January 2026
“At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict, or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, a parent.”
– Barbara Bush, First Lady of the United States
“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”
― Stephen Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Everybody dies but what is not certain is when. Here’s something interesting about the way life expectancy works. Australian data, which is a high welfare first world country, shows males have an average life expectancy of 80.6 years and females 83.8 years, with the median age at death being 79.6 for males and 84.6 for females in 2023, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW).
The average and the median are almost the same, about a year off for each. So people normally think that they’re going to get 80 to 85 years of life expectancy because that’s the average. But because of the median number, what that actually means is that only half of everyone gets that. The other half don’t. This is something I never properly understood till I lived it because I think people assume they’ll get the average not the median.
For men the average is higher than the median which means more than half of the population dies before they get to the average age. Simplistically, if the average is 81 but the median is 80, this doesn’t mean that everyone gets to 81, it means most people don’t get to 81 but some people live to well past 80.
For women it’s reversed, the average is less than the median. What that means is that more than half of women live past the average age. Simplistically, if the average is 84 but the median is 85, this means most women will live past 84, but not so far above 84 as to move the average up. In both genders getting to a point where half of the population is living to over 80 is a pretty extraordinary point in history to be in.
But I think these numbers hide something else. How much earlier than the median do the men pass away? Enough that it skews the numbers down a full 5 years or about 6% earlier. On a societal level, this means that there are a lot of old grandmothers without their husbands around anymore. I think if people understood those numbers better they might make some different choices.
What side of the median are you going to fall on? Your average life expectancy will be 80 for men or 85 for women but there’s a 50/50 chance that you’ll never get there. I think phrased like that you realise there’s a lot less time than you think and more people die earlier than you think. Sometimes a lot earlier.
The way the death is experienced by the living also falls on a distribution. Normally it is spaced out evenly where you lose people as you are going through life. Someone will pass away every few years. But if you go through long periods of time with nobody dying then what will happen is there will be concentrated periods of time where a lot of people will die at around the same time.
If for example all of your grandparents are alive for most of your life then what will likely happen is they will all pass away within close proximity in time to each other. But what is more usual is you will lose one of them every few years once you’ve reached adulthood. If you are old and most of your friends are alive then you’ll lose them all in quick succession. I never appreciated how life could fall on a curve like that before until I experienced it.
Something really bad like this happened to me a few years ago. For most of my life I’d never experienced any death at all. Even when I was a kid the idea of death was foreign, we lost a puppy once, Fluffy, she was attacked by a Dingo on Christmas but that was it. Until I was in my late 20s, nobody had ever died in my life in fact.
All my grandparents were alive, all of my friends, almost everyone I cared about. The only death I’d ever experienced was when I just graduated from high school, a close friend Josh from high school was murdered in a Mcdonalds in a drunken fight gone wrong. Some drunk guy said some words to him, he said some words back and next minute he was punched and was gone. This came with its own trauma around the fragility of human bodies and violence and risk and how stupid it all is. Then all of a sudden over about 2 years, I lost 25 people.
Within that 2 years there was an awful concentrated period of time where someone I was close to died every week for 13 weeks straight. We lost 13 people in just over 3 months. It was an extremely dark period of life where I think I lost faith in the continued existence of everyone I loved and cared about. Friends, family, colleagues, every category of person in life, we lost someone. It’s like getting stabbed in the heart over and over again, every month for years. I lost my grandmother and my godfather in the same week for example.
I lost all of my grandparents in that time. I had a regular board game group and we lost 2 of them so now we don’t even have enough people for a 6 person extended Settlers of Catan game anymore. There was a group of 4 tech bro elephants that ran our own businesses, we would all cowork together and we lost 1 so nobody felt like being in that office anymore. The only silver lining is I think it taught us a tremendous amount of resilience and never to take living for granted.
The social fallout of a close knit group of friends where one person dies is also devastating. You’d think you’d come closer together but in reality you drift further apart. Because when you’re a close group of 4 and you lose 1, it becomes harder to see the other 3 because it reminds you of the 4 that isn’t there anymore. So what sort of happens is you seriously lose 1 because they die, then you soft lose the other 3 because you drift apart. The soft loss in some ways is as bad as the hard loss because it’s a loss that you can’t really explain why you don’t have it anymore.
With death the person is physically gone. But with the living there’s just a lack of motivation to do what you used to before the death. It’s like a psychic grenade goes off in the centre of all of you and you’re covered in psychic shrapnel moving forward. You can remove the shrapnel over time piece by piece but you’re never quite the same. During that concentrated period, it felt like every month there was a funeral for years straight and just as the shock and grief was starting for one, another one would happen so you could never properly process and overcome the previous one.
It was very difficult to be happy about anything then and since it was right around the time of the birth of my daughter, gave my wife and I a full complex around life and death and existence and mortality. It also coincided with a period of tremendous personal success in business so layered on top of that was a complex around wealth and joy and time and what it even means to be alive.
During it I didn’t understand what was happening and it was so dark that it felt like we were never going to come out of it. But we finally have now, it’s been over a year since anyone has died. A friend of mine who is a data scientist explained what was happening really perfectly, the framework for understanding what was happening. I was living through a black swan venture power law moment. If enough people toss a coin 20 times in a row, someone gets heads 20 times.
Where what was usually a normally distributed death over time continuum was instead highly concentrated over a short period of time. Because I’d spent 20 years with no deaths, I was experiencing therefore 20 years of deaths in 2 years. In the startups venture world we think a lot about black swans and power laws on the upside but we don’t think about how a black swan power law works in the downside.
Where everything bad that can happen to you does happen to you all at the same time. I think that is sort of what Murphy’s Law is trying to explain but it doesn’t go far enough. You can capture downside risk in a concentrated period of time in the same way you can capture upside risk. Then after the concentrated period of time you just run out of people who can die which means you’ll then go another prolonged period of time of no death. Then sometime in 20 years there will be another period of death close together.
This likely doesn’t happen to everyone but this is what happened to me. But within this framework it’s helpful to understand where you are in the normal distribution of death over time for all the people you care about in your life. Because it almost allows you to step back and see in a macro way how much time you have left with them so you can make the most of that time. I
I didn’t realise I was going to lose all my grandparents close together, but the fact that I had gone my whole life and they were all still alive meant I was going to, I just didn’t know it. If I’d known that looking forward, I think I would have tried to see them more. It’s through sheer luck I managed to write their life story down when I did.
So I’m taking the lesson from that and applying it for my parents who I try to see every opportunity I get. And for life generally as the motivation to make the effort to try and see people as often as I can. Not to let other things like work or the busyness of life get in the way of seeing people. Because I’m not sure how much time I have left with those people.
The life expectancy normal distribution
How death can concentrate in time
