How Many Christmases?
None of us know what the future brings other than that it is likely to surprise us. I am sixty-eight years old, so if I want to believe the actuarial table, I have a life expectancy of 16 years. That means that including this one before us right now, I have sixteen Christmases left. If I matched my father, I would only have two Christmases left, but if I track my mother, I would have thirty-two more Christmases. The actuarial tables also say we should expect to live three years longer than our parents. Since this is all based on averaging anyway, that implies that if I average my parents’ lifespan and added three, I should live to 88 or another twenty Christmases. Naturally this is all filled with a whole bunch of ceteris paribus. So, how does that all make me feel?
I have always found that describing my expected lifespan in Christmases is a meaningful delineation for me. It doesn’t scare me and it doesn’t bother me to think that way. It is almost a calming way for me to think because Christmas is such a joyous season. To help me put this all into perspective, it was seventeen years ago that I first met Kim. I cannot even remember life without Kim, so that strikes me as a very long time. In fact, it seems like a lifetime, in a very positive way, for me. Not to go all Frank Capra on you, but it is, indeed, a wonderful life and thinking this way makes me feel like I have an entire lifetime yet to spend with her, enjoying a whole array of Christmases,
One of the cool actuarial tricks is that the older you get, the longer you are expected to live. Why does that make me feel like a donkey chasing a carrot on a stick suspended in front of my face? When I was born, I was expected to live to 67, younger than I am today. Now I am expected to live to 85, having gotten to this ripe old age. My friend Gary, who just turned 79, is expected to live to 88, twenty-six years longer than his life expectancy at birth. Just to do one more iteration, my friend Frank turned 85 last month. His life expectancy is now 91 or thirty-three years more than when he was born. This whole self-fulfilling prophecy thing is very understandable, but it is still pretty cool when applied to the lives of people we know and hope the best for. At my age, I am 25% ahead of my expectations. Gary is up by 42%. And Frank, you old coot, you are 57% ahead of the game. And if Frank gets to 100 he will be 76% ahead. If Gary gets there he will be 65% ahead. Meanwhile, if I achieve that, I will only get to 52%. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for Frank under these circumstances, but what the fuck?
Frank, being seventeen years my senior, should have me outliving him by three years. That means if he now lives to 91, I should live to 94. That would mean he got a 57% longevity boost while I only got a 40% boost. Clearly the difference comes in due to the nine year improvement versus his birth year at birth that my generational cohort received. I’m not sure how the actuaries explain that except to say that the generational improvement in life expectancy is slowing down by virtue of what I will call the “trees don’t grow to the sky” phenomenon. Nature has its limits and all the best science may not be able to upend nature just yet. Some disagree and feel man can achieve immortality through science. That sign on the West Side Highway that says the first person to reach 150 is alive today would seem to imply that the insurance industry feels we may be heading that way.
I have said it before and I will say it here again, who wants to live forever? All the shows like Bicentennial Man and The Highlander make it quite clear that being immortal when everyone else you know is not, is no bargain. The question remains that other than those who like winning more than being with the ones they love, do people really want immortality if the good life, including being able to stay with your friends and family forever, is not what the future holds in store? I fear that is rarely the case. That is not nostalgia for “the good old days” but rather a recognition that humans often prefer familiarity to change. We see that in certain people all the time, most recently in people from the extreme right side of the aisle. I was at a neighborhood poker game last night, which was a lot of fun. I would suggest that the table was more or less split between those who vote red and those who vote blue, and we did a decent job of keeping politics out of the kitty. But speaking of kitties, one of the guys took us into a controversy about furries, the fandom subculture that prizes anthropomorphic animal characters…like wild kitties.
It began with his declaration that he was planting garlic on 56 acres of his father’s farm in Minnesota. Now, he’s an ex-Marine who has a business selling residential real estate here in San Diego. He said he was doing it less as a profit play (though he does hope to turn a profit) and more to feather the family bed for his return to Minneapolis in two years. I asked if that was a statement by him about California and he said no, but did say that he wants to raise his daughter in an environment more like Minnesota than Southern California. It turns out he is very concerned about the permissive school environment here that allows what he says are drag shows in Kindergarten classes. That is what caused him to say that it has gone so far in Escondido that furries (who he described as kids that were allowed to identify as cats and dogs) were being afforded the opportunity to use litter boxes in the school bathrooms. Another player at the table piped up that it was 100% true and that he had heard the same thing. That caused the player who lives nearer the ocean in Carlsbad (a far more liberal part of the county) to look it all up contemporaneously on his phone and declare that his quick research cites five reputable sources that say that whole line of commentary was horsehockey and simply not true. There was the normal counter-questioning of whether he believed everything he saw online, which hung in the air like a bad odor since one could easily pass that comment back in the other direction. Fortunately, the issues went away as the pot grew and attention returned to what we all had in common, which was a desire to win at poker.
I did ask the ex-Marine if he really thought life and times were so very different in Minnesota than here and he seems committed to thinking that it is. I wanted to ask the follow-up question of whether that was just wishful, wistful backward looking thinking, but I restrained myself.
I’ve had plenty of great Christmases in the past, but none of them makes me want to turn the clock backward. I accept the need to embrace change and, quite honestly, mostly welcome it. Life just gets better and better and I think that “better and better” attitude, which I learned from my 95 year old step-father Irving is perhaps the true secret to getting or exceeding that three year generational premium in longevity. As for me and my Christmases, I still don’t know how many more I will get, but I will treasure them all and stick to the thinking that the next will always be better than the last.