Its work

Working, in the way that we do, takes years off of our lives and ruins the quality of life of people in their final years too.

I mean, its a meme and the message is put across very well but, for me, an important distinction for the comments section is that wealth increases life, as much as, if not more than poverty decreases it. Its wealth specifically and not wages too. After a certain point, increased wages actually have an inverse effect on lifespan which I'm sure comes as no surprise to anyone and the reason is both self explanatory and further supports what I'm saying.

Just so its been said, wealth, in these instances, refers to capital that makes you money. More specifically, wealth gives you money from NOT from working.

The exact point at which life expectancy and QoL increases is always around the exact level of wealth and passive income someone would need to drastically lower their working hours or stop completely.

A second argument: women live longer than men. There are some biological factors for this, such as oestrogen being a vasodilator etc. However, it wasn't really enough to explain the differences we were seeing.

The thing is, this unexplained gap has started getting smaller and smaller. Now, unless there's been a fundamental change in the average womans physiology recently, only one thing has changed in our society to the extent that it could effect something like this. Its also filtering through at around the exact time it should be, were the trend to be caused work.

Nothing else reconciles all of the positions, let alone so perfectly and in one single stroke.

Edit: so many typos