The research is fairly conclusive: 100 percent of us will die—yes, even you Hot Stuff. We humans are the only animals that are keenly aware of our eventual extinction. Let’s quantify the inevitability:

• Globally, life expectancy reached 73.3 years in 2024, an increase of almost 8.4 years since 1995.
• Average life length varies widely by country: in the US, the average life expectancy is 79; women live until about 81, and men live until around 76.
• Hong Kong tops the list with life expectancy averaged at 85, and the Central African Republic bottoms the list at 54 years young.
• Thanks to modern advancements, we can expect to live much longer than our ancestors; our global life expectancy increased from less than 30 years to over 73 years over the last two centuries. If it was the year 1826, many of us wouldn’t be here reading about death because we’d already be dead.

Life expectancy is not “expected age of death” for everyone born today. It’s an average based on conditional survival: once you’ve already survived to a certain age, your outlook changes because you’ve already escaped all the risks that could have killed you earlier. Yay, you, for not dying of mumps or scurvy (thus far).

So if you’ve already made it to middle or older age, your remaining life expectancy shifts out. (Actuaries everywhere just rolled their eyes and stormed out of this intro-level class.)

Am I boring you? Wait! Here are some pretty graphs I made about your odds of dying in the next 12 months:

One of the most disturbing things about death is that it doesn’t necessarily occur in age order. It catches most of us by surprise, especially when we’re not waiting for it in hospice care. This chart reveals what we already know to be true: while the likelihood of dying increases as we age, things can go haywire along the way.

I have no intention of being a giant buzzkill here and now, but I’d be irresponsibly out to lunch if I didn’t flag this fact of life: we all have a shelf life, but some of us are going to spoil faster. Thirteen percent of us are going to die between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine. Said more dramatically, line up ten of your younger-than-forty-nine friends and family and coworkers in your mind; one of those dear souls will die before their fiftieth birthday party.

A full 50 percent of us aren’t going to live to see seventy, which means that any deferred plans to “live it up later” should be considered crimes against our own humanity. Waiting for retirement to get into the good parts of life is like gambling with a card shark: good luck with those odds.

100 percent of us will die at some point. So maybe we start living like we mean it now?

Okay that’s enough death stats for one post.

Please tell me you like the abacus doodle? Thanks.