retirement and early death

When DH retired the actuaries figures showed that the younger you were when retiring the longer you enjoyed retirement. With the increasing of the retirement age and the way in which people are generally living longer nowadays it will be interesting to see how this affects the actuarial figures - totally skewed I expect!

DH has an ambition to be drawing his pension for longer than he was paying into it - I shall help him all I can!

Sorry I haven't read the whole thread but at the risk of repetition life expectancy is longer the earlier you retire. I retired at 56!

Well, I'm taking early retirement, aged 58, at the end of Jan 16. I've eased myself into it by going down to 3 days a week, a year ago. I hope to have a long, healthy and happy retirement! Bound to have - I'm gonna to be looking after 3 DGC!

Well, IMHO, it's people who have had very stressful jobs. The adrenaline (or whatever)has kept them going for so long and suddenly no adrenaline so they collapse. Famous Russian author novel - people in the gulags who kept on on a thread till the day they were released and then died. Even if the job was not stressful retirement would be a shock to the system.

Locally we have death cafes - not that I would ever go to one - where people discuss death. The subject has become taboo even though we all know it's going to happen. I empty the odd cupboard now and then, burn a few old letters...

I was buying into your first paragraph.
I had wondered what part adrenaline plays in things.
I hadnt heard about the gulags situation.

death cafes?

This may sound strange, but during my daily perusal of the deaths column of my local paper, it struck me that the majority of people who had died were either under 70, or over 80. Some days, I have counted, and worked out the percentages, roughly, and it really does seem to follow this pattern. The number who died in their 70's tends to be under 20%. Maybe it's just where I live!

So the danger years are our 70's!! Once you get past 79 you're safe!
I have a theory that 88 is the birthday to skip dread, so many deaths seem to be at that age.
I think anneliz had a good point (15.22) and that we notice what we choose to notice. A bit like when you buy a particular make or colour of car and suddenly everybody seems to be driving one. You notice the one ex-colleague who died not long after retiring but forget the dozens still going strong!
There are all sorts of reasons why statistics can mislead us, another example is the % survival rates at 1, 5 and 10 years for certain illnesses. Other factors come into play and while the figures may be accurate, they cannot be used predictively.
"More or Less" on Radio 4 every week explains this sort of thing very well.

Appropriate for Advent-Death/Judgement/Heaven and hell

No, Advent is about a coming birth!

Soontobe - Not sure what goes on in death cafes - believe it or not imported from the States...I have seen them advertised from time to time on local forums. The idea seems to be to bring death back into the mainstream - it used to be a part of daily life, for instance years ago many children died before the age of 5, it was always around and known about. Now people go away to hospital or some place apart to die, it is not so much part of our general consciousness. Not having much success with an explanation here - google it?

Just googled - it's pretty much what I said.