Surprisingly, this isn’t true. It is true in the US that male life expectancy at birth is less than 80 years, but that doesn’t actually mean that more than 50% of men die before 80. The reason is because the death age is being averaged, it’s a mean not a median, and it falls off faster above 80 than below, so when you average them it’s below 80. Think about it this way: for the average age of death to be 80, you could have as many people dying at 1 year old as dying at 159 years old (80*2-1). Then the average is 80. But since nobody makes it to 159, the actual average is 1. Repeat for every pair of ages that sum to 160; only ages ~50-80 even have a counterpart between 80 and ~110, so all death under age ~50 skews the average down (and babies skew the average much faster than middle-age people). If 45% of people died at age 20 and 55% of people died at age 90, then life expectancy for someone at birth is 58.5 years, even though most people make it to age 90.
Look at the “Number of lives” column, and scroll to the 80 year olds. Notice that more than half are still alive.
On top of all this, remember that life expectancy changes as you get older. Note how the men who make it to age 50 are expected to live to age 80. Men who make it to 80 are expected to live to 88 1/2.
that drop between 85 and 95 is brutal. This is probably going to move forward soon. The boomers are really the first generation that never smoked and exercised as a lifestyle from adulthood.
The town my parents live in is full of old people (houses built/bought in the 1980s) and every time I go there the park is full of them jogging with their dogs, doing stretches, powerwalking... it looks like an antihistamine pharmaceutical commercial.
It’s right that most men die before 80, but I agree that if you get there, a high quality of life is still possible. My grandpa in his mid 80s gardens a large area and keeps bees, lives alone, and most impressively to me, fell on ice, got up, and shook it off like he was merely old, and not elderly (walked with a cane for a week after). For some, a fall like that is the beginning of the end. Otoh, his blood pressure is not really controlled, meds + diet usually but not always keep it down, so it could be over for him any unlucky day I guess. Still, hard to ask for better.
when they are healthy. Let's not exaggerate by talking about outliers. Most men die before they even reach 80.