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Message: [QUOTE="diggerfoot, post: 3246193, member: 1673"] You both bring up some good points, thanks for that! As for eebmg's pessimism, lowering expectations for the sake of being pleasantly surprised, one might view that as a form of optimism. Even if it is true pessimism driving the lowered expectations, that is not the same as my point of equating pessimism with realism. I should have pointed out that health adjusted life expectancy means how long we live with vibrant brain and emotional health, not simply how long we live, though it happens to be true that our average lifespan has decreased in recent years as well. Via artificial means, medical treatments or nursing homes we can live long lives, but not always with vibrant health. Direct factors influencing HALE are hormonal influences such as being positive, social and active. Diversity or population growth might have an indirect factor, but do not directly influence people as much as we are led to believe by authorities. For example, my town had a population of 1600 in the year 1800 and has a population of 1700 now. I guarantee nothing about population growth has directly affected us. However, the cultivated perception nationally of what a problem population growth and other societal issues are does impact brain health, including in this town. [/QUOTE]