Ticking away
The moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours
In an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground
In your hometown
Waiting for someone
Or something to show you the way
Tired of lying in the sunshine
Staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long
And there is time to kill today
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun
Do not work more than what is advantageous to you. This is your own limit and can change throughout your career. There will be times when working extra hours may get you to the next level, this is a path you can pursue or walk away from.
When I was just starting off in my career, my mentor told me about Scott as a cautionary tale. Scott was a hard working, and dedicated employee. He started with the company on a factory floor. He was known for always working overtime when it was available, and the first person to call if you needed someone to cover a shift.
The company was investing heavily in IT and people it determined were intelligent enough and dedicated enough to do the job. Scott was brought into a training program, sent to some classes, and pulled from the factory floor to an office job.
Scott maintained his work ethic, even though he was salaried he found value in working extra. He felt he was noticed and that his efforts were appreciated. He was also able to pick up new skills and knowledge much faster than his coworkers because he worked more hours.
Scott never married. He tried dating a few times, but the women he dated didn’t like being second to his career. Scott lived modestly and talked to his parents a few times a month.
Scott was the first one to arrive and the last to leave. The joke around the office was that he had a bed under his desk. He eventually got into gaming, late nights playing started to drag on him. But he was always at his desk before anyone else. Occasionally someone would catch him sleeping at his desk.
One day the police came looking for him. His parents hadn’t been able to reach him. When someone went to his desk, he was asleep, but they couldn’t wake him.
The coroner estimated he had been dead for 3 days. In that chair for 3 days. Coworkers walking by, saying good morning, jokes about not working too late. He had nothing really but that job.
You work your entire life to pay for your headstone.
(Approximate translation of some french punk lyrics that capture the same sentiment)
This is a good place to remind everyone that if you wait for social security retirement in America you have a really good chance of dying shortly after that retirement. The great die off starts at 65.
And yes you can live healthier to have better odds of getting higher on that chart. But you cannot add young years. So if your idea of Europe includes skiing in the alps or something then you need to go before you retire. Don’t let the idle rich dictate your life. They aren’t waiting around.
And yes you can live healthier to have better odds of getting higher on that chart.
Living healthier means keeping your stress low, saving time for exercise, and limiting your intake of fast food.
But these are luxuries primarily reserved for the already wealthy. Luxuries afforded through cheap service sector labor.
Like so much else in this country, good health is paid for with a labor tax on the poor.
That population pyramid is a bit misleading because the baby boom coincides with the ages with the steepest declines. In part, there were significantly fewer people born in 1939 compared to 1959, so you’d expect way more 65 year olds than 85 year olds in 2024.
Yes, the death rate is higher among older people, but the life expectancy of a 60 year old man is still another 20 years.
the life expectancy of a 60 year old man is still another 20 years.
Also, importantly, Americans (born in 1980 as a reference) have a 95% chance of living to see age 60.
Even in relatively poor and disadvantaged states (W. Virginia or Mississippi) you’re looking at 92-94% odds.
We’ve solved for a lot of the early mortality threats common to prior generations - childhood diseases most prominently. We’ve also seen a general improvement in public health with respect to smoking and drinking. And workplace safety has improved dramatically as we shifted from Ag Labor to Industrial work to Office jobs.
You’re not wrong but you’re not right. Life expectancy is an average. Here’s a 1980 chart that shows the same trend.
Also baby boomers are 60-78 years old. You can clearly see the die off happening within their generation.
You don’t think that 1980 chart has a very different shape? The current chart is almost flat from 20-60, while the 1980 chart is actually pyramid shaped, with the steepness is only slightly sharper past 60. And matches the steepness of the range from 25-50. Nobody talks about a 25-year-old die off.
You’re better off charting the actuarial tables to convey the data you’re trying to talk about (death rates), rather than relying on a stat that is influenced by birth rates and death rates in an opaque way.
That’s the baby boom moving up the chart. It’s 1980, they’re 15-35. You can clearly see the normal population before the baby boom and it’s fall off.
That’s the baby boom moving up the chart.
Yes, exactly my point. The boomer generation itself made the population pyramid look different at every stage of its life, which is why the 1980 chart looks so different from the 2023 chart. When you introduce a cohort that has its own slope from birth statistics, the shape of the drop off at 60 is confounded by the preexisting shape of the slope before they entered old age.
So the appropriate method of isolating the variable that shows what you call a “die off” would be to just pull up the actuarial tables that show what percentage of 60, 61, 62 year olds, etc., die that year. Not to compare how many of those there are as a percent of overall population.
Except they cover the period we’re worried about. Everyone figures anything after 80 is a gift. The oldest boomers are 78. You have 2 years on that chart that might be questionable. Seeing the die off start at 65 to 75 is all within the “new” paradigm.
You keep calling it a “die off” because you’re being visually tricked by the misleading population pyramid. Use the actuarial tables instead.
Among 65 year old men, the probability of surviving to 75 is 76%. The probability of surviving to 85 is 39%. The probability of surviving to 95 is 5.9%.
For women, the odds are 84%, 52%, and 12% of getting to 75/85/95, respectively.
Yes, these are higher death rates than at younger ages. But nowhere near what the shape of the population pyramid suggests, where the 85 age cohort is about 1/4 as large as the 65, which misleadingly suggests a probability of 25% of living 20 more years, when the real number is closer to 45%.
We bought a travel trailer back in 2011. A neighbor asked for a tour, so I showed it to him. He was telling me that it had been him and his wife’s dream to buy an RV when they retired and tour the country. Unfortunately, medical issues meant that never happened.
He told us we were smart to do it young. You just never know. And we’ve had many great experiences in it.
Poor bastard was waiting for Windows update to finish.
I think I’m the second frame, quickly becoming the third
I might still be first, how do I break out, waiting for instructions…
God I love Pink Floyd!!
Same. Especially this song. More chills given than any other song. I’d assume I’ve listened to it 200 times or more at this point
It’s brutal, isn’t it? 7 minutes of pure distilled existential terror
Yeah it’s breautiful™
Mine is “Dogs.” The combination of the message and the barking in the solo is just…
I wonder what motivational posters workers in the Bahamas have on their wall
People crave what they don’t have.
I too crave the carve
A big rusty secondhand spaceship, with which to run a dinky little trans-lunar scrap and salvage company. My second mate would be a cat.
Skyscrapers, most likely.
I used to live in a resort city for the past year, and really missed big city things, like specialty stores - for the whole city there was only one PC store, one bicycle store, one music store - and all of them sucked big time. So I had to rely on online marketplaces… oh wait, there were none, so I had to order international and wait for months. Local taxi was also not good, food delivery business practically non-existent. Same for furniture and appliances, instead of home depot and radioshack you’d have to go to bazaars and ask around. But the most important one is opportunities. I was a digital nomad and lived comfortably, but locals, holy hell, I don’t have any idea how they survive with wages this low. Pretty sure some of those construction workers would trade it all away to live as street musicians in SF or NYC, as just surviving there would put them in like worlds top 0.1%, but instead they work for hours on dangerous jobs for what I would’ve spend on a cup of coffee in a local cafe catered to tourists.
A lot of “third world” countries don’t work the hours we do.
This claim doesn’t really pass the smell check for me - can you point to where you get the notion from? Checking the lists for average hours worked per year per worker, richer countries routinely have lower numbers than poorer countries.
Mostly it’s for areas that aren’t even in the developing category yet. Once you’re developing you’re talking about 9-5 work with less pay and benefits than in the West. But traditional work doesn’t do office/factory hours. That means periods of lots of work and periods with little work where you live off the previous gains.
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A picture of some depressing city alleyway that’s says
“Laugh at the losers who are stuck with this out their window”
It’s not like you can afford anything else.
to rebel is what we have left
I’ll see you on the dark side of the Moon.
Surviving in love, surviving in hate
We still have to die, there can be no escape
Clock in, clock out, forty hours a week
Our lives being spent with no real truth to speak(Sung by the guy who hung himself at age 40 to the sound of Sean Lennon’s “Into The Sun.” Don’t try this at home, kids.)
I had this happen to me once when I was trapped in a whale. Sat down to play hand of poker. Next thing you know 40 years had passed by.
Its ribs are ceiling-beams, its guts are carpeting, I guess we have some time to kill.
I was just listening to this song today.
There is always time (until there isn’t)
