If you have got this far through 2016 without thinking about living and dying, it seems safe to assume that you don’t read much and you definitely won’t be reading this (unless maybe by some spooky coincidence I peg out on the long walk I am about to set off on, and there is a macabre interest in the serendipity of my last thoughts. In 2016, nothing can surprise). For the rest of us, the year’s slowly unfurling scroll of the dead, and above all of the dead too young, has been a stop-start conversation about the lethal genius of creativity, about good lives and, above all, avoidable deaths.

Not much united those unwittingly cast in the biopic of 2016, the Year of Dying Too Soon, subtitle: a cautionary tale about the consequences of prolonged substance abuse, but I am willing to bet my walking boots that most of them had one thing in common. Despite its solipsistic appeal, not one would ever have taken the trouble to fill in Public Health England’s healthy lifestyle questionnaire.

There are several reasons for this confident assertion, but one is acknowledged in the way the One You questionnaire, titled, “How are you?” – there’s a hint there – tries to sneak round the great big dilemma that usually sabotages even the least ambitious of New Year resolutions. That might be called the “why should I stop doing something that makes me feel good now just because it might make me ill (defined in a very broad not-well kind of way) sometime much, much later on in my life” dilemma.

Everyone has a chain-smoking aunt who lived until she was 90, and some of us have hard-drinking rellies who kept at it for as long as they could get to the shops; and we all know of individual tragedies, of people who ran marathons and never deviated from a life of sober moderation and still got carried off by a lethal and incurable cancer at a cruelly youthful age.

The only certainty in life is death. When and how you die can (but doesn’t necessarily) indicate how well you lived; that makes it a political concern, though not half as much of a concern as what the process of our dying is going to cost the survivors who are paying for the NHS.

Public Health England (PHE) – an outfit whose admirable purpose is, well, encouraging public health – tries to weasel round this with a cheery note of positivity that hints at a degree of self-awareness. It knows that the people visiting its site and working through its questionnaire are theirs already. Because presumably – just guessing here – the people it most needs to reach are the people who don’t think about their health and are much less troubled by the possible link between their lifestyle choices and their future wellbeing than the moment they are in. I can say this confidently because it is a feeling I strongly identify with.

Poor old PHE. There it stands in all its gleaming white-tiled purpose, about as relevant as a clean, scrubbed public convenience standing among the fast-food joints and the cut-price booze outlets, a beacon of community values in a world that has been modelled to pee up against a lamp-post.

PHE, like its sister organisations elsewhere in the UK, is the party pooper in a world where no one wants to deny that the party’s the thing. But that’s only the most obvious of its problems. Like an economics faculty at a university, it is an expert in a very uncertain world of expertise. It can map probabilities, it can trace cause and effect, it can make big predictions. But it cannot tie them with any degree of accurate particularity to you or me. Nor (and there’s a hint of this in the survey too) can it disentangle lifestyle from much more nebulous aspects of health, like why do you want to be healthy and who do you want to be healthy for.

It is working in a world where physical wellbeing is (and we’re talking big picture stuff here) the product of economic wellbeing, where better-off people lead healthier lives and live years longer enjoying them.

It’s to escape the impact of the stonking great class divide on the national health that PHE has come up with its eye-widening assertion that 80% of middle aged people are living bad lives: they are obese (a condition that is highly visible and quite closely associated with poverty) or guilty of the invisible sins of the better-off – a failure to exercise, or drinking too much alcohol. Oh, sorry, drinking alcohol at all.

It is challenging us all to do that thing that almost none of 2016’s scroll of lost talent ever did. Except perhaps for a few, like Carrie Fisher, one of the greatest and surely almost the last name to be engraved on the scroll of the dead-too-soon. In her semi-autobiographical novel, Postcards from the Edge, she wrote about realising she was a drug addict, and that she would have to give up: “From here on out, there’s just reality. I think that’s what maturity is: a stoic response to endless reality.” Fisher lived that maturity with lacerating savagery, just as we all must, whether we give up our pleasures or not.