Everyone dies, but depending on which country you live in, you could die significantly sooner compared with people born in other countries. That's the takeaway from this simple but striking infographic by Omani designer Marcelo Duhalde. Looking something like the open pages of the Big Book Of Death, Duhalde's "Life Expectancy At Birth" will tell you the statistical likelihood (if not Vegas odds on when) you're going to go belly up, depending upon where you live.
Where we are born has a lot to do with how old we will be when we die. Pointing out that "life expectancy is a synthetic indicator of the living conditions, health, education, and other social dimensions of a country or territory," Duhalde chose to organize his visualization geographically, stacking the average life expectancy of countries on each continent in descending order in clusters based on landmasses.
So where are the best places to live if you want to keep kicking? In general, Europe: if you're born in Monaco in 2013, you can expect to live to 90 years old. In fact, almost half (22) of all Europe's countries have a life expectancy of more than 80 years these days. That's pretty good compared to America's life expectancy of 79, although being born in Japan (84), Macau (also 84), Australia (82) or New Zealand (81) will also give you good odds of evading the Grim Reaper for a long time.
The places where life expectancy is lowest are in Africa. If you are born in Chad or South Africa in 2013, your life expectancy is only 49 years. In fact, most countries in Central and Southern Africa have extremely low life expectancies thanks to disease, war, and poverty, with life expectancy only passing 70 years old once you start looking at countries in wealthier Mediterranean Africa.
All in all, if you were born in Europe in 2013, you have an average life expectancy of 78 years, compared to America's 75, Asia's 73, Oceania's 72 and Africa's 60. But while most of us, if asked, would probably like to live longer, keep in mind how far life expectancy has come in just a short amount of time: in just 100 years, the average life expectancy globally has more than doubled from 32 years to 71.
If that keeps up, who knows? Maybe in a few hundred years, our descendants will all practically be immortal. Won't you feel like a fool then for dying so young?