What Year Will You Die?
Easy to calculate based on probability, but few of us ever do until it's closer than we like to think.
Your name here.
I just learned that the Social Security Administration judges my “cohort life expectancy” to be 78 years and two and a half months. That is to say, within my age cohort of people born in 1958, if we make it to 65, as I have (or rather, as I did two years ago), our cohort gets 13.2 years more. Of which I’ve already used up two, so really I get 11. That makes my sell-by date 2036.
But there’s a different way to measure life expectancy, and that’s according to social class. Higher income gets you more years. If I were in the top one percent I’d make it to 87.3 years, but alas I’m not in the top one percent. I’m at the lower end of the haut bourgeoisie, so probably I get more like 84 years. That makes my sell-by date 2042. (And yes, it’s grotesque that your age expectancy has anything at all to do with how much you’ve got in the bank.)
A third yardstick for longevity is physical health, and though I lack hard information on when a person at my age and income level and state of health (which my doctor tells me is pretty good) can be expected to die, I’m going to say 2050 because my parents both lived past 90 and because it’s easy to remember.
These gloomy thoughts are occasioned by my having, in my latest New Republic piece, to imagine some date in the future when I’ll be dead. It’s amazing how resistant our minds are to thinking about this. I ended up picking 2085, which is so ridiculously far in the future that it would be biologically impossible for me still to be alive. Better to pick a date closer to the likely event, like 2051. But I’m not that Stoic, or maybe I don’t want to make any commitments. Another consideration is that my sell-by date might be much nearer, given the unpredictable workings of chance, and that would make choosing 2051 extremely arrogant.
The New Republic piece is, I promise, not about sickness and death at all. It’s an imaginary look backward at the stock market crash of 2025. Although the piece is imaginary, the possibility of a stock market crash isn’t imaginary at all, and none of my facts is made up until you get to a 2085 postscript written by my imaginary great-granddaughter, whom I decided to name Greta. You can read the piece here.