When anyone looks at the Social Security Actuarial tables based on data from 2020, used by various organizations, for their planning for calculations based life-related risk data in late 2023 and early 2024, they will see that the average life expectancy of a 64 1/2 year old male in the United States is about 17.3 years or an average EXPECTED remaining life of 6,313 days left for a male. These are AVERAGE life EXPECTATION data for the entire United States, however, there are reasons …predominantly related to the non-sedantary nature of our worklives and the tendency of some of us in this area to be more likely minimize or totally abstain from alcohol … why the average life expectancy of a male of someone like me with my background from an area like this [with my general genetic heritage] is approximately 3 to 4 years longer than the United States average.

Based on the actuarial data and adjustments to reflect actual local data, my own personal life expectancy is probably about 20.54 years or more … FOR PLANNING PURPOSES, I sort of need to assume that I have about 7500 days left to live.

OKAY, OKAY, OKAY … I get it … yes, I know that it looks as if I kinda fudged my expected lifespan calculations to come out at 7500 days …and maybe I did that, just a bit, because it’s probably slightly longer than 7500 days ….

But does it matter? The whole POINT of this exercise is basically about MY time mgmt … specifically managing / optimizing the time that I have left on earth FOR PLANNING.

It gives an appropriate, as accurate as possible understanding of the scarcity of my time left … so that I do neither DAWDLE nor rush out to dig a hole for my grave, buy a casket to set on the device to be lowered into the grave and sleep in the casket so that everything’s ready in case I die tonight.

For planning purposes, I need to use the BEST UNBIASED ESTIMATE of my life expectancy … and rounding it to 7500 days is just practical, responsible PLANNING … with a number that represents about 20 1/2 years and a figure I can kind of break down and visualize for the whole 7500-day trajectory.

I am not going to constrain the goals, objectives and plans of what I want to do with rest of my life by adopting an irrational fear of any imminent death UNLESS and UNTIL I receive some medical diagnosis that gives me something like “hours or days, but not weeks left to live.”* For the sake of responsible FINANCIAL planning, I should not assume that I will die before I am 150 or 200 or so even though those last years after I turn 110 or so and until I close on 200 might be covered strictly by my Social Security check, if my investments don’t pan out …

We all know damned well that we might indeed win the lottery and die tommorow or maybe within the next five minutes for that matter … but the chance that we could die really does not matter much for our PLANNING PURPOSES.

Until we males turn about 95 [assuming that we don’t have a firm diagnosis of a condition with a less optimistic prognosis], the likelihood of our dying within the next day is less than one in a thousand … it’s not until we’re 73 1/2 or so, that the likelihood of our dying within the next day is less than one in ten thousand.

I am not exactly sure WHY many people seem to cower in fear of dying and sort of turn into STUPIFIED, quasi-paralyzed, ultra-risk-averse fussbudgets focused on having everything taken care of because they’ll likely die tomorrow … but the thing is, there’s a VERY STRONG marketing and advertising-assisted tendency at age 65 to fall for the fear-mongering … so we males take our “offense” off the field and just play a full-court press of prevent defense even though the [likelihood that a 65-year-old male dies tomorrow](until we males turn about 95 [assuming that we don’t have a firm diagnosis of a condition with a less optimistic prognosis], the likelihood of our dying within the next day, according to the best data we have, is approximately 1/19,086.

The probability that I’m alive one year from now is about 98.16% … or the likelihood that I die within the next year is only about 1/55 … so I’m going to keep playing offense … especially for PLANNING purposes.

7500 moderately healthy, moderately productive days left.

The 7500 number is okay … but the important thing is I want to live WELL, ie independently and healthy/fit and NEITHER drunk nor on prescription medications, as long as I’m going to alive … whatever the true number of days that I have left to live actually is.

The MOST IMPORTANT gift that I ever gave myself in life was the TIME time to spend just sitting with my father on the deck on the house at the farm … helped me think about how I had wasted my life trying to be a professional and how I should have worked harder at entreprenurial projects, making NEW connections with NEW colleagues in NEW industries, in order to be a more diversely successful investor.

Even if one does not have a father to care for, retiring at 50 is something that I would recommend to anyone … even for those who think that they might not have enough money. {BIG HINT: The more that you can do to reduce your living expenses to next to nothing, the happier your retirement will be – in spite of what elder-vacay advertisers, insurance salesmen and pharma parasites want you to believe, happieness in retirement does not accrue to those with a open wallet spending on things that the retirement demographic consumes at 25X to 100X the rate they should swallow those poisons at.}

In my case, retiring at 50 GAVE me that opportunity to spend EVERY DAY with my father, in his last 18 months, which furnished me with indispensable insights about my own health and the work I needed do on my own physiscal self, to save my own life … I also got to see the impact of his own recalcitrance and stubbornness … this kind of thing is loveable and adorable to a degree, but one sees the impact it has. It was the PAIN that recalcitrance caused someone who I loved as a best friend and as my father that really opened my eyes to how THE fundamental flaw in humans, especially OLD MEN, is their own stiff-neckedness … it’s all about the the manner in which we humans, particularly us as OLD MEN, absolutely cling to OLD WAYS, even when those old nasty habits of being our unhealthy selves were basically the implements that we used to enslave ourselves.

At 50, I was a PROFESSIONAL with an okish professional resume, that I had built mostly just by luck and by imitating what others were doing and delivering results and financial success for my employers. Frankly, I worked far too long for employers that were unworthy, when better employers were out there … but I stayed longer at jobs than I should have because of the friendships with great people, ie most of the corporate realm is UNDER-MANAGED and OVER-POPULATED with ridiculous talent. My professional career was definitely NOT the result of any coherent planning effort on my part … mostly, I was a reluctant employee, ie I settled for being an employee because it was convenient; I did not really enjoy thinking about career advancement and professional planning. I was just sorta faking it … but I suppose that I was about as good at faking it as almost anybody else was who was really trying to do it. Mostly, I wish I have left the engineering profession and had stayed in more entrepreneurial, but technical ventures.

On the other hand, at 50 I actually was definitely a success as an investor, ie it was my investing success and returns that were greater than stock indicies or the best mutual funds that made it possible for me to retire at 50; it was certainly not the result of my salaries working as a Federal agent, in academia, in industry … my investment returns were better because of the connections I WORKED at making in my professional life directly influenced my ability to bypass news and propaganda to make better investments. It was the long-term performance of my trading and following those investments [as risky and unpredicable as that performance was] that made it possible to me retire … so making new CONNECTIONS with people who are doing especially compelling stuff will ALWAYS be important to me … just as it will ALWAYS be important to me to keep my living expenses to the barest of bare minimums so that I NEVER HAVE TO WORRY about the risks that necessarily come with genuinely important ventures that create radically better opportunities for people.

Tolerance for risk along with the push to make new connections is what I have to do to make the most of the next 7500 days … but I also have to break the hardened, calcified old habits of being my terrible unhealthy self and I will need to plan and work harder transform the old me into somone who is becoming MUCH MORE disciplined and MORE perseverant in my health and exercise … even if that discipline and perseverance costs me old friendships; I need the disipline and perseverance more than I need the friendships with people who have given up on themselves and are not willing to work on their health and exercise.

Part of having a good offense, and being mentally shrewd enough to assess risks/rewards of new opportunities comes from aggressively working on one’s health EVERY SINGLE DAY.

One MUST BE healthier tomorrow and better able to train and stay more fit … I know how important this is because I did not do it, UNTIL I was well into my mid 50s … before that I would tend to get sick or my Dockers would get tight and THEN I would react for the next few months or maybe even years with a TOTALLY MYOPIC get-fit-now diet or exercise program … but I took my health for granted, just as I took it for granted that things would work out just fine if I just didn’t ignore the signals and got after it with discipline and perseverance working diligantly each day on health and exercise to make the corrections I needed to make … but I did NOT actually plan; my discipline and perservance was a matter of REACTION … when the alarms went off and I got some sort of wake up call telling that my health was trying to tell me that it was time to work on making some corrections … but until I was at least 55 I had no long term plan for what I NEEDED to do in order to get healthier … I burned health as fuel to work on different distractions, some were actually defensible and laudable, but most were just about IMITIATING what successful professionals who I looked up to seemed to do in their careers … [without much in the way of seriously PLANNING about what my life was supposed to be about].

At this point in my life, I will confess that there is a big part of me that is fully ready to just die RIGHT NOW … I look forward to whatever comes after this life … I completely trust my Creator to provide the next step for me … I expect that the final processes of dying will be extremely and even tediously painful so I will confess that hope death comes quickly … but I really dunno if that step after life will be easy or enjoyable or much of anything about that next step … I dunno if anything about this existence will inform that next step after life; I don’t even know if the whole concept of Time and one event following another will apply … whatever comes next is far to too different to bother contemplating and it simply cannot be allowed to become something I worry about … I just LOVE my Creator and I accept Jesus Christ as my sole path to being with my Creator, I love my Creator more than I love life itself, which also means that I love my Creator more than I love any of my fellow humans … I LOVE my Creator and trust that the next step will be whatever the next step is willed to be by my Creator.

My ONLY purpose in life is to try each day to understand my life in the context of my Creator’s will and to CELEBRATE each moment cognizant of that understanding. I can do this while getting other practical things done, but my prayer that my Creator’s will be done must always must come first … it must inform everything that I do, but it also implicitly recognizes that ONLY I can be responsible for my planning for my future and that I must be responsible for my own actions and the consequences of those actions.

What will I DO with my last 7500 days of productive time on Earth?

It’s worthy of repitition … My ONLY purpose in life is to try each day to understand my life in the context of my Creator’s will and to CELEBRATE each moment cognizant of that understanding. I can do this while getting other practical things done, but my prayer that my Creator’s will be done must always must come first … it must inform everything that I do, but it also implicitly recognizes that ONLY I can be responsible for my planning for my future and that I must be responsible for my own actions and the consequences of those actions.

Mostly, I want my remaining days left to work out and eat right while avoid alcohol or medications be roughly as healthy as I am now … I would like to try to be moderately more productive, but I am not overly stressed about being more productive – it’s one of those eustress stretch goal things … I still WANT to put points on the board, which I can do as a retired person, but the game changes because one needs to REALISTIC, particularly when other people are involved..

For example, since the probability of death happening in the next year for a 33-year-old is about 1/400 and the probability of that for a 70 year is about 1/40, I have to look a bit harder for co-founders to sustain anything that I can’t finish and any kind of angel investor or VC will absolutely DEMAND that the venture has two solid co-founders and that my participation is not indispensable. Accordingly, my MAIN goal from even before initiation [when one is kicking ideas around for founding something] and all points thereafter will be to INVEST in or contribute to the start-ups of others as an employee, rather than as a founder … but I still WANT to put points on the board so, as a practical matter, I will need to focus most of my efforts on open source contributions.

A degree of eustress in defining my stretch will hopefully help keep me engaged in practical tasks/activities that help me in building my discipline and the right kind of work itself helps me to be more spiritually inspired and motivated … whether I feel like I have accomplished anything or not may not matter, but it does help to see practical gains rather than living entirely in the abstract realm.

Here are some ideas that I have for the next 7500 days:

I will try to learn a new skill: Perhaps in swarm robotic operating systems or perhaps in the measurement of soil quality by SoC field devices. I know that I need to learn new skills that challenges me mentally and/or physically … but I dunno about things like learning a musical instrument, a foreign language, or a some sport like golf or tennis.
I will set achievable fitness goals … maybe not in something like training for a marathon … but I probably do need to do more longer distance hiking on uneven ground with a pack … improving my strength or flexibility through a structured exercise program is something that might work, but only if it involves some objective in martial arts.
I will engage in volunteer work in open source commmunity development in niches, like real time operating systems for swarm robotics that are especially meaningful to me and challenges me to step outside my comfort zone in the aspect of C/C++ programming and VLSI hardware engineering … but I dunno if I have ANY interest in typical volunteer activities like mentoring youth … I somewhat cautious about getting my hopes for what is possible in helping at a local charity OR participating in community projects … because of the backward-looking idea-averse nature of the stiff-necked people in charge of those community projects.
I have LESS THAN zero desire to travel and explore in the physical realm … retirement travel with well-planned trips and adventures that give geriatrics a chance to explore new places, cultures, and experiences is the LAST POSSIBLE place that I would look for anything exciting and enriching. I DO have interests in traveling and exploring if there a VALID BUSINESS REASON for me doing that … I absolutely detest being a tourist or a vacationer. I do not need or want ANY vacations.
I might look for ways that I can take on new responsibilities or fill new roles that allow me to meet NEW colleagues with starkly different perspectives and backgrounds than mine. I am not at all interested in things like organizing a family reunion or leading a community initiative … those are things that I have done and I really have not been struck with any desire to do those kinds of things again; those things are for others to do.
I will always pursue autodidactic forms of education and this includes participating in Wikipedia editing, developing forkable MOOCs on GitHub and finding other ways to do new forms of autonomous, self-replicating, autodidactic educational programs will that interest other people … I think that OpenScience intiatives are something than can challenge people intellectually, moreso than attending lectures, listening to podcasts or YouTube videos or taking online courses.
I know that I will start new ventures and online educational projects because doing this requires planning, creativity, and effort, moreso than just writing an ongoing memoir … but all of these projects typically start with something like a GitHub organiztion with different affiliated repositories, possibly a blog and a social media personna.
I will try to push outside of my comfort zone by engaging is a more serious podcast, even if the podcast content is slightly comedic or about getting a deliberately UNSERIOUS different take on things … since podcastering is a bit like auctioneering or public-speaking in that the performance gives a chance for the audience to provide feedback and sometimes that feedback can be particularly challenging or even threatening.

The necessary practical details that I need to attend to in my last 7500 days or just over two years or so of productive time left on Earth are get my affairs in some rough semblance of quasi-order so that I can dispose of the remaining details in my last 750 days … and possibly even less if some sort of health crisis or accident arises … when one reaches the point in life where one EXPECTS to have 7500 days, it’s more actuarially 10X more likely that one finds out that one does have much time left, but the luxury of being older is that few are COUNTING on him, eg as parent with young kids or as a caretaker and executor of estates of elderly parents … but, practically I still need some room to move, so I don’t need to have every last detail buttoned up and tidy as if it’d all be taken care of tomorrow. First of all, I still have to LIVE and DO THINGS and maybe try to accomplish something financially or philanthropically … if I die tomorrow, there are should be sufficient assets in my estate to compensate my heirs for the problems of having to dispose of my stuff.

Maintaining my current level health/fitness, ie I rarely if ever get sick and ideally slightly improving my fitness level just a bit might be the MOST IMPORTANT objective of the next 7500 days, particularly since my level of health is necessary to do the kinds of things that I want to DO. That means that in the realm of business and open source projects, I still WANT to put points on the board … I do not have ANY real interest in adding hobbies or travelling or doing anything other than just working on my business ventures and open source projects and following my investments. My main plan to maintain or improve my current level of health/fitness is to keep breaking the bad habits of being my unhealthy self that I accumulated in the first fifty years or so life … I have stopped doing a lot of stupid stuff, but I didn’t start to figure out how to quit the dumbest stuff, eg drinking alcohol or mostly eating the standard American diet, until long AFTER I retired and had time to actually work on my health.

Only through the grace of God did I make it to 50 … but I knew that I needed to retire and work on my own projects well before I retired … I just lacked the confidence to do it. I probably would not have made it to 55 if ONE of those project was investing in and working on my projects the philanthropic realm of health improvement and finding ways to encourage more martial arts dojos to start up … ultimately, my retirement philanthropies have sorta taught me the world needs fewer gyms, fewer dojos and MANY MORE things like Gracie Garages and homes in which living rooms with comfortable seating and teevee screens have been replaced by rooms to roll with jiu jitsu grappling mats and tall muay thai heavy bags. Going somewhere to engage in martial arts, wrestling or gymnastics should replace bars and restaurants … martial arts retreats to train with people around the world should replace things like spectator sports … mostly people should get off the couch and get rid of most of their chairs.

The MAIN thing that I WANT to do is just focus on putting points on the board

I can say this, after having focused on my health so that I have gotten significantly more healthy over the last 17 years or so … when on March 9, 2007 I was told that I would likely die from sepsis within hours or few days, but that I did not have a week left to live … I have crawled out of a state of believing that I faced imminent death OR that I would likely soon relapse into that state where I faced imminent death. In the decade or so after being told that I would likely die in hours, I sort of ceased believing that I should ever start something that I would not likely finish … the shadow of impending death sort of pre-occupied my thinking … and that was probably actually a blessing, because I had the opportunity to come to terms with my mortality in ways that people who have not had the executioner’s axe hanging over their neck have never had to contemplate. I am better for that experience … but I need to RETURN TO focusing on putting points on the board except that now it’s a more informed view of what that means, ie I need to work in the realm of OPEN source technologies, which PRIMARILY a philanthropic push, but it does not necessarily eschew financial gain, since I have some hope that my technological expertise might inform my investment selections.

I need to THINK in terms of a 20 year agenda, rather than something I can finish in 2 months or 2 years. I have been far too conservative although Ecclesiastically it was necessary to go through a prolonged period of more intense, even sometimes angry/frustrated contemplation, it is now necessary to put the offense back on the field and try to put some points on the board.

What will I do with my last 750 days of productive time on Earth?

It’s worthy of repitition AGAIN … My ONLY purpose in life is to try each day to understand my life in the context of my Creator’s will and to CELEBRATE each moment cognizant of that understanding. I can do this while getting other practical things done, but my prayer that my Creator’s will be done must always must come first … it must inform everything that I do, but it also implicitly recognizes that ONLY I can be responsible for my planning for my future and that I must be responsible for my own actions and the consequences of those actions.

The main practical thing that I need to accomplish in my last 750 days or just over two years or so of productive time left on Earth is to get my affairs somewhat tidied up into a manageable enough group so so that I can assist my heirs in disposing of the remaining details of my life in my last 75 days … but I will put off the final disposal until I actually do have just 75 days left because the main thing that I still need to be chasing in the first part of my final 750 days on Earth is putting more points on the board … to borrow a metaphor from football, it’s STUPID to turn ultra-conservative and put in the prevent defense before the final possession; until then the best defense is a strong offense.

After all, it MAY become overwhelmingly apparent that I will have a brand new 750 day or 1000 day or 500 day lease on life, which will mean that I still have to try to put some points on the board … conversely, I feel fine now but I might be told next month that I have just a couple months or at most 75 days left to live – when that happens I will shift immediately to the final disposal of the remaining details of my life that I had planned to complete in the final 75 days of my life.

What will I do with my last 75 days productive time on Earth?

It’s worthy of repitition yet AGAIN … My ONLY purpose in life is to try each day to understand my life in the context of my Creator’s will and to CELEBRATE each moment cognizant of that understanding. I can do this while getting other practical things done, but my prayer that my Creator’s will be done must always must come first … it must inform everything that I do, but it also implicitly recognizes that ONLY I can be responsible for my planning for my future and that I must be responsible for my own actions and the consequences of those actions.

In my last 75 days on Earth, I will be focused on the final disposal of the remaining details of my life … I will put off the final disposal until I am kind of sure that I actually do have just 75 days left.

What will I do with my last week or 75 hours of productive time left on Earth?

It’s worthy of repitition OVER AND OVER until I die … My ONLY purpose in life is to try each day to understand my life in the context of my Creator’s will and to CELEBRATE each moment cognizant of that understanding. I can do this while getting other practical things done, but my prayer that my Creator’s will be done must always must come first … it must inform everything that I do, but it also implicitly recognizes that ONLY I can be responsible for my planning for what little time is left and how short my future appears to be. Until the end, it is me who must take full responsibility for my own actions and the consequences of those actions.

I have had the incredible luxury of recovering from an illness where the best doctors in the world believed, as I believed myself, that I would die within a few hours or at most days … since I know what is entailed, I have made a point in my life of never waiting to tell someone something that I thought I would eventually need to tell them … I don’t have to worry about saying goodbye to people or making amends with people or anything like that … I do not live in a manner waiting to make apologies; I also have zero regrets about ever offending anyone, because I truly believe the offense taken is on them – I have tried to be brutally honest, forthright and deathly frank with people … there’s no room for hypocrisy or passive-aggressive NICE little manipulative lies …

I have certainly had periods of doubt and skepticsm, even depression and utter despair in which I simply could not think, to even put together a plan to tie my shoes. I NEVER have been one who goes out with an intention of picking fights, but I have let fights come to me for me to finish. I never been much of a coward … I have called cowardice out and I have gotten used to being told that I am not as tough as I think I am. Of course, I know full well that my bravery is not something that I have earned, but rather it is only through the grace of my Creator that I have had any bravery or any toughness – so it IS true that I am personally not that tough.

It has also proven to be true that I become a billion or a trillion times tougher than I think I am when my Creator calls upon me. People who are isolated from our Creator cannot possibly imagine this. They might imagine that this makes into some form of arrogant asshole or bully, I have only used bullying behavior when someone else attempted to bully me … I will do whatever is needed in order to fight for my Creator’s will; my most supreme wish of all of my wishes in my whole life is to DIE fighting for my Creator’s will.