American life expectancy is now at its lowest in nearly two decades
&gt; The two reports, released by the CDC on Thursday, show deaths from COVID-19 and drug overdoses, most notably synthetic opioids like fentanyl, were the primary drivers of the drop in life expectancy.<p>Not entirely surprising wrt COVID. The drug overdose deaths are a sad situation. I remember first hearing about the epidemic of ODs a couple of years back.<p>There is a bit of a common theme between this article and the other current article about the planned obsolence and inherent crappiness of most modern products. (This one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34092749" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34092749</a>).<p>I have noticed this gloomy attitude from many people my age, a sort of existential despair and belief that we sit somewhere near the end of the world as we know it. I don&#x27;t personally share this belief (maybe just out of stubborn naivete and optimism), but I do understand why people feel it. The modern media seems to love these kinds of stories, and there&#x27;s always some crisis being pushed between global warming, economic woes, and the rise of some fairly troubling and extreme candidates in American politics.<p>Not sure what my point is here, but there&#x27;s definitely a contingent of young folks (late millenial to gen-z seems to be the main demographic) who seem to have lost hope in the future. I hope we can find our way to a more hopeful collective spirit.<p>One last comment on this already rambling post: when I recently watched Apollo 11 I was quite moved by the spirit pervading the whole enterprise - this idea that we sent people to the moon with hopes for the whole world. That everyone was watching, hoping, praying for the success of the mission. That is a sort of unity that is awfully hard to find today.