An Aussie State of Mind

Part One: Living Longer

There is a question worth asking: what if living longer was less about medicine and more about how you choose to live? The statistics between Australia and the United States point squarely in that direction. Australians live, on average, five years longer than Americans. Five years. That is not a rounding error — it is a canyon, and it demands an explanation.

The easy answers are the ones the pundits reach for first: universal healthcare, lower poverty rates, better public infrastructure. These are real, and they matter. But they do not tell the whole story. Scratch beneath the surface and a more nuanced — and more personal — picture emerges. One built on choices, culture, and a philosophy of living that is quietly woven into the fabric of everyday Australian life.

The Numbers Don't Lie

Australian men live to approximately 81.5 years on average; women to around 85.5. American men, by comparison, average 76 years, with women reaching 81. Australia consistently ranks in the top five countries globally for life expectancy. The United States, despite being one of the wealthiest nations on earth and spending more per capita on healthcare than virtually any other country, ranks somewhere between 40th and 50th. Something is going wrong — and it starts long before anyone sets foot in a hospital.

Obesity is a critical piece of that puzzle. Australia's obesity rate sits at roughly 30 percent — significant, but meaningfully lower than the United States, where the figure hovers between 36 and 40 percent. Obesity drives heart disease, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, and a cascade of other conditions that shorten life and diminish its quality. The gap between these two numbers carries a measurable toll in years lived.

Moving Through Life

Australians move more. Not just in the structured, gym-membership sense — though gyms are, notably, everywhere in Australian cities and towns — but in the daily, habitual sense. Walking is a default, not an afterthought. Parks are abundant, well-maintained, and genuinely used. Hiking is not a weekend hobby reserved for the athletically inclined; it is simply something people do, across all walks of life, all ages, all fitness levels.

This is not coincidental. Australia's climate, its coastlines, its national parks and open spaces create an environment where physical activity is the path of least resistance. The culture reinforces it. Being outdoors is not a niche lifestyle choice — it is the baseline. And baseline habits, sustained over a lifetime, are what the actuarial tables ultimately measure.

The Weight of Circumstance

Those who study such things argue that some of this discrepancy can  explained by two uniquely American circumstances accelerate the death toll in ways that have no real Australian parallel. The opioid epidemic has claimed hundreds of thousands of American lives over the past two decades, gutting communities and dragging down national life expectancy figures in ways that were nearly inconceivable a generation ago. Australia has not been immune to addiction challenges, but the scale of devastation has not approached what the United States has endured.  Hopefully, recent awareness of the problem will reverse this trend in the United States. 

Gun violence is the other stark variable. The United States loses tens of thousands of lives each year to firearms — homicides, suicides, accidents. These are disproportionately younger lives, which has an outsized effect on average life expectancy calculations not seen in Australia. 

A Foundation Worth Building On

None of this is to paint Australia as a utopia or the United States as a lost cause. Both countries face genuine public health challenges. But the five-year gap in life expectancy is not mysterious. It reflects the accumulated effect of daily choices — what people eat, how much they move, the communities and systems that either support or undermine their health — playing out over a lifetime and across a population.

Part One is about how long Australians live. Part Two is about something arguably more important: how well.

Part Two: Living Better

Statistics can measure a lifespan. They cannot measure a life. They can tell you how many years a person lived — not whether those years were full ones. For that, you need something harder to quantify. You need to be there.

I have been to Australia several times, and across those visits — in Sydney and Melbourne, in Cairns and Newcastle, in rural towns and suburban streets — I have been struck by something that no table of data adequately captures. Australians do not just live longer. They live better. Their healthspan — the years of genuine vitality, engagement, and physical capability — appears to stretch further than what most Americans experience. I have seen it in the faces of older Australians. In the way they move. In the way they show up.

She'll Be Right — The Power of Optimism

There is a phrase Australians reach for when things go sideways: 'She'll be right.' It means: this is going to work out. And it is not mere denial or naivety — it is a cultural posture. A default orientation toward the belief that things will be okay, that problems are manageable, that life is fundamentally worth showing up for.

The science on optimism and health is robust and unambiguous. Optimistic people live longer, recover from illness faster, have lower rates of cardiovascular disease, and report higher quality of life at every age. Optimism is not a personality quirk — it is a health variable. And in Australia, it seems to be a shared inheritance, passed through culture the way language is passed: casually, continuously, without anyone noticing it is happening.

Americans reading this will recognize the contrast. The United States has, over the past two decades, marinated in negativity — politically, culturally, in its media diet. Anxiety, outrage, and division have become ambient. The cumulative health cost of that environment is real, even if it is rarely calculated in those terms.

Mate: Community as Medicine

Loneliness is one of the most significant public health crises in the Western world, and the United States is at its epicenter. The surgeon general has declared it an epidemic. Its effects on mortality are comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Against that backdrop, Australian community culture is not a soft, feel-good observation — it is a profound health advantage.

In every Australian city and region I have visited, I have felt what I can only describe as social density. People are present to each other. There are shops everywhere — not just commercial transactions, but relationships. People take genuine joy in owning their businesses and in patronizing the businesses of their friends and neighbors. Nobody is too busy. Nobody is in too much of a hurry.

They call each other 'mate.' That single word carries an entire philosophy. It is democratic — you say it to a stranger or a lifelong friend. It signals: you are not alone here. We are in this together. 'You reckon?' 'What are you thinking?' The language invites others in rather than shutting them out. It is the opposite of the transactional, isolated social register that increasingly defines American public life.

I have sometimes felt, walking through an Australian town, as though I had been dropped into the 1960s — not in terms of technology or progress, but in terms of the texture of daily life. A time when people knew each other, helped each other, and were genuinely interested in each other's wellbeing. That quality of social life is not nostalgia. It is medicine.

Strong Views, Soft Edges

Australians have strong political opinions — do not mistake the warmth for indifference. But those opinions do not tend to corrode the social fabric the way they have in America. A disagreement about politics does not become a declaration of moral war. People can hold different views and still call each other mate, still patronize the same shops, still show up for each other when it matters. The polarization that has made American communities brittle has not taken the same hold.

This matters for health in a direct way: social cohesion buffers stress. When your community is intact — when you feel seen, supported, and connected regardless of your views — the physiological stress load of daily life is lower. And chronic stress, as the research makes abundantly clear, is a killer.

Experiences Over Everything

There is a particular motivation I have observed driving Australians to stay fit, active, and engaged well into old age: they want to have experiences. Not things. Experiences. They want to hike the trails, swim the reefs, travel the outback, surf the breaks. And they understand — almost instinctively — that those experiences require a body capable of delivering them.

This is a fundamentally different relationship with fitness than the one that dominates American wellness culture, which can be highly aesthetics-driven or anxiety-driven. In Australia, fitness is more often purposive: I want to be able to do the things I love for as long as possible. That is a more sustainable motivation. It connects physical health to life's meaning, rather than treating the body as a separate project to be managed.

Growing Old Well

Perhaps most striking to me has been the status of older Australians. They are visible. They are active. They are respected. They are present in community life in a way that older Americans often are not. And their optimism — that national inheritance — does not appear to dim with age. The old men at the bowling club are laughing. The older women hiking the coastal paths are moving with intention and ease.

The United States has a complicated relationship with aging. There is a cultural tendency to sideline older people, to treat aging as something to be fought or concealed rather than inhabited. The result, in health terms, is often devastating: isolation, loss of purpose, accelerated decline. Australia's respect for its older generation keeps those people engaged with life. And engagement with life, it turns out, is one of the most powerful predictors of how long and how well you live.

An Aussie State of Mind

What I have tried to describe across these two pieces is not a healthcare system or a set of policy prescriptions. It is a way of being in the world. Australians live longer because they move more, eat somewhat better, and are not burdened by the particular crises of opioids and gun violence that shorten so many American lives. Those are the statistics.

But Australians live better — with more vitality, more connection, more joy, and more capacity for experience at every age — because of something less tangible and more fundamental. A state of mind. An orientation toward optimism, community, and the belief that life is meant to be lived fully, for as long as your body will carry you.

'She'll be right' is not just a phrase. It is a health strategy. And the data, quietly and consistently, agrees.

The life lesson for us is clear: We can adopt an Aussie state of mind as part of a strategy to improve our healthspan.

This essay was written by Stacey White's brother-in-law, Mark Shank, who recently returned from Australia. He was there to watch the induction of two close friends into the Australian Water Ski Hall of Fame.

Mark and Lu Ann Shank during Christmas.