Most people who die won't have a chance to say goodbye.
If you have children, I encourage you assemble an "oops, I died" kit for them, not just with legal papers, but with long goodbye letters. If they're younger, make a letter for now and a letter for when they are adults.
I also made letters for important people in my life so that my survivors can hand them out to them.
I try to update these once a year accompanied by a good bottle of wine. I have updated my ex-wife's letter several times. It gets shorter every year.
I've been trying to record a short video every year for my wife, should I pass. I read somewhere that hearing a voice is the hardest thing to remember over time. I keep them in a folder on my desktop called "In the event of my untimely demise" along with what bills need paid, who online needs to know I passed, how to get into my password manager, and approximate values of my hobby stuff.
> I try to update these once a year accompanied by a good bottle of wine. I have updated my ex-wife's letter several times. It gets shorter every year.
“The questions have been selected from 5 years of research into what people, whose parents died when young, wished that they had known. Use them as a springboard. You can select the questions you want to answer and/or add your own. Answer what you like, in the order you like. Ignore the questions you don’t like. Come back to others.”
It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round"
-"Do You Realize?" by The Flaming Lips
I suppose we all find ways to cope with mortality as much as we can, but I've become much less sentimental in this way as I've aged; I just try to hold on to less and less and enjoy the moments as I can.
Transmitting lessons learned, hopes and memories isn't for you, the now dead person, it's for your children. It's to strengthen them and hopefully guide them.
If I'm lucky I still have 30-40 years left. That sounds reasonably long for life extension technologies to be available for the general public. I don't expect immortality, I just want an extended period in which I can walk around freely and enjoy life.
(don't put this on my headstone if a bus hits me next week)
My maternal grandparents are in their mid 90s and as recently as right before the pandemic they were both entirely independent, so it's not impossible.
Part of their secret seems to be living on the fourth floor without an elevator for seventy plus years and going out on a daily basis.
I can't hope to live this long due to years of leading a sedentary lifestyle, but I invested in an apartment that's more than 64 steps above ground and on top of that has two levels, so every time need something from the kitchen I have to go down and up again to where I have my desk.
The % probability continues to grow past the distribution peak. If you have made it that long, you are still more likely to die each year you go on living.
I feel exactly the same way. But I also recognize that many many many people who have been born, lived a long life, and died, felt exactly the same way.
I used to think it was very likely that by the time I am old, "old" will be 100+. I'm not very sure of that now.
Are there any life extension technologies at all, assuming an already healthy person? The only one I'm aware of that's definitely effective is caloric restriction, and last I heard that was only proven in smaller creatures and not confirmed in humans.
Exercise extends your life. I think this would qualify since you'd be considered healthy if you exercise a moderate amount, but if you exercise more than a moderate amount, it further increases longevity.
This strikes me as very unlikely. And if something like that will be developed, it will be priced out to the stratosphere, because most people will be willing to pay whatever it takes to get the treatment.
Imagine its a treatment rather than an expensive suite of continual treatments. Your proposition seems fairly US centric wheras most places would give it away and rejoice in the savings implied by not having to pay old age related costs.
Even here why wouldn't you just force your government to make enough for everyone at cost and string up the owners front trees if they object strenuously enough?
Even something as simple as a steady supply of Tylenol could have commanded a king's ransom before analgesics became available. You are likely right that it would be prohibitively expensive at first, but such treatment would go down in price as society redirects resources away from things like Bitcoin and into the new life extension technology.
I'm hoping when I hit 80( mid 30s now), I'll be able to have my brain hooked up to the matrix or something.
Would be awesome to effectively "live" for 500 years with options to pilot androids every now and then. Moral questions aside, it wouldn't surprise me if it becomes possible to get a new body for the exceptionally rich.
Factors are of course overlapping, but you could think about what questions a life insurer would ask you, since they have money on the line and probably the best models.
Smoking is a really big one, given that it's estimate that 2/3 of life-long smokers die due to smoking and that continuing to smoke across a lifetime is estimated to reduce your life expectancy by 10 years.
I don't really know how this data is useful, especially if you're younger. Because the group is so big when you're young it brings the average down, because the average is meaningless without showing the standard deviations.
In other words this data gets more accurate as you get older and your cohort dies off.
There are better calculators that ask you questions about your wealth and lifestyle, and then use this same data as a starting point and then the answers to the questions as modifiers. Those seem far more accurate (and are closer to what actuaries use).
Honestly, the best predictor of when you might die of natural causes is your life insurance company, who only makes money if they get it right most of the time and have an incentive to have good tables!
78 seems so young to die. I suppose my family is lucky to have good longevity genes and disciplined enough to live fairly healthy lifestyles. I have 3/4 grandparents still alive and relatively healthy in the mid 90s and several great and great-great grandparents lived past 100 even at times when that was even less likely than it is today.
I do expect there's going to be some revolutionary enhancements to human longevity over the next century. Not as optimistic as Kurzweil, but perhaps the oldest old will shift from ~120 to ~150 and the median from ~78 to ~100
My father is doing poorly, and he is just around this "median" age. He has a chronic disease which somewhat contributed to him not moving around much. Largely sedentary, but not over-weight.
On the other hand, my in-laws are doing very well, into their 80's. They take walks, attend talks, stay active. They don't have any substantial diseases.
So IMO, the revolutionary enhancements will come from controlling diseases, so those with diseases do almost as well as those without.
I put it together as a kind of Stoic practice to reflect on the fact that we will all die, but also with a data scientist hat on to try to get myself to think about life expectancy as a distribution, rather than an exact number.
Silly question: If I read this correctly, your chances of death go down after ~80 years of age. Why is this? Is it because most things that will get you would have earlier or just that the population size is so low at that extreme?
It's your probability of dying at those ages. The higher ages have lower probability because most people will have already died. In other words, the probability of dying at the age of 80 is conditional on the probability of surviving to the age of 80.
"Chance to die: 1 in 952 within a year, 1.5% (1 in 66.1) within 10 years" good grief... I think it's worth me keeping those figures in mind more often. I might be less frivolous with my time, being more actively aware of those stats...
I've kind of had that in the back of my mind probably since hitting 30-ish or so (perhaps it's what they call a mid-life crisis). I've been on kind of a tear ever since but I am not sure it has allowed me Tim etc smell the roses as they say.
1 in 952? Sounds nice. I got 1 in 510! :/ (41 year-old male in Canada). My wife, who is one year older than me gets 1 in 1000. Adding the fact that most of my father's side of the family died "young" (ex: my father passed away from brain cancer that hit us all by surprise at age 66) doesn't have me feeling all warm and cozy.
But yeah, when people tell others to slow down, take their time, there is no rush ... um, no. Time is precious and short-lived. Make the most of it. Spend as much of it as possible doing things you love, and as little of it as possible on things you don't.
> But yeah, when people tell others to slow down, take their time, there is no rush ... um, no.
I my mind, you should read this from a "work smart, not hard" angle; it's not advice to waste your time. Instead, do things right and do the things that are important to you. Spending a bit more time to find the right thing to do is in nearly all cases a good move.
Readit News
If you have children, I encourage you assemble an "oops, I died" kit for them, not just with legal papers, but with long goodbye letters. If they're younger, make a letter for now and a letter for when they are adults.
I also made letters for important people in my life so that my survivors can hand them out to them.
I try to update these once a year accompanied by a good bottle of wine. I have updated my ex-wife's letter several times. It gets shorter every year.
It can be great to have something physical and re-readable from your loved ones that have passed on.
The letter or the amount of wine in the bottle?
: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/recordmenow/id987986634
“The questions have been selected from 5 years of research into what people, whose parents died when young, wished that they had known. Use them as a springboard. You can select the questions you want to answer and/or add your own. Answer what you like, in the order you like. Ignore the questions you don’t like. Come back to others.”
That everyone you know someday will die?
And instead of saying all of your goodbyes
Let them know you realize that life goes fast
It's hard to make the good things last
You realize the sun doesn't go down
It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round"
-"Do You Realize?" by The Flaming Lips
I suppose we all find ways to cope with mortality as much as we can, but I've become much less sentimental in this way as I've aged; I just try to hold on to less and less and enjoy the moments as I can.
(don't put this on my headstone if a bus hits me next week)
Part of their secret seems to be living on the fourth floor without an elevator for seventy plus years and going out on a daily basis.
I can't hope to live this long due to years of leading a sedentary lifestyle, but I invested in an apartment that's more than 64 steps above ground and on top of that has two levels, so every time need something from the kitchen I have to go down and up again to where I have my desk.
It's a probability distribution you have a certain % of probability to die each year, which grows and peaks around the distribution peak.
I used to think it was very likely that by the time I am old, "old" will be 100+. I'm not very sure of that now.
See: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/can-exercise-extend-your...
(Not sure if exercise counts as a "technology", though. Maybe exercise equipment does.)
Even here why wouldn't you just force your government to make enough for everyone at cost and string up the owners front trees if they object strenuously enough?
Would be awesome to effectively "live" for 500 years with options to pilot androids every now and then. Moral questions aside, it wouldn't surprise me if it becomes possible to get a new body for the exceptionally rich.
Smoking is a really big one, given that it's estimate that 2/3 of life-long smokers die due to smoking and that continuing to smoke across a lifetime is estimated to reduce your life expectancy by 10 years.
meanwhile in blue zones all over the world, the longest living people in the world are mostly quite poor
In other words this data gets more accurate as you get older and your cohort dies off.
There are better calculators that ask you questions about your wealth and lifestyle, and then use this same data as a starting point and then the answers to the questions as modifiers. Those seem far more accurate (and are closer to what actuaries use).
Honestly, the best predictor of when you might die of natural causes is your life insurance company, who only makes money if they get it right most of the time and have an incentive to have good tables!
I do expect there's going to be some revolutionary enhancements to human longevity over the next century. Not as optimistic as Kurzweil, but perhaps the oldest old will shift from ~120 to ~150 and the median from ~78 to ~100
On the other hand, my in-laws are doing very well, into their 80's. They take walks, attend talks, stay active. They don't have any substantial diseases.
So IMO, the revolutionary enhancements will come from controlling diseases, so those with diseases do almost as well as those without.
I put it together as a kind of Stoic practice to reflect on the fact that we will all die, but also with a data scientist hat on to try to get myself to think about life expectancy as a distribution, rather than an exact number.
But yeah, when people tell others to slow down, take their time, there is no rush ... um, no. Time is precious and short-lived. Make the most of it. Spend as much of it as possible doing things you love, and as little of it as possible on things you don't.
I my mind, you should read this from a "work smart, not hard" angle; it's not advice to waste your time. Instead, do things right and do the things that are important to you. Spending a bit more time to find the right thing to do is in nearly all cases a good move.
https://youtu.be/X-lU1SeyWew