About one in six young and middle-aged adults in the United States wants to die before age 80, according to a new study.
Researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health conducted a telephone survey of more than 1,600 people aged 18-64 - here's what they found:
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- One-third hope to reach their 80s (which is close to the current average life expectancy in the United States).
- One-quarter hope to live into their 90s.
- The rest hope to reach 100 or older, with blacks more likely to say they hope to live a century or more.
"Having rather bleak expectations of what life will be like in old age seems to undermine the desire to live up to and beyond current levels of average life expectancy," the study's first author, Catherine Bowen, said in a university news release.
"People who embrace the 'better to die young' attitude may underestimate their ability to cope with negative age-related life experiences as well as to find new sources of well-being in old age," she added. Bowen is an expert on mental representations of old age and the aging process.