I forget if I first heard her say the phrase when I was crawling under the trailer after our last camping trip, or when I came in tired after playing basketball with my daughter and her friends, but my wife has taken to reminding me, “You know, you’re no spring chicken.” If I remind her “40 is the new 30”, it just prompts her to remind me that I’m closer to 50 than I am 30. As someone who still feels like their 18th birthday was just a year or two ago (it’s been 23), and has the sense of humor of a 12-year-old, it’s… it’s a fun conversation.
But we say it often enough… is there any truth to the myriad sayings of “B is the new A” in regards to age? Looking at the Social Security actuarial tables, the answer seems to be a resounding yes. Comparing the probability of death at a given age, by decade, definitely shows we are aging better today than we were 70 years ago. But the specifics depend on if you have a Y chromosome or not.
The people who actually compiled all the data and put it into a usable format are over at flowingdata.com, and they put together a nice interactive chart. I’ve summarized the big round numbers below:
| Age in 2020 | Female Age in 1950 | Male Age in 1950 |
|---|---|---|
| 40 | 27 | 31 |
| 50 | 38 | 40 |
| 60 | 50 | 49 |
| 70 | 62 | 60 |
| 80 | 72 | 73 |
| 90 | 84 | 86 |
So, a 50-year-old woman today is approximately the same health as a 38-year-old woman was in 1950. But, then again, the 1950s saw doctors endorsing cigarettes and homes outfitted with the latest in decorative asbestos siding. So… are we really surprised?
While we’re apparently aging slower than we used to, we’re still finding ways to make things age faster. Big news this week was a company called Bespoken Spirits, who claim to have found a way to create barrel-aged liquor in a matter of days. The award-winning process (the company’s hooch netted eight awards in a San Francisco competition and another 10 from the American Distillery Institute) has quickly produced whiskey, rum, brandy, and tequila on par with competitor products that have spent decades in a barrel.