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That's a bit of a stretch. Stats suggest it's more like 5 decades for a reasonably healthy American 30yo white male today. Then consider that in your final dec
by themacguffinman 5y ago
That's a bit of a stretch. Stats suggest it's more like 5 decades for a reasonably healthy American 30yo white male today.
Then consider that in your final decade or so, your options are extremely limited because of severe mental and physical decline. 1 in 9 adults will spend one or two of their final decades in a long goodbye due to Alzheimer's alone.
But the decline starts earlier, mental speed is high until age 60. This will affect your job and career prospects, and even if it doesn't for you, employers (esp. in tech) think it will and discriminate based on age anyway (roughly ~45yo based on some articles I've read). If you're a blue collar worker, a career of hard physical labor starts to hit a wall. If you're a woman, fertility starts declining (and childbirth health risks dramatically increase) fairly early (~30) and dating desirability follows rapidly.
Those are just the terminal issues, psychologically your life path more or less calcifies as you age. There's no age cutoff but, for example, it's said that the longer you stay in corporate work, the more likely you'll stay there and the less likely you'll succeed at entrepreneurship. I'd speculate there's maybe one or two more major life pivots in a 30yo.
Most of these factors don't exactly make life unbearable, but after a fairly "young" age (around 30 I suspect) a lot of doors start closing and it only accelerates from there. Depending on what "prime" or "best" means to you in terms of life goals, realistically you have much less than 6-7 decades to exploit them. I generally disagree with this attitude of oh don't worry you have plenty of time, life is much shorter than you think.
Nevertheless, once your doors are shut, there's little use in ruminating over the missed opportunity.
- scubakid 5y agoThis condensed several of my own musings into one well-reasoned comment. Do you think there's anything ProjectionLab could/should try to do with the concept of health-span?
- themacguffinman 5y agoNot sure, maybe lifespan estimates based on current behavior could be handy. Eg are you a smoker? Are you regularly physically active? What's your race, occupation, etc? I think chronic conditions are also hard to plan for in your head, so some preset stats-based options for medical costs could be helpful. No one intuitively imagines it'll happen to them but something like 60% of 65yo+ adults managed 2 or more chronic conditions, which are conditions like heart disease, diabetes, strokes, and of course cancer. It's more likely than you think. Stuff like cancer won't just kill you sooner, it'll bleed you dry towards the end of your life as you attempt all manner of surgeries and treatments to delay the end.
- scubakid 5y agoI dread the idea of having to navigate the current US healthcare system in circumstances like that. One drawback that occurs to me about the idea of projecting lifespan/healthspan is that with the data you'd need, you get into PHI territory pretty quickly right?
- themacguffinman 5y agoYeah that's probably protected data. I'm not a lawyer but maybe it could still work if you don't store the health data and just use it to locally generate adjustments (or maybe just store the health parts in-browser but keep the generated financial adjustments in the cloud). The more accurate your projection model, the more personal data it'll have to factor in.
- scubakid 5y agoAnyone happen to know what the standard is for when something officially counts as data collection? i.e. do you always have to send things sever-side before it counts? With all the fuss about things like cookies, I wouldn't even be that surprised if a form input that went nowhere could somehow still get you in trouble.
- fsflyer 5y agoWhat opensocialsecurity[0] does is sufficient for most folks. Mike has a choice of five different mortality tables. [0] https://github.com/MikePiper/open-social-security/blob/master/src/app/mortality.service.ts https://github.com/MikePiper/open-social-security/blob/maste...
- scubakid 5y agoLetting the user pick from preset mortality tables seems like a pretty sensible approach to me. Thanks for the link; bookmarked!
- mym1990 5y agoWhile all of these statistics are valid in their own right, I don't think it makes sense to take them and use them to extrapolate the rest of your life, especially in such a doom and gloom way. My attitude is certainly not of the 'oh don't worry you have plenty of time' because we really don't have that much time. But if the view is that in an 80 or so year life span, you got to get in 8-10 golden years as a healthy American, oof, that is pretty tough, and I probably won't change that mindset.
- scubakid 5y agoIt's true, broad stats aren't great predictors of individual outcomes. Or at least that's what I like to tell myself haha, though at times I worry it's tough to distinguish from "yeah, but it won't happen to me."