Iâm a creature of habit, and I always start my days the same way, no matter what else I plan to do later. I wake up early, usually around 5 a.m., shower, shave, make a pot of coffee and then sit down in my office to browse the news channels, looking for something that might inspire a future article. This morning I was doing that, and one item caught my eye. It was a statistic â not a happy one â and it was featured on several different websites. It seems that average life expectancy here, in the United States, fell by a year and a half to the upper 70s during 2020. The figure for West Virginia is even lower, and we sit just above Missouri at No. 50 on a list of all the states. Hawaiians are said to have the longest life expectancy in the country, while in the rest of the world, Hong Kong residents and the Japanese tend to live longest.