What Life Expectancy Really Meant in the 1600s

Logosofia no Dia a Dia · Sep 10, 2026 · 37m

Life expectancy at birth of 35 sounds like a world where everyone dropped dead in their thirties. It isn't. That number is dragged down by catastrophic infant mortality, and it tells us almost nothing about how long a 37-year-old could actually expect to live. This episode unpacks the arithmetic of period life tables, the surprising European marriage pattern, and why "retirement" didn't exist as a life stage until the twentieth century. Along the way: why the wise elder archetype was a scarcity premium, and what a thirty-seven-year-old was actually doing in a seventeenth-century English…