78 is definitely not young, and various age-related health conditions develop rather abruptly with age. While your mind might be crystal clear, the rest of the daily life is far harder at 78 than say at 48.

It’s not young but it’s not extreme. The average lifespan for a man in Japan, where he lived, is 81.5 years

Many more people are living into their 90’s, and even over 100.

https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/18826/number-of-hundred-y...

Hopefully what we consider to be old changes over time. Dr Fauci is a few days from 81, for example.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci

“Old age” is likely one of those things we simply accepted and never made much of an effort to address the issues that make us old.

> The average lifespan for a man in Japan, where he lived, is 81.5 years

That includes people who died as children, teens, etc. If you reach 70, your average lifespan is much higher AFAIK.

Yes, 78 is considered old age. In fact, the US life expectancy at birth is 78.

Most of the US is obese and unhealthy as well. If we remove child deaths from ancient Roman times it wasn’t that different not accounting for infant mortality, and in Britain for males it’s 79.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...

>If one’s thirties were a decrepit old age, ancient writers and politicians don’t seem to have got the message. In the early 7th Century BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote that a man should marry “when you are not much less than 30, and not much more”. Meanwhile, ancient Rome’s ‘cursus honorum’ – the sequence of political offices that an ambitious young man would undertake – didn’t even allow a young man to stand for his first office, that of quaestor, until the age of 30 (under Emperor Augustus, this was later lowered to 25; Augustus himself died at 75). To be consul, you had to be 43 – eight years older than the US’s minimum age limit of 35 to hold a presidency.

Interesting. So what age would you consider old age and on what grounds?

I am confident a random sample of any nation on Earth would consider 78 old.

Ask them what age and they’ll tell you what age they think a 78 year old should look like (examples like on oxygen, can’t use legs, obese, completely wrinkly, no teeth, had 20 pills they need daily, basically on the verge of death).

Ask people how does this person look and they’ll often be surprised, epigenetic age matters more (obesity raises it for example) and when we think of age we don’t think years as much as “how old they look”. There are 50 year olds that show accelerated aging and 80 year olds that still look younger than their age. https://www.odditycentral.com/news/ripped-81-year-old-bodybu...

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g01016/

I will look at a person and decide how old they look.

Fascinating. Thank you for sharing.

Even in Japan life expectancy is 81.9 years for men. 78 is well within what we consider to be old age for men.

I’ve always found mean life expectancy an odd metric. Median life expectancy seems more useful to answer “how long am I expected to live?” and appears to be 3-4 years higher in the US.

Japan's life expectancy is a bit higher.

Yes, it’s 81.5 years for a man and almost 87 for a woman.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_ex...

yes, 81. i'd say 2-3 years before the average age of someone's death constitutes "old age", surprised to see this has spawned such a debate.

Lol I had the same thought. There’s times when HN feels a little like Monty Python https://youtu.be/xpAvcGcEc0k