Between 2014 and 2017, life expectancy in the United States fell three years running.
Read that again, because the habit of skimming past numbers will cost you the point. Not growth slowing. Not a bad quarter. The length of the average American life got shorter, three years in a row, in the richest society that has ever existed, during peacetime, with no plague and no famine.
The last developed country to manage that was the Soviet Union, on its way down.
By any measure of aggregate production, this is the most productive civilisation in human history, and nothing in this essay disputes that.
The trouble is that aggregate figures answer a question almost nobody is actually asking. They tell you how much is produced. They are silent on who receives it, on how it was generated, and on whether the generating can continue.
Over a hundred thousand Americans a year now die of drug overdoses. That is more, every single year, than died in the entire Vietnam War.
Case and Deaton named this category "deaths of despair": suicide, overdose, alcoholic liver disease. Concentrated among people without a degree, in places hollowed out first by the factories leaving and then by the contempt of a class that regards their existence as slightly embarrassing.
Alongside it: a third of Americans report loneliness, and among adults under twenty-five it is over sixty per cent. The Surgeon General declared it a national epidemic in 2023, noting the health effect is roughly that of fifteen cigarettes a day. One in six adults takes a psychiatric medication. One in three teenage girls reports seriously considering suicide.
The birth rate is the lowest ever recorded and well under replacement. Marriage is down around sixty per cent since 1970. Forty per cent of children are born outside it, against five per cent in 1960.
None of those are separate problems, which is the thing I want to land.
Now look at that list again. It is not a set of unrelated social indicators. It is a single reading, taken seven different ways, of a society in which people no longer need one another and have not found anything to put in the place of that.
Loneliness is the subjective experience of it. Collapsing family formation is its demographic signature. Deaths of despair are the terminal stage.
The standard objection is that declinism is a genre, that every generation believes it is living at the end, and that the people predicting collapse have been wrong for two thousand years. Both halves are true. "People have cried wolf before" is not a finding about the wolf.
What would count as evidence is a measurable divergence between what a civilisation produces and what it does for the people inside it. That is precisely what three consecutive years of falling life expectancy at peak output is.
The numbers are not ambiguous. They are only unwelcome, and those are different things, though a civilisation in decline is precisely the sort that would confuse them.