
Years You Have Left to Live, Probably - ingve
http://flowingdata.com/2015/09/23/years-you-have-left-to-live-probably/
======
lordnacho
The nature of the curve, with virtually no chance of death until about 65,
with a strong dropoff after, should give rise to a fair bit of reflection.

I'm the same as the author, a 34 year old male. For me, chances are pretty
concentrated on me living a good few decades more. Which is ok, I can plan for
that. I'll need a house to live in for the next 30 years, changing careers
could be done, etc. I'm pretty unlikely to die in the next couple of decades,
so hopefully I'll see my kids go to college. Chances of dying earlier are so
low I can basically ignore them.

It also makes me sad about my high school classmate who passed away at 29. Set
the marker to 18 and you have to wait quite a while before one of the
simulations ends at 29 or earlier.

For someone older, there's an interesting issue. Say I put in my father's age,
71. There's a 1/3 chance of not making it to 81. But then there's also a 20%
chance of making it past 91. What do you do about that? You can't spend all
your money now. But you can't not spend it, either. Should you wait until next
year to see your old friends? The likelihood is flattened out, which makes it
quite hard to decide things.

~~~
jbapple
> There's a 1/3 chance of not making it to 81. But then there's also a 20%
> chance of making it past 91. What do you do about that? You can't spend all
> your money now. But you can't not spend it, either.

Pensions and annuities, unlike private retirement savings in stocks and bonds,
spread this risk out among many people. Your father could get about $650 per
month guaranteed for life for every $100,000 he puts in an annuity today.

~~~
lordnacho
That insures you against the long tail of living too long, yes. But if you
knew you had exactly 5 years with 99% probability, you wouldn't do that,
right?

Also plenty of things are not purely financial. How will you know if this is
the last opportunity to see an old friend? As a 34 year old there are plenty
of friends I put off catching up with because it will happen someday. As a 71
year old?

------
Jonovono
I made this 'mori clock' awhile back (used to have it at a url):
[https://s3.amazonaws.com/mori-
app.com/index.html](https://s3.amazonaws.com/mori-app.com/index.html)

It shows your life in blocks of weeks, up till your 80.

Edit: I bought the domain back :)
[http://moriclock.com/](http://moriclock.com/) (might still be propagating)

~~~
daw___
This somehow cheered me up. It showed it to me that the blocks of weeks that I
felt great make up a huge chunk of life -- thank you!

~~~
fdanconia
I wish you many more continued blocks of happiness mate!

------
kitd
A bit OT, but when I was programming actuarial software, with access to the
mortality tables, I was interested to learn that most people need to get to
the age of 105 or so before the chance of them making their next birthday is
less than 50/50.

------
pedalpete
Nice UX, but the probability is probably wrong.

I am in my 40s, so I'll give the current life expectancy stats about a 50%
chance of being valid by the time I reach the age to die.

But somebody who is 10 today, will likely have a life expectancy much longer
than the 80 yeas. The entire curve will be pushed out. So for that person, I'd
guess the probability of this being correct is closer to 10%.

~~~
peteretep

        > But somebody who is 10 today, will likely have a life
        > expectancy much longer than the 80 years
    

Turns out there's a _highly_ developed and mature prediction market for this
called life insurance, and they disagree with your assessment.

~~~
reasonattlm
An industry that will be destroyed or bailed out when there is a large upward
discontinuity in life expectancy trends thanks to advances in medicine. There
is a very big change going on in medical research at the moment, shifting from
not trying to treat aging as a medical condition to actually treating aging
and its causes. The difference in outcomes will be night and day; some
relevant technologies are transferring out of the lab and into startups even
now. E.g. Gensight in France, Pentraxin Therapeutics Ltd in the UK, Oison
Biotech and Human Rejuvenation Technologies in the US.

Anyway, pensions and life insurance will most likely be bailed out when the
crash comes, and the expectation of this socialization of losses might explain
some of what is observed there in the sense that they are not responding
aggressively to the actuarial community's ever more strident warnings on the
uncertainty of their projections. Also people are not particularly rational in
their expectations about aging - see this for example, a survey of the
actuaries who are the same time as warning that life expectancy predictions
are increasingly uncertain due to medical advances in the works, still base
their future expectations on what happened to their grandparents:

[https://www.dovepress.com/longevity-expectations-in-the-
pens...](https://www.dovepress.com/longevity-expectations-in-the-pension-fund-
insurance-and-employee-bene-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-PRBM)

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I don't think that will destroy the life insurance industry. In fact, I think
it will help them.

If I buy a life insurance policy for a 15 year old today, I pay them $X in
order to receive $Y when the insured dies. If the insured lives for 70 years,
the insurance company has 70 years to invest $X, in order to have $Y available
when the insured dies.

But if the insured lives 80 years, then the insurance company has 10 more
years to invest $X. They gain from that situation, rather than lose.

~~~
ishi
The main problem if I understand correctly is with pensions. They have 10 more
years to invest your money, but they also have to pay you for 10 more years...
so the longer you live, the less they profit. Live long enough, and they will
lose money. And if enough people live longer than expected, the insurance
company could go bankrupt.

~~~
Jtsummers
The issue with pensions is already being dealt with. Either by their absence
from many employers (US, not sure about the rest of the developed world), or
by delaying the age at which you can receive it or reducing the rate at which
you earn into it.

Social Security is an example of this,
[http://www.ssa.gov/planners/retire/agereduction.html](http://www.ssa.gov/planners/retire/agereduction.html).
This, of course, requires an act of Congress to change. But businesses aren't
so limited, new employees can be brought in on a new pension system while
grandfathering in the old ones, with few (if any) legal holdups.

------
cosmorocket
Last autumn I was involved in working on a similar web app [1] for WorldBank
which consumed its data sources.

I think it should be more accurate as they at WorldBank collect the data from
multiple sources and process it in a scientifically precise manner. You can
enter country you live in, which can make a dramatic difference.

[1] [http://population.io](http://population.io)

~~~
lucaspiller
Hearing I'm older than 46% of the worlds population is pretty interesting. I'm
only 27.

~~~
cosmorocket
If you have a look at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_ag...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_age),
you will see that the total world age median is 29.7.

------
hiergiltdiestfu
What's really depressing about this is setting the calculator to fast and to
the age of my youngest kid and watching the rare odd ball fall at ages younger
than me. It is rare, but it does fall. Probability, you heartless bitch.

------
slg
I remember reading somewhere on the internet about a person who had a
decorative bowl in their house. This bowl was full of marbles. Once a week,
they would take a marble out of the bowl and throw it away. Each marble was a
week of their life. When they started this practice, they calculated their
life expectancy and bought enough marbles for each week they were
statistically expected to live. The idea is to give you the constant reminder
that our time is limited, always running out, and shouldn't be wasted. The
older you get, the less time you have, and the fewer marbles that are left in
that bowl. If you are a typical HN reader, you likely have less than 3,000
marbles left.

~~~
StevenOtto
Chris Crawford perhaps! [http://kotaku.com/30-years-later-one-mans-still-
trying-to-fi...](http://kotaku.com/30-years-later-one-mans-still-trying-to-
fix-video-gam-1490377821)

------
Zirro
I believe that we will see significant advances in lifespan-increasing
research over the next hundred years, barring any major disasters affecting
humanity. Old models and expectations for calculating death can no longer be
relied upon.

Most of the people alive today will probably (unfortunately or fortunately,
depending on your world view) be among the last generations to die from what
we currently consider natural causes.

~~~
hydrogen18
This notion seems to be as old as humanity. It's built on some inner hope that
mortality can be outsmarted and escaped.

Back in the real world, we can't even agree as a society what level of
healthcare should be afforded to all members vs. what level you have to earn.

The greatest advancements in life extension in recent years have only added
more years of horribly low quality life. I don't want to die, but I am going
to. Why should I invest my resources to spend years suffering?

~~~
msabalau
Generally speaking, we are actually reducing the amount of time people spend
suffering, while at the same time extending peoples lives. From the 2013 NBER
working paper "Evidence for Significant Compression of Morbidity In the
Elderly U.S. Population":

"For a typical person aged 65, life expectancy increased by 0.7 years between
1992 and 2005. Disability-free life expectancy increased by 1.6 years;
disabled life expectancy fell by 0.9 years.

"The reduction in disabled life expectancy and increase in disability-free
life expectancy is true for both genders and for non-whites as well as whites.
Hence, morbidity is being compressed into the period just before death."

And, given that part of the low quality of life at end of life comes from two
thirds of people not thinking through and documenting their wishes for care,
one can improve one's personal odds by creating and advanced health care
directive. And of course, many of the things that we dislike about old age
result from chronic conditions that can be addressed through good nutrition
and exercise.

So, good news, end of life isn't as bad as you fear!

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Still, my 90-year-old friend Betty used to say "Old age is not for the timid"

------
vortico
I like this way of visualizing probability as a series of random variates of
the distribution in a timed sequence. After watching for a while, your mind
can get an intuitive notion of the probability without having to parse numbers
and functions.

~~~
netcan
It's actually a nice example of places where technology plays a real role,
especially as we accumulate a lot of these little tools. This would be a handy
little widget to have in a high school textbook.

------
0h139
The thing about this tool is it answers the following question: given your
gender and your age (and no other data about you), based on CDC data of
mortality in the US, how many more years do you have left to live?

In reality, you'd likely better be able to predict your remaining years if you
have more details about yourself (you should, unless you're Benjamin Kyle).
Are you a long-term heavy smoker, overweight like most Americans, or do you
work in a dangerous job like construction? You're more likely to live less. On
the other hand, do you have a safe job, stay physically fit, and avoid alcohol
and drugs? You're more likely to live more.

------
fredkbloggs
> And I should probably look into life insurance.

Why? What exactly is it that you think "life insurance" does? If there were a
product that would reduce the variance in remaining life length, that might be
interesting, but that's not what "life insurance" is. All it does is pay
someone else some amount of money when you die, after you pay them some
(usually increasing) amount each year while you're alive (with countless weird
financial variants for those who really like being taken to the cleaners). The
ev of every such policy is negative, as it is for all types of insurance. You
are almost certainly better off taking the money you would have spent on
premiums and investing it conservatively; that's all the insurer is going to
do with it anyway, and that way you don't have to give them a cut or worry
about them going out of business before you die.

As always, the primary exception to this rule is adverse selection: if you
know something about yourself that makes you much more likely to die soon,
isn't reflected in actuarial tables, and won't be found by a medical exam (if
required), then it may be to your designated beneficiary's advantage to buy
insurance. But a healthy 34-year-old is so unlikely to die any time soon that
they'll almost always be better off if you just stick money into some tax-
deferred account and designate a beneficiary. Which is probably what you ought
to be doing anyway, just in case you do happen to live a long time.

~~~
roryokane
The EV of all insurance policy is negative when measured in absolute dollars.
But the EV can be positive if the value of dollars to you doesn’t scale
linearly.

For example, if you have to spend $10,000 on medical bills, that might be 1
unit of disutility. But if you have to spend $100,000 on medical bills, that
might be 30 units of disutility, not 10, because you just don’t have that kind
of money and you will go bankrupt and your quality of life will go way down.
With this reasoning, health insurance might have a positive EV for utility,
even though it has a premium that gives you a negative EV for money.

This reasoning is less likely to apply to life insurance, because people are
less likely to care about what happens after they die. But for people whose
beneficiaries would suffer a lot from losing their income – perhaps they would
be evicted – life insurance can be worth it.

------
nilkn
If I've understood this correctly, the one main flaw this has is that the
probability to live to your next birthday is dependent not just on your
current age, but also the current year. In other words, if you're 30 right
now, the probability you'd need to look up is "the probability to live to my
next birthday at age 30 during year 2015". When you're 40, you'll want to look
up "the probability to live to my next birthday at age 40 during the year
2025", which could very well be different from "the probability to live to my
next birthday at age 40 during the year 2015".

Obviously, though, we don't know how this value will change in future years,
so this isn't really a fault of the chart so much as it is an unavoidable
limitation. Some sort of model could be introduced for predicting healthcare
advances, but I doubt anyone can do so reliably enough to produce a net
increase in accuracy here.

~~~
sillysaurus3
During the early 1940s, if you were a young Russian male adult, the chance of
living until 1946 was 2 in 3. Pretty strange time period. Each time you walked
down the street, you could say "live, live, die, live, die, live, die, live,
live" and be statistically correct.

It's true that a war isn't necessarily relevant

------
dest
I would have appreciated to have the distribution curve calculated, in
addition to having to wait for the animation to converge.

------
simonh
I'm turning 49 on Saturday. The number of balls I see dropping just past 50 is
a little worrying.

~~~
netcan
Did you set age to 49? If you've made it this far (well done, BTW) you're
chances of still ticking for log enough to worry about your 60s are pretty
god, >90%.

Still, the possibility of not making it another 10 years is quite a bit higher
than I am personally comfortable with, at pretty much any age. If someone has
an idea for an immortality startup, I would definitely be willing to pay the
$29 subscription. I would even seriously consider the $79 pro tier.

~~~
reasonattlm
Sign up with Alcor with payment via life insuance. Or donate to the SENS
Research Foundation, which is spinning off and seed funding relevant biotech
startups these days.

------
terrn
I think about my own death daily, as a reminder to not take for granted this
incredible opportunity of being alive in the universe. But I am still unnerved
by this graph! I'm 33, and I'm old enough to know that time passes very very
quickly. If I want to die well it is better to start preparing myself now; it
may take a long time to get square with the truth that absolutely everything
dies. 10 years from now or 1000 years from now, what difference does it make
if I can't accept that I will cease to be in this form at some point?

Any hearsay over some technology that might exist to expand our lifetimes
completely misses the point. There will never be an absolute end to death.
Even the Sun will eventually explode, and even beyond that the universe itself
will probably die in heat death. Where will we be then? At what point do we
think that we will have "lived enough"? Why do we assume that if we only live
longer that we'll somehow be more cool with being dead some day? Is there
anything in our experience that suggests we're more OK with death the older
you get?

Why talk about tomorrow - we can eat right now!

------
madelfio
If I have no known health problems, how does that change the distribution? Are
there richer datasets that include that type of breakdown?

From a different angle, if 15% of males my age will die in the next 30 years,
how many of those are foreseeable due to current circumstances vs accidents
that could happen to anyone?

------
stared
A nice visualization!

I was investigating this topic for some time and it turns out that the
mortality curve is interesting: grows exponentially in time. In some sense, we
start "aging" at the age of 6-8 y.o. (the safest age in Western countries).
Plus, there is a bump of mortality in around 20, much more pronounced for
males (accidents).

See e.g. [https://plot.ly/~PiotrMigdal/11/mortality-rate-by-age-and-
ge...](https://plot.ly/~PiotrMigdal/11/mortality-rate-by-age-and-gender-
poland-2013-data-from-statgovpl/) And more info on the exponential growth:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz%E2%80%93Makeham_law_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz%E2%80%93Makeham_law_of_mortality)

------
Florin_Andrei
Running the simulation on fast, it's like those little marbles run out of gas
after a certain limit and fall off. In my case the limit is somewhere in the
80s. After they hit that invisible barrier, very few continue to fly.

By comparison, there's a continuous trickle of marbles falling off randomly
early.

So what I take from the simulation is that there are two main components: the
random stuff that can take you out at any time, and then there's a more-or-
less fixed amount of "gas" you have - when that one is gone, it's gone.

------
webmasterraj
I have a counter that greets me on a new Chrome window that tells me how much
time I've been alive to the hundred-billionth of a second.
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/motivation/ofdgfpc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/motivation/ofdgfpchbidcgncgfpdlpclnpaemakoj?hl=en)

People find it depressing, but it tells me not to waste my (limited) time.

------
myth_buster
Could someone explain to me the necessity of the animation? A graph showing
the probability distribution for each year would have been much better IMHO.

~~~
spenczar5
I think it is to reinforce the feeling of individual lives. You watch the ball
scoot along to 38 years old and suddenly drop, and you recognize that
sometimes it just gets cut short. When presented with just the probability
distribution, it's easy to ignore the wings and focus on the mode.

------
Amorymeltzer
Great visualization! I think the balls dropping metaphor is a brilliant one
(and just heart-breaking).

From a command-line perspective, though, there's xkcd's actuary.py -
[http://blog.xkcd.com/2012/07/12/a-morbid-python-
script/](http://blog.xkcd.com/2012/07/12/a-morbid-python-script/) \- which has
some nice options.

------
cm2012
I'm 24, and I recently bought $2 million of life insurance for $80 a month
that's good for the next 10 years. I figure that's a pretty good deal. If I
die young, I want my wife to not have to worry about money.

~~~
ben010783
I don't think that's a good fit for a person in your situation. It's so
unlikely that you'll die in that period. I don't know about if you have kids,
a house, or your work situations, but I would consider lowering the the payout
and investing the rest in a retirement account. If you dropped it down to
$500,000, your wife would still be fine for years after you died. If that
freed up $40 that you could invest every month, it would result in over
$50,000 that you would have at retirement.

~~~
cm2012
I want her to be set for life though in case of a freak accident - $500k will
run out eventually.

~~~
rajivm
Yea, but a freak accident is unlikely to occur before 34. It is likely the
decade after would be more concerning where she might have to support kids,
etc. in addition to herself.

------
pm24601
I use curves like this as an anti-procrastination method.

"Hey, you have only 200 more months to live. Don't waste a month doing
something stupid."

------
mpg33
This assumes no advances in medicine though...correct?

------
jwildeboer
US only, what else ;-) I live in Germany and drink better beer and enjoy
better food :-)

------
reasonattlm
Note that life expectancy is a statistical construct, an expected outcome if
you lived through the period of technological development from a lifetime ago
to now.

But you won't. You will be living through the period of technological
development from now until an undefined future date, and we are in the early
years of a great and sweeping revolution in the capabilities of biotechnology
and medicine.

\------

The cautious majority believes that human life span will continue to increase,
but only incrementally, much as it has done for the past few decades - both
life expectancy at birth and life expectancy after 60, due to the continued
introduction of new medical technologies. (Which proceeds far more slowly than
it could, thanks to the heavy hand of the state). One faction of
epidemiologists even argues for the possibility of a dip in overall life
expectancy as present trends in obesity take their toll - to their eyes the
consequences of being overweight look set to outweigh modest gains due to
advances in medicine.

To my mind, arguing for incrementalism in any trend relating to medicine at
the present time is choosing to go against the tide. The biotechnologies that
underpin advances in medicine are going through a period of massive,
revolutionary change. While it is true that organizations such as the FDA do
pretty much everything short of shooting scientists to slow down and increase
the cost of turning research into therapies, the rapid pace of progress in the
life sciences will win through.

Allow me to put forward a historical analogy: standing in 2012 and arguing a
case for gentle future changes in life expectancy over the next few decades,
based on the past few decades, is something like standing in 1885 or so and
arguing that speed and convenience of passenger travel will steadily and
gently increase in the decades ahead. The gentleman prognosticator of the
mid-1880s could look back at steady progress in the operating speed of
railways and similar improvement in steamships throughout the 19th century. He
would be aware of the prototyping of various forms of engine that promised to
allow carriages to reliably proceed at the pace of trains, and the first frail
airships that could manage a fair pace in flight - though by no means the
equal of speed by rail.

Like our present era, however, the end of the 19th century was a time of very
rapid progress and invention in comparison to the past. In such ages trends
are broken and exceeded. Thus within twenty years of the first crudely powered
and fragile airships, heavier than air flight launched in earnest: a
revolutionary change in travel brought on by the blossoming of a completely
new branch of applied technology. By the late 1920s, the aircraft of the first
airlines consistently flew four to five times as fast as the operating speed
of trains in 1880, and new lines of travel could be set up for a fraction of
the cost of a railway. Little in the way of incrementalism there: instead a
great and sweeping improvement accomplished across a few decades and through
the introduction of a completely new approach to the problem.

This is one of many historical examples of discontinuities in gentle trends
brought about by fundamentally new technologies. Returning to the medicine of
the present day, there are any number of lines of work we could point to as
analogous to the embryonic component technologies of an aircraft in 1885. They
are still in the lab, or only being trialed, or still under development - but
they exist in great numbers. There are the SENS technologies; a range of
advanced applications of immunotherapy; targeting methodologies to safely
destroy specific cell types; organ engineering; and others. Just because we
can't see the exact shape of the emerging technologies that will be
constructed atop these foundations doesn't make them any less likely to be
created: great changes are coming down the line in medicine. The future is not
one of steady and incremental progress.

------
simonh
Because somebody has to:

[https://xkcd.com/1577/](https://xkcd.com/1577/)

------
anoplus
Oh man, I've got to find love quickly!

