From the day of birth, most Americans are told by society that their life should follow a certain trajectory: go to school, get a higher education, get married, start a career, and retire as soon as they are gray and old.
For many people, their life story plays out exactly like this – but people actually do it at very different speeds, or people end up hitting these milestones in different orders. Meanwhile, some Americans deviate from the typical path altogether, forging their own unique stories.
Charting Life Events
Interestingly, all of these landmark life events can be viewed through the lens of demographics, and today’s charts from Overflow Data help to tell this tale. In the below charts, we’ll look at education, employment, and marital status all visualized based on a spectrum of age.
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The end result? You’ll see when people hit certain landmarks such as graduating from college, getting married, or getting a job. You’ll also see an alternate perspective as well, such as the points in time where millions of people are outside of the workforce, or when divorce rates spike.
Getting an Education
The below chart shows the American population by age, sorted by the level of education attained.
Getting a Job
Next, here is the U.S. population by age, sorted by status in the labor force.
Getting Married
The below chart shows the American population by age, sorted by marital status.
Even though each person charts their own unique course in life, it is interesting to look at the data in aggregate as well.
From these three charts we can see when most major life events occur, and they help to paint an even bigger picture of the lives of the 323 million people in the U.S. population.
I ran into a major life event two weeks ago- my SO was diagnosed with cancer. Age 52. Squamous cell carcinoma, in the throat. Some metastasis into the body. This is common in smokers but he’s never smoked. This is considered to be one of the more treatable forms but it’s been really hard. He went in for a chemo port and GI tube Monday and was hospitalized overnight with pain, and was discharged Tuesday. He didn’t eat for two days and very little for two more but finally got his appetite back last night. Good thing I’m a good cook. Btw, if your woman tells you to go to the doctor-F*ING GO.
My SO had cancer in one breast – multiple sites, but localized in just one breast when she finally decided to get it treated. It took ME telling her “I think your nipple is winking at me” to get her off the dime – she had noticed it earlier, delayed for some reason (hoping it would go away? No idea) and instead of a “lumpectomy” they had to take the whole thing off. Moral: don’t wait.
Surgery, chemo, radiation, she got the lot – and between the cancer and the treatments, a latent condition called scleroderma woke up and gave her more hell. She’s been cancer-free for five years now, and we’re all glad she is – but she’s already told me if it ever came back she’s have a hard time deciding whether to treat it or not.
Btw – if you spot a medical condition, don’t wait for your SO to find it before you get treatment – if they’re unobservant enough, you might not make it.
Same here. He started snoring which he never did before and sounded like he was hacking up a lung every morning. I kept telling him to go see a doctor and he kept telling me it was ‘just an infection’. Well, if you’ve had an infection for two weeks and it’s not getting better it’s STILL time to go to the doctor and get some antibiotics. Turns out it was the growth behind his tonsils, pushing them out making it feel like there was something in his throat when there wasn’t. Yeah, he’s getting chemo and radiation too. There’s a spot on his pelvis they found in the full body scan, I think if he’d have waited much longer it would have morphed into bone or marrow cancer. I hope it goes away and doesn’t come back.
Hey, I just saw this. I think the guys here need to see it too. This is EXACTLY what the SO has: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cancer/hpv-related-cancers-epidemic-men-report-finds-n605546
“There is an epidemic of HPV related cancers in men, specifically those of the tonsil and the back of the tongue,”
A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that HPV infection raises the chances of throat, mouth or tongue cancer by at least sevenfold. Experts predict that throat cancer will beat out cervical cancer as the most common HPV-related cancer by 2020.