Dying Young in Medieval Europe? I Wouldn't Count on It

When it comes to medieval Europe, we often think that life was short, brutal and if the plague didn’t get you then the battle on the field over yonder next week probably would. 

This dark and brutal story has been drilled into us as the default narrative about life in the middle ages. We assume that everybody was dropping dead in their twenties, and that living a long life was an anomaly, something only achievable in the modern world.

But what if that story was…wrong?

The Danger of Bad Maths

It’s easy to put blind faith in numbers. Large datasets give us a sense of certainty and we can be confident but monumentally wrong about the statistics we draw from it. By taking data at face value we begin assuming that 1 x 2 = 2, but in marketing that is rarely the case. When we focus too much on the data before us, we forget about wider contexts it has been drawn from.

Take life expectancy: we see numbers like 30 years and assume everyone died young. But this is a classic example of mistaking an average for an individual reality. Life expectancy is an aggregate figure, heavily influenced by high infant mortality. When we ignore individual life spans and look at life expectancy as a whole, we take a range of data that reflects a huge variety of people with different behaviours, health conditions and lifestyles. Lump them all together and we get our answer, albeit the wrong one.

Data can guide decisions, but if incomplete or misunderstood, it can lead us astrat - prompting us to focus on efficiency, while neglecting effectiveness. Emotions, behaviours, and environmental factors often escape easy measurement but play a critical role. 

So while many in medieval times faced grim odds, remember that statistics alone don't tell the whole story. Just like in business, there's always more beneath the surface.