Actuarial Table

With the deaths of Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Karl Malden and my friend Claire Burch, author and videographer, all happening in the space of a couple of weeks and then having a birthday fall around the same time, I thought I’d better check the actuarial tables at the Social Security website to find out how much time I have left.
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/table4c6.html

I want to make sure to get all the stuff done on my list before the bell rings. I realize the vast majority of folks deviate from the statistical death forecast as reflected in the social security life chart but what can I do about that? It’s the best I’ve got to work with.

The tables show unsurprisingly that women live longer than men but the gap has narrowed over the past twenty to thirty years. Men’s life expectancy has increased faster than women’s.

An infant is as likely to die in the first year of life as a man in his midfifties is likely to die within one year. In year two, the mortality rate declines precipitously.

The safest year to be alive for males is age 10 and females, age 11. The probability that a ten year old boy will die within one year is a scant 0.000096. For an eleven year old girl, the probability is 0.000106. One percent of males, however, will be dead before the age of 13 and one percent of females will die before age 20. Clearly, the early years are more deadly for boys.

Ninety-eight percent of males make it to 24 and that same percentage of females reaches age 37. Wow.

When you reach age 54, 10% of males born when you were born will be dead. For females, that happens at age 62.

At age 59, you have a 1% chance of dying within one year. Women reach the 1% threshhold at 64.

Seventy-nine percent of males make it to age 65. For females, it’s 87%.

If you make it to age 70, you have 13.30 years left to live if you are a male. For a female at that age, you have 15.69 years left.

A man has a 10% chance of dying within one year at the age of 84, the same as for a woman at age 87.

Of a statistical group of 100,000 men born in the same year, 45,986 will make it to age 80. For women, 60,540 will make it. You can see from this why social security is going broke.

Of our statistical group of 100,000 of each sex, 543 men and 1,981 women will make it to 100. At 100, a man has a 38% chance of dying within one year and a woman has a 35% chance.
　
The table is based on statistics for the year 2005 so it’s slightly dated. Since then I suspect a small shift has occurred in the direction of longer life unless it’s true that the world will end on December 21, 2012, as some say the Mayans have predicted because that's the last date shown on their famously accurate calendar. But we really don’t know the world will end that soon. Maybe the Mayans did mean to signal the precise end date but it seems just as likely that they got lazy or bored with what must have seemed a monotonous abstract exercise and simply walked off the calendar construction job to grow more maize. We’ll just have to wait and see.

I don’t have a strong opinion about what happens after death. I’m open to the idea that in the bardo state, I could make an election to follow the bright light and blend into a cosmic superconsciousness or just return to this plane of existence for an encore. On the other hand, I may have no choice at all. It could be up to some anonymous grader who will examine my life and say I’m good to go or have to return to make up some incompletes.

Another possibility is that when life ends, that’s it. Annihilation. Eternal darkness. The only way to make this acceptable is to remember that I won’t be around to witness it so it will hardly matter to me.

So I go back to this question of getting things done before my final exit. I certainly want to make sure that I’ve left my dog adequate food and water to last until my body is discovered. Before people start snooping and figuring out I'm some kind of loser, I will have wanted to take out the garbage, mop the floor, clean the toilet, cancel my magazine subscriptions and pay Chase. I definitely want to make sure I’ve visited a number of foreign countries and all fifty states. I have three states to go. They are Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin. I’ve got lots of other things on my list but I won’t bore you with them.

After consulting the tables and making appropriate corrections to account for heredity, good or bad habits, and environmental influences, you can do your own calculations and map out a to-do list for the time you have left. So what are you waiting for?