this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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You're 50 years old?!! .... Wow! ... are you some kind of wizard or something? What spell did you cast or what magic did you use to live so long? My father, grandfather and all their siblings all died at 25 and I'm only 16 and half of all my children already died before their first year.
Low average life expectancy doesn't mean you can't get old. If you survive the first few years of childhood, you have a decent chance of getting reasonably old. The average is being pulled down by high child mortality.
Both are true - half of all children dying before age 10 in some pre-modern societies, for example, really drives the average life expectancy down.
On the other hand, people who made it to adulthood did die much younger than we did on average - in places, as low as one's 30s is the average; more often, 40s or 50s. Still comparatively young. You'll not know your grandchildren for more than a handful of years.
These are still averages. Just because the average person dies in their 30s or 40s, you wouldn't be called a wizard because you lived to 50 or higher. It wasn't as common to get old as it is today but there were definitely people living into their 60s, 70s or even higher.
I remember reading a passage from Pliny the Younger, I think, in which he expresses surprise over the good health of a particular mountain town. It was so good, he noted, that some people even had living grandfathers!