Poets live for 7 years less writers.
A new study by scientists on the relationship between profession and life expectancy has just appeared in the journal “advances in gerontology”.
In recent years, a growing interest is the data about the signs of accelerated aging of the representatives of different professions, – says Gennadiy Zharinov. – Okay, truck drivers, sailors long voyage, the liquidators of the Chernobyl accident is associated with the hazards of the profession. On the other hand, there is evidence of greater longevity of persons with a high socio-economic status, those of Nobel laureates, members of national academies of Sciences.
My colleague and I decided to see how things are going at the persons professionally engaged in literary work in Russia and abroad from the XIII century to our days. In Russian, the English-language Wikipedia, other sources have collected data on 26 679 (22 028 and men, 4651 women). Divided them into three categories. “Pure” poets (e.g., Blok, Mayakovsky), “clean” writers (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky) and those who wrote poetry and prose (Pushkin, Lermontov). Passed through a special computer program. And got a curious result.
Poets live on average 7.4 years less than prose writers. And poet – 8.6 years less than women writers. Writers of both sexes often live to be 90 and 100 years. While among the poets and poetesses centenarians are rare.
Analysis of causes of death has shown that poets are 2.1 times more often writers are dying from accidents, killings, 1.6 times commit suicide. The same pattern is observed among the weaker sex. Poets killed in 2.9 times more often than women writers. They are 1.7 times more likely to die from accidents, 2.1 times more of them suicides.
Tellingly, the poets of both sexes, writing and prose, in all cases occupy an intermediate position.
