We Live Longer, But We Live Sicker

We have gained years. Sometimes entire decades. Thanks to scientific advances, more precise treatments, and systematic screenings, life expectancy has steadily risen. The demographic curves show it clearly: we are pushing death further back, generation after generation. This is an undeniable victory for modern medicine.

Yet, upon closer inspection, this victory has a bittersweet taste.

While the statistics celebrate longevity, everyday life tells a different story. A story of bodies that endure but tire more quickly. Of dull aches that settle in without warning. Of treatments that become lifelong companions rather than temporary fixes. We no longer die as young, that’s true. But we often live accompanied by vulnerabilities that we learn to manage, day by day.

This is not about denigrating medical progress—it saves lives, extends existence, alleviates real suffering. It is about taking a clear-eyed look at what this longevity costs us, not in money, but in the quality of our presence in the world.

In the past, illness was often a sudden event: it struck, disrupted, then passed or carried away. Today, it tends to become chronic. We no longer always cure; we stabilize, we balance, we monitor. The patient no longer passes through the healthcare system: they become a resident, with regular appointments, annual check-ups, dosage adjustments.

Each morning, many people open their pill organizers like checking their diary. Test results become familiar landmarks. The body is no longer merely experienced; it is monitored, quantified, compared to standards. And because we measure more, we detect more. A slight variation here, a slightly elevated marker there. Nothing serious, but something to keep an eye on. Perfect health seems to recede endlessly, like a horizon.

One might dismiss this with a wave of the hand: it’s the price of progress, the toll to pay for living longer. But the question remains: what is the point of gaining time if a significant part of that time is spent maintaining one’s own fragility?

Medicine excels at staving off death. It knows how to resuscitate, operate, contain diseases that were once fatal. It is less equipped to deal with diffuse ailments, exhaustion without obvious organic cause, that persistent feeling of not being quite well without being truly ill. In this gray area, the patient can feel lost, and the doctor sometimes at a loss for words.

We have redrawn the boundaries of the normal. What was once seen as the vicissitudes of age or daily life now becomes suspect, medicalized. Prolonged weariness is no longer just fatigue; it can become a syndrome. Passing sadness is no longer just a mood; it can become a disorder. Naming helps, of course. But labeling also confines, integrating the individual into a framework that doesn’t always leave room for their uniqueness.

Prevention, meanwhile, often remains a pious wish. We are urged to eat better, move more, manage stress. As if it all depended on personal discipline, while the pace of life, professional pressures, and social inequalities weigh heavily. Medicine then repairs the consequences of what society produces upstream, without being able to address the root causes.

Contemporary fatigue may be the most telling sign of our era. Not the kind that vanishes after a good night’s sleep, but the kind that lingers despite reassuring tests. It reveals the limits of an almost exclusively biological approach to health.

Mental health, too, is increasingly part of the public debate. And rightly so: if so many minds are faltering, it’s not just a matter of individual resilience. It’s the collective frameworks that are cracking—precariousness, isolation, constant pressure. Here again, medicine offers tools to cope, to soothe. But it cannot, on its own, restore connection or meaning.

We are thus heading toward a strange society: a society of long-lived people under permanent medical surveillance, where we fear the slightest bodily alert, where we are protected from premature death but rarely fully at peace with ourselves.

This observation does not call for rejecting medicine. It calls for broadening our perspective. To acknowledge that it cannot do everything. That true health is not merely the absence of disease, but the ability to live fully, with energy and serenity.

We have learned to add years to life.

The real challenge now is to add life to those years.

And no pill can do that for us.

JLP