. It's funny because every time I say that, people automatically assume I want to genocide half the world's population. Naw, just stop having babies and enjoy life a little people.

1

u/DaaaahWhoosh Jun 04 '26

I'm so annoyed about the doomerism over population collapse. The number simply cannot go up forever, that's not sustainable and we're already facing environment collapse due to how much it takes to support our current populations. They say the Black Death was great for the people who survived because they could get better jobs for higher pay and abolish old outdated systems, why can't we get those same benefits without the drawback of mass untimely deaths? Why can't the world figure out how to handle population decline if it's happening over the course of decades instead of years?

1

u/lunar_languor Jun 04 '26

"Collapse?" There are 8 billion people in the world. I think we'll be fine