Trippin' Through Time

It's funny, cuz 35 really wasn't ancient, it was just lucky. People didn't live shorter lives on average, they'd frequently die super-young.

It's kinda like mechanical hard drive failure rates: if a hard drive is gonna prematurely fail, it usually happens within the first two years. After the first two years, you're expected to see a reasonable lifetime with your hard drive. Even then, it's normal to expect less than a 2% early failure rate. So, if your hard drive fails early, you're one of the unlucky few.

If we were to elevate that premature failure rate to 20%, you'd see a significant drop in the average lifespan of hard drives. And if you were one of those unlucky 1 in 5 whose hard drive failed at less than 2 years, then you'd be like, "well, guess I had a bad one." But if your hard drive made it past the two-year mark, you'd be one of those other 80% of people whose hard drives should last an expected 5-7 years.

If that same hard drive then failed after 3 years, you'd be like, "shit, that's a really short time for my hard drive to last past the two-year window." And then you'd be in a newer, more exclusive category of hard drives that didn't die before 2 years, but still died at a point that would be considered young.

So, it's not like everyone died at 30, they just had really high premature failure rates. Dying at 30 was seen as a bit of an oddity.