Twenty-Two Blank Years: The Gap Between Living Longer and Living Well
We live longer than ever. According to the latest data from the National Statistics Institute (INE, 2023), life expectancy at birth in Spain reaches 83.2 years — one of the highest in the world — with 80.2 years for men and 86.0 for women.
In Portugal, life expectancy is slightly lower, averaging 82.1 years — 78.7 for men and 85.2 for women — a figure that also reflects the success of health and social progress.
However, the latest figures from Eurostat (Healthy Life Years) reveal a gap common to both countries: Spaniards live, on average, 61.1 years in good health — 61.7 years for men and 60.6 for women — while the Portuguese enjoy 58.2 healthy years — 57.6 for men and 58.8 for women.
This difference of more than two decades between longevity and health redefines the very concept of well-being. We have conquered time, yes, but a significant part of that time is spent in conditions of frailty, dependence, or chronic illness.
Longevity, which until recently was synonymous with success, has become a new civilizational challenge: the quality of the added years is now the true measure of progress.
Success That Challenges Us
For decades, a country’s health was summarized in a single figure: life expectancy. The higher, the better. But the success of living longer has revealed a new dilemma: it is not enough to extend life if that time cannot be fully enjoyed.
The so-called “health gap” —the distance between the years we live and the years we live well— has become the true thermometer of 21st-century well-being. Spain and Portugal share this structural challenge: two long-lived societies with high-quality healthcare systems that are aging faster than their institutions can absorb.
Paradoxically, the longer a society lives, the more urgent the question of the quality of that longevity becomes. Today, the challenge is not to add years, but to ensure that each year gained is a year lived with meaning, autonomy, and social participation.
The New Frontier of Well-Being
Medical advances have managed to control the causes of death, but not always the causes of decline. We have tamed many diseases, but not frailty. The great health achievements of the 20th century allowed us to gain time; the challenge of the 21st is to fill that time with life.
To live more than 80 years and spend more than twenty with limitations is not a complete triumph. It is, in a sense, an interrupted biography. Well-being, understood as a continuum between body, mind, and environment, has become the true indicator of human development.
The well-being of the future will depend less on hospitals and more on neighborhoods, on the environment, on access to clean air, free time, and support networks. The public health of tomorrow will also be written in plural: it will be ecological, community-based, and emotional.
That is why more and more experts speak of “healthy life expectancy”: not how long we live, but how much of that time we do so with autonomy, functionality, and purpose.
The Invisible Causes of the Gap
This distance between longevity and well-being is not explained by biology alone. Living conditions also play a role: economic inequality, unhealthy environments, work-related stress, loneliness, or poor diet.
The health gap is, at its core, a social gap.
A study by the European Health and Life Expectancy Information System shows that in Spain, a person with a low level of education lives, on average, six years less than someone with higher education and spends ten more years in poor health. In Portugal, the differences are also notable: people with lower income or limited education experience nearly twice as many years of life with disability as groups with higher levels of education.
Where we are born, the jobs we hold, or the neighborhoods we age in weigh as much as our genes. Not everyone can afford to eat well, rest, or have support networks. Well-being has become a privilege that politics must restore to the sphere of rights.
That is why closing this gap is not just a medical task: it is a cultural and political challenge that demands an integrated vision of well-being.
Science, Prevention, and Purpose
The good news is that change is already underway.
Research on healthy aging is advancing toward a more predictive and personalized medicine, capable of detecting frailty before it appears. Exercise programs, adapted nutrition, and community support networks show that longevity can be active if it is cultivated.
But there is a less measurable and perhaps more decisive factor: purpose. Numerous studies in gerontology and psychology of aging agree that people who live longer and better not only take care of their bodies but also of their purpose: they maintain curiosity, social connection, and the feeling of remaining active members of their community.
That is precisely the focus of IBERLONGEVA, the major Spanish Portuguese project promoted by CENIE and co-financed by the Interreg Spain–Portugal (POCTEP) program. Through social, clinical, and biological analysis of more than a thousand people over 60 years of age, the project seeks to understand which physical, psychological, and social factors determine the distance between living longer and living better.
IBERLONGEVA is not just a scientific study: it is a shared laboratory between Spain and Portugal exploring the future of longevity as a territory of well-being, equity, and collaboration. It is a joint effort to democratize healthy longevity and transform “blank years” into time filled with purpose.
The Ethics of Time Gained
We are living through a historical paradox: humanity has conquered time, but has not yet learned to inhabit it. The additional years force us to think about what we do with them, how we organize them, and whom they benefit.
Each of those 22 “blank” years is a reminder of what we can still improve. They are not a sentence but a horizon of action.
Turning longevity into well-being is not a medical challenge but a collective responsibility: a new social contract between generations and between countries.
Because success will not be defined by living longer, but by ensuring that no one is excluded from the possibility of living well.
And projects like IBERLONGEVA remind us that the future of the Iberian Peninsula is not measured only in life expectancy but in shared healthy life expectancy.
What good is it to live longer if part of those years is filled with frailty, loneliness, or dependence?