It’s the start of another year, so it’s time to update ‘My Life in Weeks’.
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- I have now lived 3,453 weeks, which is 83% of my estimated expected ‘useful life’.
- Will I make it to 80? or perhaps even longer, into ‘bonus time’?
- 99% of humans throughout history had much shorter lives than ours, but somehow they managed to build the modern world and prosperity we enjoy today.
- I have been thrown a curve ball this year that may upset my grand plans.
- Time to re-focus and make sure I make the most of every day.
How it works
Each box on the chart represents a week of my life – past and possible future. Each row of boxes represents a year, consisting of 52 weeks organised into 13 blocks of 4 weeks, starting at the top from when I was born.
The black boxes represent the 3,453 weeks I have lived thus far. Done and dusted. Over. Finished. Gone.
Below the black boxes are grey boxes for the remaining 707 possible future weeks from now up to 80 years of age (which I have estimated as ‘useful life’ – see below). The white boxes at the bottom are the ‘bonus’ weeks if am lucky enough to live beyond 80 years.
When I set this up years ago I arbitrarily had it run up to 100 years. I put the dial in the top right corner to indicate where I am now. It’s getting a little scary!
Why 100 years?
It’s a nice round number! From my calculations based on the latest Australian life expectancy tables (ABS 3302 Table 1), at my current age my median life expectancy for males is 85. The statistical ‘median’ is just the middle person in the entire population, but the actual outcomes are distributed over a very wide range around the median. Half will die before the statistical median person, and the other half will live longer. Some a lot longer.
Given recent distribution patterns, I estimate that around 5% of current 65 year old Australian males are likely to live to 100 or more. I would like to be in that lucky group, but only if I can remain physically and mentally fit.
My mother lived to 97, which is pretty close to the 100 year mark, but she was born in 1928 when her life expectancy at birth was just 63 (Australian Year Book 1926, p.971), so she out-lived her initial median life expectancy by more than three decades.
Life expectancy tables are constantly projecting longer and longer lives thanks to ongoing advances in health, nutrition, medicines, vaccines, health care systems, etc.
Statistical life expectancy
Those statistical tables refer to Australians. Had I been born in Australia in 1959 my life expectancy from the time of birth would have been 67 years (Australian Year Book 1959, ABS p.346).
However, I was born in poor, war-torn south-east Asia (Singapore, which was then part of Malaya), in the middle of an independence battle and communist insurgency. Given when and where I was born, my life expectancy at birth was probably only around 50 years at best.
Fortunately, I came to Australia on a boat in the early 1960s, so for most of my life I have had the benefit of Australia’s wonderful health system, living conditions, prosperity, absence of civil wars and foreign invasions. Hence, I now base my numbers on the Australian life tables.
Why 80 years of ‘useful life’?
When I set up the chart, I arbitrarily divided the 100 years into 80 years of ‘useful life’ and the last 20 years as ‘bonus’ years, if I am lucky enough to get them. My median life expectancy was 80 at that time (based on Australian life tables).
Also, I figured that my health and ability to fully participate and contribute will probably be in terminal decline from around the mid-70s or 80.
Mind you, I have some great friends who are now in their mid-80s and they are still sharp as a tack. For example, Noel Whittaker is ‘fit as a mallee bull’ and is as busy as ever. Don Stammer is still mentally super sharp and physically still as active as a ‘Duracell bunny’ despite battling Parkinsons Disease for more than a decade.
Life’s a lottery
As Tom Hanks’ character Forest Gump summed up:
“Life’s like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get!”
My father died at 79 from a bunch of cancers in his last ten years.
My brother died in a plane crash at 50 – out of the blue, literally.
My mother had severe vascular dementia and died six months ago after a massive stroke at age 97. Mentally and physically completely shot.
The wife of my best man at my first wedding died suddenly of leukemia just three years later when she was 29, leaving Rob to bring up their three young girls.
A couple of years ago my good buddy and close collaborator Graham Hand (Cuffelinks/Firstlinks) was super fit and playing competitive football at age 64, but died less than a year later from a sudden brain tumour.
Life’s a lottery.
My journey so far
I look at the chart and think: up to age 15 (20% of estimated possible ‘useful life’) I was basically growing up, figuring out who I was.
The period from 15 to 23 was about maturing into an adult – finishing high school, uni, travel, part-time work, moving to a new city/state for first full-time job, figuring out my place in the world. By age 23 I had already ‘used up’ about 30% of my ‘useful life’. That’s one third of my likely useful life gone just getting started!
Then from age 23 (30% of useful life) to age 65 a couple of years ago (80% of cumulative useful life) – I was building my career, jobs, businesses, skills, experiences, family, friends.
Historical context
To expect 80 years of useful life is considered fairly normal these days in a rich, lucky country like Australia but it is actually quite extraordinary in the grand scheme of things. For most of human history, people only lived to around 20 to 30 years of age at best. Most of my forebears died at relatively young ages from illness or in wars or doing dangerous work.
During almost all of human history, life was ‘nasty, brutal, and short’. (Thomas Hobbes, ‘Leviathan’, 1651), echoing ‘vita brevis’ from Hippocrates in 400 BC.
To survive childbirth and the first year of life was a major achievement. To live beyond 30 or 40 was a supreme gift, a bonus, that 99% of humans never had.
Successes while ‘young’
Most of what we regard as great achievements or accomplishments or contributions to society were done by people while they were ‘young’ in today’s terms. But that is all they had. They did not have the luxury of the extra decades of life we take for granted today.
Alexander the Great conquered most of the known world when he was 33. Napoleon Boneparte led his rampage across Europe at 27. Joan of Arc inspired the citizens of France into revolution when she was just 18.
Cleopatra lived just 39 years, Eva Peron 33, Benazir Bhutto 35, Martin Luther King Jnr 39.
Charles Darwin was just 22 when he set out on the Beagle to develop his theories on evolution and natural selection.
Albert Einsten was 22 when he started publishing papers that revolutionised physics.
Isaac Newton was 43 when he published 'Principia Mathematica', which laid the foundation the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century.
John Maynard Keynes started publishing his papers at 26.
Mozart lived to just 35, Jimmy Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Janis Joblin, Amy Winehouse, Robert Johnson, Brian Jones all died at 27, John Lennon 40, Buddy Holly 22, Otis Reading 26, Richie Valens 17.
Anne Frank wrote her diaries when she was just 13. William Shakespeare had his first stories published when he was 26. Emily Bronte only lived to 30. John Keats to 26.
Nelson Mandella was 26 when he co-founded African National Congress's Youth League.
Malala Yousafzai was 15 when she was shot in the head by Taliban gunman and started a global movement promoting female rights to schooling in Pakistan.
Samantha Reed Smith was just 10 when she wrote to USSR leader Yuri Andropov and became a peace activist during the Cold War before dying in a plane crash aged just 13.
Iqbal Masih was 4 years old when his parents sold him into child slavery at a Pakistani carpet factory, he escaped from slavery at age 10 and campaigned against child slave labour until he was killed by the carpet factory mafia at age 12.
Thomas Edison obtained his first patent when he was 22, Marie Curie first discovered new radioactive elements at 31, Henry Ford started Ford at 40.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple when they were 22 and 26 respectively. Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft when they were 19 and 22. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google when they were both 23. Mark Zuckerberg started ‘Facemash’ (Facebook) at age 19.
Some Aussies:
Caroline Chisolm was 30 when she started setting up shelters for immigrant females and families.
Banjo Patterson was 23 when he started writing poems for the Bulletin, railing against Aussies joining the British war in Sudan.
Henry Lawson was 20 when he published his first poems.
Charles Kingsford Smith was 31 when he flew the first transpacific flight in 1928.
It seems our world was made by young people! Actually they weren’t ‘young’ at all. 99% of humans lived much shorter lives than we do today in rich countries like Australia. They just made the best of whatever time they had.
I have lived many decades longer than these folk when they made their mark, and I certainly have had far more favourable conditions, privileges, and opportunities handed to me, but what have I contributed?
Late starters
The good news for us oldies is that there have been some ‘late starters’. For example:
- Colonel Harland Sanders was 62 when he opened his first KFC in 1952.
- Ray Crock was 58 when he bought Dick & Mac MacDonald’s burger chain in 1961.
- Joseph A Campbell was 78 when he made his first condensed soup (Campbell Soups).
Time left
Although 83% of my estimated ‘useful life’ is gone according to my chart (3,453 weeks out of 4,460 weeks), that still leaves 17% of supposedly ‘useful life’ left. That’s 707 weeks! And possibly even more if I get into ‘bonus’ time. Surely that should be plenty of time to get some real stuff done and work toward my life purpose (which by the way has nothing to do with finance or investing or writing).
Problem is - as Forest Gump warned, something has come up -
Curve ball
This year there is suddenly a new “life’s like a box of chocolates” element in play. Less than a month ago (early December 2025) I got a cancer diagnosis out of the blue. Malignant cancerous tumour in large intestine. No symptoms. It just came up in a routine scan, then confirmed by tests and biopsy.
So later this week (early January) I am going in for cancer surgery and then possibly chemo or whatever else is required, depending on what they cut out and what remains lurking in the shadows for future surprises.
My father’s demise taught me that surgery and chemo/radiation therapy never remove all of the cancer. There are undetectable microscopic bits left behind that can have a nasty habit of popping up elsewhere in the body.
Time to re-focus
It certainly does focus the mind. I am re-focusing my efforts to make the most of every day I have left on the planet because no one ever knows what is around the corner.
I look forward to updating ‘My Life in Weeks’ same time next year, and for many more years after that.
‘Till next time – safe investing, and stay fit and healthy!
For more on life expectancy tables, how they work, how life expectancy has increased over time, and how to construct your own ‘survival probability curve’ see -
Also, I wrote a couple of stories on my experiences with my mother’s dementia journey:
For my 2025 year-end wrap-up of local & global markets for Aussie investors: