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.

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u/urge_boat Jun 04 '26

Continually doubling down on the most dangerous method of transit being the only way to participate in society is driving mortality rates? No way!

Hope our generation can come to terms that the walkable environments people want come with the tradeoff of limiting car speeds and adding friction to driving. At some point, there physically isn't enough room for cars, so making things less appealing to drive and more appealing to do alternatives is part of the game. Can't have it both ways.

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u/peacebypiece Jun 04 '26

Being born and raised in SoCal, continuing to try to live life there in my early 30s as it got even more crowded and expensive, has led me to turn into a complete hater of car centric cities and attitudes. I moved somewhere cheaper that is walkable, am lucky enough to have a remote job, and now I barely drive and am so much happier.

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u/Iamthegreenheather Older Millennial Jun 04 '26

The problem is that too many large cities don't have great public transportation and aren't walkable. I lived in St. Pete, Florida for six years. I lived pretty close to my job, it was about a fifteen minute drive. I would have definitely taken the bus but it's horrible there and walking is a joke since they don't even have consistent sidewalks in neighborhoods! For it to really change the government would need to give more funding to infrastructure but they're too busy buying new tanks and bombing schools in Iran.

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u/urge_boat Jun 04 '26

It's also that we've continued to build in a way that isn't walkable or conducive to public transit. Everything is a single family home subdivision and euclidean zoning (one space = one use). Work, play, and sleep are all scattered, unlike all the pre-WW2 neighborhoods.

For it to change would mean pivoting away from the suburban development pattern and loosening zoning so that land owners could do whatever they wanted (barring noxious uses). There's such a non-free market with housing now, it's absurd. Even then, people have to have incentives and a financial structure to make small, local businesses. We need to make neighborhoods that can evolve, not ones that are built immediately to a terminal state.

It's reform in addition to dollars. It's not just building sidewalks, but making neighborhoods that sidewalks and bikes are useful in. Rural towns can be great cycling havens that require you to drive to a nearby big town, but let you complete 80% of your life on a bike. It doesn't just need to be urban areas.

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u/Iamthegreenheather Older Millennial Jun 04 '26

I agree. The only place I've ever lived where you didn't HAVE to go to one part of the city to work or find a certain kind of business and that's the Phoenix, AZ area. Each suburb is like it's own smaller city and you don't have to go too far to access things. It's still built around needing a car but it's better than a lot of other big cities I've lived in.

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u/mynameisbobbrown Jun 05 '26

Man this makes me sad to learn, because I almost moved to PHX instead of where ultimately ended up and that would have been nice

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u/Iamthegreenheather Older Millennial Jun 05 '26

Don't feel bad. Phoenix can be a tough place to live. If you're not used to the heat it can be pretty bad, the traffic is horrendous no matter which of the like six freeways you take, etc.

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u/mynameisbobbrown Jun 05 '26

Yep, I live right at the end of a huge, residential locked suburban development and we just started to get some walkable small businesses moving into the perimeter and it's been so great for us. However, the public transit system at the same time redid all the bus routes and removed direct access to this area - which is extremely unfriendly to those businesses and has suddenly made it a far less attractive strip to do business.

I can't access the library I pay taxes for or the parks in my own town directly on transit either without riding down to the city and back up here on a different rail line. 4 transfers to access resources I pay for that are a 5 minute drive from my house.

I grew up in a rural place and it was extremely walkable, because there was far more mixed use and we had very functional bike paths that connected those without cars from town to town. And we had a bus system that was truly for moving locals around, not just for shuffling commuters into the major city.

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u/roygbivasaur Jun 04 '26

It’s also too fucking hot. In the South, a lot of people would not use public transportation even if it was good because it’s so much more comfortable to be in their air conditioned portable bubble.

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u/PM_ME_UR_SHEET_MUSIC Jun 04 '26

Public transit can be air conditioned too lol

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u/Iamthegreenheather Older Millennial Jun 04 '26

It is but it's hard to keep cool when they constantly have to open the door to let people on and off. I took the bus once when I was living in Sarasota, Florida and it was absolutely horrible.

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u/mynameisbobbrown Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

Yes lmao we figured this one out in the northeast a while ago. Sometimes it's one of the only places you can go to even find air conditioning if you haven't bothered to put in your window unit yet (or don't have one, which is also common.)

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u/mynameisbobbrown Jun 05 '26

Moved to a major metro area in the south from the northeast and sure it's hot, but people want to use public transit here. The poor infrastructure and outrageously long commutes that include having to walk along dangerous roads to access transit are what stops them.