In 1950 the average human lifespan was 45 years old. Today it’s 73. Part of that story is the success we’ve had as a global society in reducing infant and child mortality — but there have been improvements on the other side of life as well, such that some scientists have estimated that about half of children who have been born in the past 20 years will live to at least 100 years old. And what that means is that many of us will be having the experience of not only outliving our parents, but growing to ages they never saw, and living those years without their examples.
Thomas Beller is the director of creative writing at Tulane University and the author of a recent piece in The New Yorker called "On Outscoring My Father," as well as a new book called Lost in the Game: A Book about Basketball.
