Live-A-Little

Live-A-Little makes a prediction of how many years you have left to live based on actuarial life tables and your current age. 

In particular, it uses the 2017 actuarial life table reported by the United States Social Security Administration. The actuarial life table lists life expectancy data by gender, but the data used for the Live-A-Little prediction is an average of both genders. Consequently, Live-A-Little will slightly overpredict male life span by 1-3 years and slightly underpredict female life span by 1-3 years. It's easy enough to just use the life expectancy data for one gender, but I wanted to make the first prototype representative for both genders. 

Some interesting things to note about the life expectancy data (see image above):

• infant mortality spike before age 1
• average age of death is close to 78 years old
• mode of age of death is close to 87 years old

The Live-A-Little approach to predicting life expectancy works as follows:

1. sum all deaths at and above the current age
2. generate a random number between 0 and the sum of all deaths at and above the current age
3. counting up from your current age, the age "bucket" that the random number falls within is the age prediction

This prediction method ignores any lifestyle (i.e. "controllable") influence on life expectancy. It is most similar to picking a random person from a crowd of Americans who are at least as old as you and saying that you have the same life expectancy as as that person. More often than not that person will have average lifestyle and average luck that results in a near average life expectancy, but sometimes their life expectancy could be less or more depending on their unique combination of lifestyle and luck.

Our understanding of how much life we have left to live seems to influence our approach to living life to the fullest. Think you have only six months to live? All you may want to do is spend time with family and travel. Going to live for the next thirty years? Maybe going back to school for several years to change to a career you enjoy is worthwhile.  

None of us can predict how much time we have left to live. You could have until tomorrow or sixty years from now. The tendency seems to be either avoid thinking about how much time you may have left or think that you will live an average or above average life span. The reality is that not everyone will live a long life, but it sure seems like you can always live a full life no matter how long you have left to live.

Live-A-Little is an experiment to understand if a daily reminder of how long I may have left to live changes my own approach to living life to the fullest.