I have good news and bad news: which one do you want first?

Research says 78% of us want bad news first, so brace for impact:

Almost one third of our life expectancy is spent in poor health.

Wait, have I lost you? To the bar? To the perilous edge of a bridge? Don’t jump just yet (but go ahead and order another Painkiller at the bar—because pineapple juice, rum, cream of coconut, and orange juice whirled together in a blender makes all the bad news better).

Allow me to explain said bad news before I bestow the good news upon you.

Explaining the bad news

You know about life expectancy—the average number of years you’re expected to live, right? (In the US it’s 79.46 years, or around four thousand Mondays.) But did you know about the measure called healthy life expectancy, or health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE)? HALE is the average number of years you can expect to live in “full health” by taking into account years lived in less than full health due to disease &/or injury. (In the US we can expect 63.9 years of full health. For a cute little interactive map of healthy life expectancies around the world, click here.)

You basically start with your good-old-fashioned life expectancy number and then lop off the limpy years of disabling illnesses or injuries. Since I already mentioned 29% of our lives are spent griping about our ailments, we need to rethink a few things about our Grand Life Plans, Sparky.

But first … wondering what are the most common ailments are? According to the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019, the “leading causes of years lived with disability” include … can we get a drumroll for these life-denting conditions, please … diabetes, hearing loss, low back pain, osteoarthrosis, blindness/ vision loss, oral disorders (is scurvy making a comeback?), depressive disorders, dementias, falls … and a bunch of other ways life flushes itself down the shitter.

Since I started Four Thousand Mondays, I’ve been strong-arming politely encouraging people to calculate how many Mondays they have left… I even created a calculator for those of you who get all twitchy from math and don’t want to figure the number out for yourselves … and if I’m being honest, I knew the mortality math was a tad bit flawed. I was calculating the quantity of Mondays left, not the quality of Mondays left.

For example: as of this week I have 1,810 Mondays left to live, according to the life expectancy tables. But not all Mondays are created equal, are they? My last slew of Mondays aren’t likely to be brimming with vitality, statistically speaking. I’ll likely be deaf (like my Mom was in her last few years), wheelchair bound (these bunions will surely be my kiss of death disability), and petting imaginary cats in the memory care facility someone will have locked me up in graciously set me up in. So I don’t really have 1,810 *quality-filled* Mondays left, do I?

This whole “healthy life expectancy” concept rightfully prompts a recalibration of the “How Many Mondays Do You Have Left” calculation. We need to account for the time we’ll be too rusty and crusty to actually enjoy our lives in the same way we’re likely taking them for granted/ going through the motions/ living them today.

Well isn’t this post a real mood booster? Is now a good time for me to show you this SWEAR-TO-GOD-IT’S-AN-ACTUAL-MODEL from researchers who study this stuff, for even more giggles? Let’s all share a laugh-cry at the 3-state illness-death model:

Clearly all roads lead to death. Sometimes after illness, sometimes not. Noted.

And now the good news

Oh right! I was supposed to have good news.

I kid, I kid. There is a good news angle to this “severe truncation of your life expectancy calculation” story.

Consider:

• We need deadlines to get things done. Your deadline just got a little closer. What goals might you want to get on with, now that you know your number of Healthy Life Expectancy Mondays is a bit abbreviated?
• We tend to value things that are “limited time only.” The concept of temporal scarcity highlights how we treasure our time after tuning into how scarce it is. Life expectancy is scarce, but healthy life expectancy takes the value of life up several notches. Does this even-more-limited number of Mondays motivate you to take action on some of the living you’ve maybe been deferring?

Sitting here on our couch, typing this blog post, I just calculated my “healthy life expectancy Mondays left” and the number is shocking. Women in the US have a 65.1 healthy life expectancy, so after mathematizing over here, that leaves me with 850 supposedly quality-filled healthy Mondays. That’s a far cry from the 1,810 I was kind-of-sort-of banking on.

😳 (👈the perfect emoji for the moment)

(No wait, maybe this one is more appropriate: ☠️)

Sure, many of my friends and family are over 65.1 and are still unaffected by disease and disability, so it’s easy for me to say, “I’ve got more time than that to romp around and travel and zipline and go back to school and paint that big canvas and learn how to dance like I’m not an octopus just one time on a dance floor.” But then again, many of my friends who are under 65.1 have ailments. I’m not special (even though my dad thinks so … hi dad, love you!) … I’m absolutely going to continue to rot, slowly, until I die. And now that I’ve just completed this morbid mortality math, I am that much more driven to GET ON WITH IT.

I urge you to do your “new and depressing” Monday calculation, just like I did. It will feel like a gut punch (cue another Painkiller?), and then it will likely stir you. TO LIVE. To dance. To learn. To sign up for that mountain biking race. To try out for that Ninja Warrior show. To make a Pavlova and eat it all by yourself. To get pregnant/ get your tubes tied (probably not in that order). To go to Brussels. To see your favorite band perform in a random city. To pull an all-nighter. To renew your vows in Vegas. To meditate in a forest. To do any and all of the things you’ve longed to do, before disability and illness take the wind out of your sails. Of course you can still “live” with debilitating conditions … but you might find yourself at 67, wishing you’d gone to see the northern lights when you actually had your eyesight.

Go live now … before the scurvy takes you.