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?
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Actuarial Tables Are Evil
ReplyDeleteIf you have nothing to do but watch the calendar, you won’t necessarily live for a long time, but it will sure seem that way. Stop that and get a life, literally.
The longer you live the longer you will live, because of advances in health and medicine. Soon the rate of increase in life expectancy will outpace our aging. Wait until stem cell therapy kicks in. That’s when they will have to start killing us to stop us from outpacing our Medicare budget. And someone will have to decide what is more important, money or life? Sounds simple?
The white light at the end of the tunnel people see in their near death experiences is only the sensory experience of the brain dying. I’ve had general anesthesia and time just stops cold. I can’t see any reason why death would any different, except that you don’t wake up at the end of the operation.
People on Okinawa love and have sex in their 90’s and as a result are said by researchers to live longer and more active lives than anywhere in the world. That’s because they are too busy having fun to notice the passage of time.
The oldest person in the world was 122 years old when she died. Nobody knows when your number’s up. Don’t waste your time waiting at a station for a bus that isn’t coming.
Actuarial tables are evil because they make you think you can predict something that nobody can predict. You can worry yourself to death about dying. Don’t do it.
Age is relative. Probaby ants, dogs and birds live as long as humans, in their racing biological time clocks. Someone had the bright idea recently to slow down bird twitters with a fast tape recorder and found that there is a lot of information hidden in each chirp.
We are all cheating Mother Nature every day. Living naturally? Phooey! Mother Nature is not benign! Once we have fulfilled our biological duty of passing on our DNA and raising our children and grandchildren, Nature just wants us DEAD! We are just in the way and messing things up for our future progeny by not making room for others. There is no further evolutionary advantage to our existence. To make this happen, I believe scientists will find that Nature programs our bodies with a hormonal ticking biological fuse, that slowly and purposely destroys us after a certain period of time. Our bodies don’t just wear out, they are programmed to fail. It’s Nature’s answer to planned obsolescence. My advice is to cheat with the many anti-aging strategies available today.
We are fooling Mother Nature by creating another evolutionary pathway of living a long life, making ourselves useful by touching the lives of others and leaving our influence for posterity, creating a parallel path to existence.
Time is just events. No events, no time. It just stops. You can't measure it without events, so it just does not exist. Whatever you can't measure doesn't exist.
Relax.
Oh, and Happy Birthday, David! This year the kids and I are not there to bake you another cake and celebrate it with you again this year, but with them grown and us all in different places this year, we just have to send you our Happy Birthday wishes via internet. At least many children are free of government abuse thanks to the hard work and many sacrifices you have made - and that is the wonderfulness we can all be thankful for as we look forward to another year of finding all the fun life can offer.
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