When Your Vision and Hearing Decline with Age

If you want to feel like you’re getting old, visit an optometrist and have them tell you that in 6 to 12 months you won’t be able to read things up close and you’ll need bifocals. Here’s when your senses will decline.

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Common Age Differences, Married Couples

Through pop culture, it sometimes seems like it’s common for there to be a wide age difference between spouses. How common are the age gaps, really? These are the age differences through the lens of the 2022 five-year American Community Survey.

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Feeling Rested with Age

How much you sleep each night matters, but more importantly, it’s about the quality and if you feel rested when you wake up. This seems to shift with age as responsibilities and sleep patterns change.

The following chart shows how rested people felt, based on answers to the American Time Use Survey.

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Highest Education Level by Age

When you’re a kid, most (if not all) of the people you know who are your age are in the same grade as you. Education paths start to diverge towards the end of high school and after.

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More pets than children in Taiwan

Julia Janicki, Daisy Chung, and Joyce Chou explore Taiwan’s aging population, where in 2021, pets outnumbered children. I like the experimental views in this piece. More of this please.

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Oldest and Youngest, by State

In some states there are more kids, such as Utah, which has the youngest median age at 31 years and 4 months. In others states there are more older adults, such as Maine, which has the oldest median age at 44 and 8 months. This is based on the 2021 American Community Survey.

Of course, we can see the age breakdowns in greater detail. States aren’t uniformly young and old.

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Shifting causes of death over the decades

Saloni Dattani, for Our World in Data, used a set of heatmaps to show how causes of death changed by time (on the horizontal axis) and age (on the vertical axis) in France. Each panel represents a cause category.

The code is on GitHub, in case you want to make similar charts for your own country.

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Age shifts around the world

The world is getting older overall. For The New York Times, Lauren Leatherby broke it down by country with a set of animated frequency trails, along with charts for more demographic shifts. I like it.

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Best Possible Life More Common with Age

People scored their current life from 0 to 10, where 0 is their worst possible life and 10 is their best possible life. The older they were, the more likely they were to say they were living their best.

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Congress still getting older

For FiveThirtyEight, Geoffrey Skelley digs into the ongoing trend:

What’s behind these increasingly older Congresses? The country’s aging population as a whole is chiefly responsible, which is most apparent in the disproportionate influence the baby boomer generation has on Capitol Hill. Coupled with longer-running trends that have made it more likely for members of Congress to win reelection and stick around, this has all helped make Congress older than ever before. And the overrepresentation of boomers doesn’t just produce moments like those of the TikTok hearings — it also has real effects on the type of policies passed by the federal legislature.

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