Here’s the remarkable thing: Deaths from heart disease and cancer among 55- to 64-year-olds declined between 2000 and 2019. So the two leading causes of death were both declining, but the overall rate of death was still rising. Why? Because Americans in their late 50s and early 60s were suffering more deaths of despair, especially drug overdoses. From 2000, when Silents were the entirety of 55- to 64-year-olds, to 2019, when the group was all Boomers, fatal drug overdoses increased by an incredible factor of ten, fatal liver disease (often caused by alcohol abuse) by 42%, and suicide by 60%
