A few months back I thought it would be interesting to look at an actuarial table to find the conditional probability of a 26 year old living to 27. What I discovered really changed my outlook on life:
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
A 26 year old male has a 0.1412% chance of not seeing 27, that's approximately 1 in 708. If you had asked me to estimate that probability I would have been off by a couple of orders of magnitude - I didn't think it was anywhere NEAR that high. So what does that mean for me? Well it makes a lot of my problems, my fears etc seem pretty trivial. Fits in pretty well with my life philosophy, don't worry about it, make the best of it and don't do anything (excessively) stupid.
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