’Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes
The Cobbler of Preston by Christopher Bullock (1716)
https://archive.org/details/coblerofprestonf00bull/page/14/mode/2up?q=taxes
A I said in my first post, life is a journey, make of many steps down many paths.
There are only two known fixed points on the meandering path we take through life, the start and the end, birth and death.
I’m closer to the latter that the former on my journey and as each year passes, more events arise that remind me of this. I don’t fear death, my greatest fear is that I won’t be ready for it. Hopefully I have a good number of years left in me. How many? Taking a guess, I would say there are around 30 left in the tank.
However being the engineer than I am I like to know as much as possible related to the thing I’m working on, what are the facts and figures, the data, the models etc. So what do they have to say on my life expectancy?
Well it’s complicated but starting at the beginning, what does life expectancy even mean?
Per Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
“Life expectancy is a statistical measure of the average time an organism is expected to live, based on the year of its birth, its current age, and other demographic factors including sex.”
If you read the Wikipedia article you will see that it gets more complex and there are many factors that influence life expectance. I might be able to do all the calculations myself but luckily there are a few Life Expectancy Calculators on-line that I can use:
A simple one is the USA Social Security Life Expectancy Calculator
Which for me gave the following results:
Not bad, close to the 30 years I guessed above. However look at the first note, it does not take into account many of the factors that affect life expectancy!
Using another calculator at LifeExpectancy.org Inputting my data and picking excellent health give me another 2.6 years for a total of 32.3 (84.5)
Out of interest I also ran the numbers if I was a heavy smoker and got only 21.5 years! Almost 11 years less.
But we know that there are factors other that smoking that affect my life expectancy.
Here is a calculator from John Hancock that takes some more factors into account.
Inputting my data, Male, 52, Non-Smoker, 5’9″, 172 lbs, Normal BP and cholesterol, no exercise, no alcohol, no driving violations, gives me another 35 years with a projected life expectancy of 90 years!
All these are based on the US population. I couldn’t find any Irish calculators but here is a UK based one from a insurance company that also gave me 90 years.
I did find an Irish Times article that was based on UK life expectance data. Following along in my case life expectance is 81 + 4 years for genes, +2 for diet, +2 for marriage, +2 for mood for a total of 89.
So in conclusion, if I keep up a healthy lifestyle I should have another 30-38 years left on this journey. That is good to know and hopefully give me enough time that I will be ready to take that last step …
So how did you do? Was your life expectancy age in line with your expectations?
Dreams, Designs and Destinations 