Just remember, you make it depressing by feeling sad about a future event. It's just a clock, which is probably wrong. All manner of things could happen tomorrow to the person with 10% left, like dropping dead from (whatever).
Or, you could find yourself in a much better place in a year, and the time you spend doing that better is worth more in a year than the last 5 years where it was not better.
All that we can be certain of is this very moment and not much else. Live it up!
Mine said 61% and to me it seems like a crazy amount. It’s hard to imagine doing all the living I’ve already done all over again and then some.
I think about 10 years ago I felt like I had already gotten plenty enough out of life not to feel short changed. Still love living, don’t get me wrong.
Exactly. I hit 40 a few years back, and I’m statistically likely to live at least that long again. A lot happened in 40 years, and I was not in control of my life for just shy of half of that.
I'm about to turn 40, and I feel like perceptually life gets faster and faster, which seems to be a common experience.
So in that sense you may not do all the living you've done all over again and then some.
For example, I'd say my 30s felt half as a long as my 20s, which themselves seemed to pass much faster than than 10-20, which felt very long indeed. And childhood, 0-10, seemed like an eternity!
This is true even at a micro level. E.g. a 3 hour car ride now does not feel like a big deal to me, but it seemed almost unbearably long to me as a child.
Another way in which you won't do as much living as you've already done is that in your early years you went through profound development -- both physically and mentally. That doesn't happen again; we mature, we refine, and (sadly, hopefully not too much), we decline, but it's nothing near as profound as we get to experience early in life.
Don't worry. I've got 14% and I can assure you that years go by at an alarming rate. It started for me at 40. 50 was on me pretty quick but 60 was there before I knew it. Now it's all just a blur. Probably best to do stuff now.
Yep. 55 now, and the same. A year can pass and feel like nothing. Especially the last two COVID years. Just feels like a long nap sometimes. I think it's because as we get older, our lives are not changing much. 0-10 years each year brings big changes in our physical growth, intellectual understanding of the world, literally every day brings something new. 10-20 is similar, but the pace starts to slow down. By the time you're 50, one year is pretty much the same as the another. Kids are grown or close to it, you're probably not job-hopping, you're settled in your home. Everything is routine.
They’re rough averages, and I can’t tell (it gave me NAN) if they’re taking your current age into account. You could die tomorrow, but you also have a roughly equal chance to live into your 100’s. Every year you survive, you have a longer estimated lifespan.
FWIW, as someone in their early 30’s, the chances of you dying this year are somewhere in the 1% range. But your life expectancy has also gone up to 78/83 (male/female), from 76/81 where you were at birth.
Excellent idea. If they tied it to a fitness calculator it would show your life extending when you exercise and shrinking when you don't. Spend more time on the couch and watch your life get shorter. Go for a long walk and watch it grow longer. Seems like a pretty good motivator. Don't show me how many steps I've taken. Just show me how much life I have left. I would buy one!
Seems broken? Tells me I have 60-some percent of my life remaining (I was born 1964, when I return to settings it seems stuck on 1992 - for which 60% would make sense).
Only entering the month+year isn't the issue. The website is near random. I entered my DOB perfectly and was suggested i was an age decades off (with corresponding % being that wrong). Clearing cookies, meticulously entering and checking DOB again and i get decades off the other side of my age.
The website is seriously malfunctioning. I guess it's just giving results of a different user.
Seems broken to me too. I put in 1926 for my 96-year-old dad and it says 61% remaining. Which would be great, but I don't expect him to live to 246 (of which 39% lived so far would equal 96).
A calculator which is much easier for me to use and gives more reasonable results is https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/population/longevity.html Its inputs are gender and date of birth. Gender has a big effect on life expectancy. This one shows 2.7 years left and a total estimated lifespan of 98.7 years. By this calculation he has about 3% of his life remaining.
That a person alive now is expected to die in the past?
> Consider that at 91-92 years you will have exceeded the expected number of years for your cohort.
The correct method for estimating remaining life is using life expectancy at current age not life expectancy at birth, since you want to know how long one is expected to live given that they have not, in fact, died already.
At 92, life expectancy is 3.54 years for a man, 4.2 for a woman, not some negative value.
> That a person alive now is expected to die in the past?
This seems an uncharitable interpretation. Instead, I expect that the value shown is the "expected age of death" - "current age", which if your current age is beyond the average results in a negative number.
FWIW and as you note, this isn't the most useful result since alive people can't die in the past unless we accept some sci-fi premises.
> The correct method
While we're on the topic... More correct? Many factors that would improve the prediction weren't collected and used but a better prediction would take those into account.
So... Yes, your suggested method seems more useful and accurate yet I wasn't going for that goal so much as noting that it made sense to be that a lazy/naive/PoC/first implementation might get a negative result using exactly the formula above.
So many people are saving up their happiness for a day when they feel like they can finally be allowed to truly be happy. Sometimes, the day never comes, and the happiness has expired.
About 10 years ago I moved onto a wonderfully quiet street that has only old people. All three of my immediate neighbors (either side plus straight across the street) were couples that had just retired and had been saving for a long time in order to go traveling. Two of the men got too sick to travel and died within a year. The remaining man got sick and almost died, but he’s hanging on. He and his wife both too sick to travel. My wife now reminds me weekly that we need to get our travel and adventure in now before we retire, and not wait. Actively working on it…
The early part of life is the best time to spend money on travel and experiences. In the late part of life, one should spend money on the material things that provide passive satisfaction and don’t require too much physical effort. People often get these backwards.
The problem is if you spend all your money when you are young, you won't have any to spend on "material things that provide passive satisfaction" when you are old. Time value of money and compounding gains is a powerful thing.
On the other hand, if you are old and wealthy, you may be too frail to do anything.
Yes, and the last part is why I'm more interested in passing an inheritance to my kids than I am with doing anything with the money myself. The money my parents left me largely paid for my kids' college education. I haven't really spent it on anything else; I have everything I really need, and feel like "paying forward" is the best thing I can do with it.
Watch a couple of YouTubers that live in the road in their RV. Same story: woman had worked in a hospital and saw an old couple who had just begun living their lives in their "golden years" but the wife ended up dying — the husband was floored at this turn of events in their plans.
he YouTubers hit the road while they still could. Are enjoying themselves in a way many of us (still) only dream about.
I appreciate the idea, but what about preparing for the future? Money spent now doesn’t compound for later. I’m concerned about not being a burden later or leaving my wife without enough. There is surely a balance but without a crystal ball I wonder how to find it.
Travel is the last thing I would want to do, especially if I'm old, but that's just me.
The rest of it is pretty accurate. My dad lived about 3 years after he retired, half of that he was too sick to do very much. My mom lived another 6 years after that but the last couple of years were not what anyone would really call living.
Don't assume you'll be a vital, active, world traveler at age 80. It might work out that way, it might not.
You can spend a minute to think about it though; I know too many people who were going to really enjoy themselves after getting their pension only to find out they actually hate not working or that they in fact hate their hobbies (fishing might be nice 1 hour a month when you are relaxing from work, but suddenly having 16 hours 7 days a week to fish drives many insane) (and so wasting 10+ years being angry, depressed and searching) or dying too quickly after. It is strange how people who never 'had a little house in Spain (or whatever) in that pitoresk village' plan their entire life to that that point thinking it is nirvana while they could have done that all along.
I know millionaire managers/directors of my age (around 50) say this for the past 20+ years and when I ask why they do not do it now because a) you might not like it b) you might not make it, they seem to find many excuses, some of which are even money related (and they have millions now).
I built another version of this about 30ish years ago, you can see it now at www.deathclock.com. I sold the site about 15 years ago (helped pay for an adoption). It was my first "successful" website, getting near 5 million views per day. It was also a useful programming exercise (learned the painful way that one ColdFusion function wouldn't support large numbers and others would, so had to do so wrangling to get the final number right).
I remember that site and it was actually what I was expecting to see when I clicked on the OP! I feel like the version I remember stumbling across had smoking but no BMI but I can't corroborate it on archive.org
Smoking and BMI and other stuff came after I sold it. I used to have hardware models too - I forget who I partnered with. It never did earn any real $$.
This is going to sound stupid but your website is one of my first memories I have of the internet.
I was shown it by a school friend (we were about ~8 years old) and I remember being scared about the result, none of could read English well so pretty sure we filled out nonsense for the weight input :)
I have the almost exact same story as parent.
Was around 10 years myself and remember using your website and being really scared of what the outcome would be
Hey! I used that website when i was very young and surfing away my curiosities on the limited web.Thanks for that, i never thought i'd see the guy who made it.Also i believe it's one of the first sources (if not the first) where i learned what BMI was[if the version back then had it, which i think it did].
Not visibly, no. Several reasons, where the most obvious is that our medical care and availability of information has massively improved. Another is that the 1918 pandemic hit young and healthy people disproportionately.
A dip, but nothing like the 1910’s. I’ve heard a rediction of up to two years. Covid mostly killed older people, while WW1 for obvious reasons mostly killed young people, therefore having a greater effect on life expectancy.
Human Longevity has been around 70-80 years for thousands of years we know about, and possibly forever. It’s one of the common misunderstandings we get by learning about life expectancy.. I misunderstood it for a long time until my brother, an anthropologist, explained that there are historical records of people living to be 80 years old from a thousand and even 10,000 years ago. Life expectancy averages in a bunch of causes of early death, so it skews the average down. Longevity is what you’re left with when you factor out all the causes of early death. Life expectancy is going up because we’re eliminating the causes of early death mostly via basic medicine, clean water, washing hands, anti-bacterials. Not having wars helps. Vaccines help. Safer houses & jobs help. Etc. Longevity appears to have been increasing a little in the last century, possibly because life expectancy and longevity aren’t cleanly separable (nobody dies of old age, they eventually die of a disease or injury).
"Most adults" fall under "life expectancy after reaching adulthood" rather then "longevity".
Adult young people and middle aged people died a lot more then today. Whether due to incidents that were more common and harder to treat or sicknesses.
If you limit the stats to "adults never never got seriously sick and never got injured" then the comparison is completely meaningless. Yeah, people did evolved to live longer, but we do expect more treatment and health.
Sure, all adults fall under life expectancy from their current age. It’s always a Bayesian statistic. The comment you replied to might be off by ~10 or even ~20 years -- depending heavily on what year and location we’re talking about -- but it’s still a valid point and it has always been true that surviving childhood to be 20 years old gave you a dramatically higher probability of leading a long life. The plot @kqr posted demonstrates this over the last 300 years.
> dramatically higher probability of leading a long life
Yes, but not that much. Mythology on HN makes them live basically as long as we do live. Completely ignoring adult accidents rates, ability to fix them or sicknesses and deaths while giving births. Ignoring sicknesses from stuff missing in food.
And of course using nebulous "past" as if forrest communities in 240 had same lifespan as 1950 city middle class. You imply deep past and all people. Then you argue by recent past excluding most common causes of death.
If you look at estimated length of life after adulthood, it is still lower then what was written here. If we were in the past, some of us would fall from roof, died of minor wound infection, tetanus, whatever we get vaccines for now, got tuberculosis or other now treatable sickness. Some of us would die while giving birth.
Why do you say not that much? How much, exactly, do you mean? I did already look at length of life after adulthood. Life expectancy at birth was 20-40 years at times in the past, and life expectancy for an 18 year old jumps to 60+ in the data posted here. I’m not sure what you’re arguing now. I gave you an out by noting that the comment you initially replied to could be off by 10-20 years for some locales and time periods, and for some definitions of “adult”, what more do you want than that? The gist of the comment you objected to is true, even if the numbers don’t hold for all places & times.
You’ve complained about my examples without providing any evidence of your argument at all. I’m not sure what your argument is either. Plato wrote about people living to be 80 years old. Bone samples from ancient native Americans show people living to 80 years old.
It’s an actual fact that surviving childhood before the last century produced a posterior probability that was dramatically higher than the at-birth life expectancy, where dramatically means 20-30 years longer life expectancy, precisely because something like 50% of people died between birth and adulthood. 50% is obviously a proxy for a number I don’t know exactly but could be anywhere from, say, 10% to 90% depending on when and where.
“Until the middle of the 20th century, infant mortality was approximately 40–60% of the total mortality. Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy during the 12th–19th centuries was approximately 55 years. If a medieval person survived childhood, they had about a 50% chance of living 50–55 years, instead of only 25–40 years.”
“Paleolothic : Based on the data from modern hunter-gatherer populations, it is estimated that at 15, life expectancy was an additional 39 years (total 54), with a 60% probability of reaching 15.”
“Classical Greece : Based on Athens Agora and Corinth data, total life expectancy at 15 would be 37–41 years. Most Greeks and Romans died young. About half of all children died before adolescence. Those who survived to the age of 30 had a reasonable chance of reaching 50 or 60. The truly elderly, however, were rare. Because so many died in childhood, life expectancy at birth was probably between 20 and 30 years.”
“Early Middle Ages Europe : Life expectancy for those of both sexes who survived birth averaged about 30—35 years. However, if a Gaulish boy made it past age 20, he might expect to live 25 more years while a woman at age 20 could normally expect about 17 years. And anyone who survived till 40 had a good chance at another 15 to 20 years.”
“Medieval Islamic World : Average age of scholars was 56–84.3 years”
I think the tables that actuaries use are publicly available and account for that. The thing to watch for would be that you're not using something with a lot of built-in conservatism meant for life insurance statutory compliance.
It's not unrealities, it's just that you want some cushion before your life insurer goes bankrupt. That's why statutory and GAAP are different accounting standards.
I can't put my finger on it but I always find this modern(Americanized?) peddling of stoicism too pretentious and vapid as to be not only useless but actively off-putting to me. The fact that life is short is already central to most adults and I don't see what purpose any of these reminders serve except to seem high-minded (and annoying). The faux precision of this "clock" also bothers me but that's a different story.
I’ve found some use for it. For example, I’m a significantly better parent when I take time in the morning to remind myself that I might die today. Similarly useful is reminding yourself that your family members might die today.
To me, it rings false because the people who propagate it so rarely face "real" adversity. I would be more interested in the stoicism of a broke guy scrapping just to exist than the stoicism of rich white tech bros. Yes, everyone faces adversity of some kind, but these lectures ring so false when the lecturer sits firmly in the top 1% of global and historic wealth.
Let me take a try why you feel that way. (I might be wrong).
Stoicism is very easily repurposed, because it is divorced from a religious praxis, and therefore easily assimilated. It is pithy and vague enough too, its maxims can fit on a bumper sticker. "Life is short!", honk if you agree.
The appeal for stoicism today is because it is aspirational; we no longer recognize the stoic hero in ourselves and our neighbors. Yet, we would wish we could marshal the inner strength we imagine the stoics of the past possessed.
When people broadcast stoic wisdom over twitter, or memes, or ted-talks, or through any other channels that exemplify the trite and vain nature of contemporary consumer media, it seems to scream despair, rather than confidence. A toddler trying to convince themselves they are not scared in the basement, if only they say it a loud enough.
Mu hunch is that is why you find a website like this annoying. Packaged for the internet, bland, vague, fast food for the brain.
I would agree. Up to a point.
Life is short indeed, gam gam has it on a plaque above her fireplace, she bought it in a trinket shop in Gatlinburg.
What is equally important, but unsaid, is what comes after. Both the stoic and hedonist will accept the premise, but will activate it very differently. Will you dedicate yourself to the future, or will you dedicate the present to yourself. I don't think that website makes any recommendation on the matter.
Exactly right. Essentially the consumerist, "fast food for the brain" idea is what I was struggling to point out. Having read a little of this thread though, I'm more open to the idea that even what seems to me as fluff is pretty useful as a regular centering mechanism so I'm just moderately indifferent instead of annoyed now.
I’d say lower your expectations even further to reach true happiness: always expect to die tomorrow and adjust your lifestyle and the way you treat your loved ones accordingly.
No joke. The Buddhist perspective gets into that. The idea of dying tomorrow sets you up to worry about making the most of the future of the rest of the day, and you're still not really present. When we consider that these few breaths or bites or moments might be our last, we can release all the clinging and aversion because it's too late to do anything but be profoundly aware of being alive in this moment. And given that we usually don't just die, we get to experience that sense of life-flashing-before-your-eyes and immediate sense of love and compassion, and still an aspiration to make the very most of each moment (including planning for the future since that might be a thing).
This might be the final sentence you read. So, there's no reason to live each day as your last. It's okay to live each moment in whatever way it shows up. It's all we have, and there's nothing to do but to be aware of it. And, remarkably enough, once we stop striving and just let go, we magically find ourselves more attuned to our deepest values of love and compassion.
This writing might be the last action I ever do. Love to everyone and everything
Okay, a minute might be too long. If you are thinking that you have some time to plan and decide what to do with it, you're not doing the exercise. It has to be such that you accept that there's nothing you can do to control what's happening and you give up your grasping for control. No point in using up your moments trying to decide what to do next.
Whatever you are doing right now, this could be it, and that's that. The magic is the chance to actually be present for an instant rather than just be lost in your anxieties and then be dead.
When you practice experiencing this as your last moments, you might just look out the window at the clouds and think about your most meaningful memories, but you also might as well keep washing the dishes and finally be really present with it.
If washing the dishes is your last moments, it can feel like a profound and meaningful experience of dish-washing. You can realize that you've been stuck in a judgmental low-level aversion to dish-washing and suddenly all the tension disappears, and you realize both the awesomeness and the mundaneness of it all at once. Water, sensations, plates are beautiful, you're living this life in some place, and it is what it is, and really it's amazing, we just constantly overlook it.
When you then do not actually die, you have the chance to prioritize being as grateful and loving as you possibly can in every moment going forward, at least whenever you can bring that presence back to mind. Whether that's when cleaning or being with others.
You might decide that there are activities you'd like to never ever do again.
But in the end, there's no right or wrong activities or context, there's only being present or not. We can be present even while the activity is making plans.
I'd separate the year and month and make the year controls visible.
But all of my UI design work is targeted at internal tools where looking good is way down the list below ease of use, so take my opinion with a grain of salt for anything customer facing.
Ex: A down arrow button attached directly to the right side of the year input field. Make it a deeper blue and then wrap a 1 or 2 pixel wide rectangle around the field itself of that same color.
Do we have enough data to make this much more precise based on personal information? Seems like much of the useful data would be locked behind medical privacy laws but I would love to see one that took into account current health conditions, maybe even hereditary circumstances.
As an aside, I really dislike the style of date picker they are using. I always find them so cumbersome.
If you are designing a website/web app please use a html input type=date, at least on more modern devices and provide a fallback for older ones. The UX for date selection in modern browsers is very well thought through.
Apologies for being off topic.
EDIT:
This shouldn’t be the top comment, you should probably stop upvoting (currently 18)… I probably shouldn’t have posted it even.
I almost gave up using it due to the year picker. If I can see the year I should be able to click it, but on this one you actually have to scroll down until it is no longer faded at all.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
The website is made to show you how much time you have left, to highlight that time is precious. To get this reminder, you have to enter your date through a date picker. This date picker is cumbersome, and makes you waste time. I think this is not a tangential annoyance, but a central one. Those two things are in opposition, and this detracts a lot from the message of this website. If time is so precious, why is my time wasted by an unknown file picker with a foreign interface?
You have a point, but it's still pretty tangential at a macro level. The main macro-level thing is that the thread at the top of a page should be responding to the core of the story—or on rare occasions, be something surprising and even more interesting than the story.
The UX of a date picker on the page doesn't clear that bar. That doesn't mean it's unimportant, just that the top of an HN page is not the appropriate context for it. Unless, of course, the story is about the UX of date pickers!
That's fair, thanks for the clarification. Would that clear the bar if that post was a Show HN? I feel like one of the problem here is that the author isn't here to listen to the feedback anyways, so anything that is "feedback" isn't very interesting.
Not sure about the stoic piece, as time you have left falls into the category of can't control and therefore not something you should worry about. Worry about what you can control in the "whatever time" you have left
I’d like to play, but this UI design is awful. Talk about encouraging someone to view their remaining time as precious, someone born Jan 1, 1970 can expect to tap or click 240 time to get past the first question.
Edit: found you can click the year, but why not just enter my full birthdate?
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadOr, you could find yourself in a much better place in a year, and the time you spend doing that better is worth more in a year than the last 5 years where it was not better.
All that we can be certain of is this very moment and not much else. Live it up!
I think about 10 years ago I felt like I had already gotten plenty enough out of life not to feel short changed. Still love living, don’t get me wrong.
The next 40 is going to be interesting.
The next 20-25 will be interesting for you - after that you will just be telling people to get off your lawn, and making doctors appointments. ;>)
So in that sense you may not do all the living you've done all over again and then some.
For example, I'd say my 30s felt half as a long as my 20s, which themselves seemed to pass much faster than than 10-20, which felt very long indeed. And childhood, 0-10, seemed like an eternity!
This is true even at a micro level. E.g. a 3 hour car ride now does not feel like a big deal to me, but it seemed almost unbearably long to me as a child.
Another way in which you won't do as much living as you've already done is that in your early years you went through profound development -- both physically and mentally. That doesn't happen again; we mature, we refine, and (sadly, hopefully not too much), we decline, but it's nothing near as profound as we get to experience early in life.
FWIW, as someone in their early 30’s, the chances of you dying this year are somewhere in the 1% range. But your life expectancy has also gone up to 78/83 (male/female), from 76/81 where you were at birth.
More interesting is the quality of life, not how long you have =)
I just spent 8 years in jail simply because I was broke. What a waste of some of the best years of my life.
I'd love one that is e-ink or something super low energy if it is just doing a countdown to death. I love watches that don't tell time.
Easy bug to fix? LASt the very least I expect it to pick some arbitrary day of the month I enter.
I should tell my dad though that he is has about 13 weeks left to live. (Or should?)
The website is seriously malfunctioning. I guess it's just giving results of a different user.
A calculator which is much easier for me to use and gives more reasonable results is https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/population/longevity.html Its inputs are gender and date of birth. Gender has a big effect on life expectancy. This one shows 2.7 years left and a total estimated lifespan of 98.7 years. By this calculation he has about 3% of his life remaining.
That a person alive now is expected to die in the past?
> Consider that at 91-92 years you will have exceeded the expected number of years for your cohort.
The correct method for estimating remaining life is using life expectancy at current age not life expectancy at birth, since you want to know how long one is expected to live given that they have not, in fact, died already.
At 92, life expectancy is 3.54 years for a man, 4.2 for a woman, not some negative value.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
This seems an uncharitable interpretation. Instead, I expect that the value shown is the "expected age of death" - "current age", which if your current age is beyond the average results in a negative number.
FWIW and as you note, this isn't the most useful result since alive people can't die in the past unless we accept some sci-fi premises.
> The correct method
While we're on the topic... More correct? Many factors that would improve the prediction weren't collected and used but a better prediction would take those into account.
So... Yes, your suggested method seems more useful and accurate yet I wasn't going for that goal so much as noting that it made sense to be that a lazy/naive/PoC/first implementation might get a negative result using exactly the formula above.
On the other hand, if you are old and wealthy, you may be too frail to do anything.
It's a tricky balance, with no guarantees.
he YouTubers hit the road while they still could. Are enjoying themselves in a way many of us (still) only dream about.
Life is short, kids.
The rest of it is pretty accurate. My dad lived about 3 years after he retired, half of that he was too sick to do very much. My mom lived another 6 years after that but the last couple of years were not what anyone would really call living.
Don't assume you'll be a vital, active, world traveler at age 80. It might work out that way, it might not.
I know millionaire managers/directors of my age (around 50) say this for the past 20+ years and when I ask why they do not do it now because a) you might not like it b) you might not make it, they seem to find many excuses, some of which are even money related (and they have millions now).
The best part was the emails I'd get. Wow.
It hasn't changed much in 20 years, eh. https://web.archive.org/web/20000520091843/http://www.deathc... Really cool to see it's still up.
What were the emails like?
I've never been more curious. What sorts?
This is going to sound stupid but your website is one of my first memories I have of the internet. I was shown it by a school friend (we were about ~8 years old) and I remember being scared about the result, none of could read English well so pretty sure we filled out nonsense for the weight input :)
― Anais Nin
They were even more different in the past when life expectancy at birth was below 30, and most healthy adults lived past 70.
But they're still very different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
The 1918 flu epidemic killed even more (3 times as many), but not weighted as young; together it was a big hit on life expectancy.
Citation needed. Or, qualification of what you mean by "healthy adult".
Human Longevity has been around 70-80 years for thousands of years we know about, and possibly forever. It’s one of the common misunderstandings we get by learning about life expectancy.. I misunderstood it for a long time until my brother, an anthropologist, explained that there are historical records of people living to be 80 years old from a thousand and even 10,000 years ago. Life expectancy averages in a bunch of causes of early death, so it skews the average down. Longevity is what you’re left with when you factor out all the causes of early death. Life expectancy is going up because we’re eliminating the causes of early death mostly via basic medicine, clean water, washing hands, anti-bacterials. Not having wars helps. Vaccines help. Safer houses & jobs help. Etc. Longevity appears to have been increasing a little in the last century, possibly because life expectancy and longevity aren’t cleanly separable (nobody dies of old age, they eventually die of a disease or injury).
Adult young people and middle aged people died a lot more then today. Whether due to incidents that were more common and harder to treat or sicknesses.
If you limit the stats to "adults never never got seriously sick and never got injured" then the comparison is completely meaningless. Yeah, people did evolved to live longer, but we do expect more treatment and health.
Yes, but not that much. Mythology on HN makes them live basically as long as we do live. Completely ignoring adult accidents rates, ability to fix them or sicknesses and deaths while giving births. Ignoring sicknesses from stuff missing in food.
And of course using nebulous "past" as if forrest communities in 240 had same lifespan as 1950 city middle class. You imply deep past and all people. Then you argue by recent past excluding most common causes of death.
If you look at estimated length of life after adulthood, it is still lower then what was written here. If we were in the past, some of us would fall from roof, died of minor wound infection, tetanus, whatever we get vaccines for now, got tuberculosis or other now treatable sickness. Some of us would die while giving birth.
You’ve complained about my examples without providing any evidence of your argument at all. I’m not sure what your argument is either. Plato wrote about people living to be 80 years old. Bone samples from ancient native Americans show people living to 80 years old.
It’s an actual fact that surviving childhood before the last century produced a posterior probability that was dramatically higher than the at-birth life expectancy, where dramatically means 20-30 years longer life expectancy, precisely because something like 50% of people died between birth and adulthood. 50% is obviously a proxy for a number I don’t know exactly but could be anywhere from, say, 10% to 90% depending on when and where.
“Until the middle of the 20th century, infant mortality was approximately 40–60% of the total mortality. Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy during the 12th–19th centuries was approximately 55 years. If a medieval person survived childhood, they had about a 50% chance of living 50–55 years, instead of only 25–40 years.”
“Paleolothic : Based on the data from modern hunter-gatherer populations, it is estimated that at 15, life expectancy was an additional 39 years (total 54), with a 60% probability of reaching 15.”
“Classical Greece : Based on Athens Agora and Corinth data, total life expectancy at 15 would be 37–41 years. Most Greeks and Romans died young. About half of all children died before adolescence. Those who survived to the age of 30 had a reasonable chance of reaching 50 or 60. The truly elderly, however, were rare. Because so many died in childhood, life expectancy at birth was probably between 20 and 30 years.”
“Early Middle Ages Europe : Life expectancy for those of both sexes who survived birth averaged about 30—35 years. However, if a Gaulish boy made it past age 20, he might expect to live 25 more years while a woman at age 20 could normally expect about 17 years. And anyone who survived till 40 had a good chance at another 15 to 20 years.”
“Medieval Islamic World : Average age of scholars was 56–84.3 years”
Etc., etc., etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
Interesting -- can you elaborate on whatever unrealities are forced upon life insurers by government?
You have -3.8% of your expected lifespan remaining
I assumed they would get this right, how sad.
Stoicism is very easily repurposed, because it is divorced from a religious praxis, and therefore easily assimilated. It is pithy and vague enough too, its maxims can fit on a bumper sticker. "Life is short!", honk if you agree.
The appeal for stoicism today is because it is aspirational; we no longer recognize the stoic hero in ourselves and our neighbors. Yet, we would wish we could marshal the inner strength we imagine the stoics of the past possessed.
When people broadcast stoic wisdom over twitter, or memes, or ted-talks, or through any other channels that exemplify the trite and vain nature of contemporary consumer media, it seems to scream despair, rather than confidence. A toddler trying to convince themselves they are not scared in the basement, if only they say it a loud enough.
Mu hunch is that is why you find a website like this annoying. Packaged for the internet, bland, vague, fast food for the brain.
I would agree. Up to a point.
Life is short indeed, gam gam has it on a plaque above her fireplace, she bought it in a trinket shop in Gatlinburg.
What is equally important, but unsaid, is what comes after. Both the stoic and hedonist will accept the premise, but will activate it very differently. Will you dedicate yourself to the future, or will you dedicate the present to yourself. I don't think that website makes any recommendation on the matter.
Or in Montaigne’s words: to philosophize is to learn to die http://homepages.wmich.edu/~rvr5407/3140readings/That%20to%2...
No joke. The Buddhist perspective gets into that. The idea of dying tomorrow sets you up to worry about making the most of the future of the rest of the day, and you're still not really present. When we consider that these few breaths or bites or moments might be our last, we can release all the clinging and aversion because it's too late to do anything but be profoundly aware of being alive in this moment. And given that we usually don't just die, we get to experience that sense of life-flashing-before-your-eyes and immediate sense of love and compassion, and still an aspiration to make the very most of each moment (including planning for the future since that might be a thing).
This might be the final sentence you read. So, there's no reason to live each day as your last. It's okay to live each moment in whatever way it shows up. It's all we have, and there's nothing to do but to be aware of it. And, remarkably enough, once we stop striving and just let go, we magically find ourselves more attuned to our deepest values of love and compassion.
This writing might be the last action I ever do. Love to everyone and everything
Whatever you are doing right now, this could be it, and that's that. The magic is the chance to actually be present for an instant rather than just be lost in your anxieties and then be dead.
When you practice experiencing this as your last moments, you might just look out the window at the clouds and think about your most meaningful memories, but you also might as well keep washing the dishes and finally be really present with it.
If washing the dishes is your last moments, it can feel like a profound and meaningful experience of dish-washing. You can realize that you've been stuck in a judgmental low-level aversion to dish-washing and suddenly all the tension disappears, and you realize both the awesomeness and the mundaneness of it all at once. Water, sensations, plates are beautiful, you're living this life in some place, and it is what it is, and really it's amazing, we just constantly overlook it.
When you then do not actually die, you have the chance to prioritize being as grateful and loving as you possibly can in every moment going forward, at least whenever you can bring that presence back to mind. Whether that's when cleaning or being with others.
You might decide that there are activities you'd like to never ever do again.
But in the end, there's no right or wrong activities or context, there's only being present or not. We can be present even while the activity is making plans.
But all of my UI design work is targeted at internal tools where looking good is way down the list below ease of use, so take my opinion with a grain of salt for anything customer facing.
If you are designing a website/web app please use a html input type=date, at least on more modern devices and provide a fallback for older ones. The UX for date selection in modern browsers is very well thought through.
Apologies for being off topic.
EDIT:
This shouldn’t be the top comment, you should probably stop upvoting (currently 18)… I probably shouldn’t have posted it even.
https://caniuse.com/input-datetime
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I suppose we could let people mark their own comments off topic, which would drop them to the bottom of the page...
The UX of a date picker on the page doesn't clear that bar. That doesn't mean it's unimportant, just that the top of an HN page is not the appropriate context for it. Unless, of course, the story is about the UX of date pickers!
Edit: found you can click the year, but why not just enter my full birthdate?
[1] https://shop-us.kurzgesagt.org/products/lifespan-calendar-po...