Teenagers tend to wildly overestimate the odds of dying young, and teenagers who think they’ll be dead before age 35 are far more likely to abuse drugs, attempt suicide, get arrested, or contract HIV. Scientists have known for quite a while that teenagers tend to think that an early death is much more likely than the infinitesimally small risk it really is. What’s recently been discovered, and is intriguing for teens and the people who love them, is that there seems to be a connection between having a fatalistic take on life and behaving in ways that actually make it more likely that you will die-or at least be sick and miserable-instead of blossoming into a healthy young adult. Here’s the back story: When 20,745 teenagers in grades 7 to 12 were asked about their chances of living to age 35, about 15 percent of them said there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that they would not make it. In truth, the odds of dying that young are almost vanishingly small. Interestingly, it seems that death is uniquely confounding as a risk, because teenagers aren’t off base when guessing their chances of other life-changing events, including getting pregnant, […]