Play It By The Numbers

For the most part, when you wake up each day the world is largely the same as when you went to bed. Some days are really dramatic, either personally or historically. Births, deaths, first dates, weddings, new jobs. 9/11. But most days are pretty much variations on fixed themes of work, food, and entertainment. In the interlude between the end of one day and the beginning of the next, somewhere between 6 and 8 hours have passed, you’ve shed about 152 Million cells, give or take 100,000 here or there, and .001% of your life is over. And while you were sleeping and essentially not moving a muscle, you hurtled through 5,390 miles of space rotationally, and 469,000 more miles in orbit around the sun. Whew, you really get around! 

But the sun is the same in a relative way… 

You awake to a world that has, as a net increase, 228,960 more people in it, which seems like a lot but is actually fairly infinitesimal compared to the base population of 7 Billion. As varied as our lives may seem from one another, a ton of things are virtually identical from person to person.  Each day we all take an average of 23,000 breaths; you only get 654,810,000 of those, so careful how you spend them. Your heart beats 105,000 times in a day and you spend .004% of your given lifespan over 24 hours. Over 99% of your DNA is exactly the same as every other person on earth. Which means I’m pretty much 99% Michael Jordan, William Shatner and Janis Joplin. Which is awesome. I’m  guessing my jumpshot is contained in the other fraction of a percent.  Just my luck. In fact, pretty much everything that matters is in that 1%. Height, weight, eye, hair and skin color. Gender. What a difference one measly percent makes. The difference between me filling stadiums like Janice, versus torturing the drunks down at the Karaoke bar on Thursday nights. Oh, well. I can still out-act Shatner. Which isn’t saying much. Kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahn!!!!   See? Who needs that 1%?

Waking up in America is pretty much the best thing that has ever happened to anyone, anywhere. Ever. For all our belly-aching, even the poorest people in America are richer than 80% of the world. 5.6 billion people on the planet live on $10 a day or less. And that’s a true purchasing power, inflation adjusted number. Rupees, Pesos, Rubles. Whatever. The guy with the cardboard sign at the freeway entrance by my house makes more than that in an hour. In a lot of ways, it’s actually better to wake up in a refrigerator crate in some alley in America, than almost anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa. Your survival rate there is measured in single-digit years, and 40,000 people per day die of starvation. 

In my town it’s hard to even find a malnourished looking homeless person, which seems odd. But maybe it isn’t, since more than 2/3 of kids and adults are overweight to obese. Strange since the poverty and hunger statistics seem to indicate that people should be a lot thinner. I suppose that depends on how you define “hungry." In America it has a very specific definition. If a person only has 2 meals per day, instead of 3, they are on the hunger roles. It doesn’t matter if they have 5,000 calories in those 2 meals and are overweight. They are still considered “hungry”. Try explaining that to Starvin’ Marvin. And while you’re at it, try explaining how the appetizer is the food we eat before the food we eat, and dessert is the food we eat after the food we eat. 

In olden days only rich people could get fat, and it was considered a status symbol. That’s why Botticelli’s all tended toward the portly. The poor had to hustle to feed themselves and their families and rarely had enough to eat, let alone get fat. Today that is reversed; only rich people can afford to eat the locally sourced, sustainable, fair trade, organic, free range Manna that their chefs and nutritionists prepare for them. Who else could afford the second mortgage it takes to show up at Gold’s Gym every day and have their Nike-Under-Armor-clad asses toned by Fabrizio, lipo-ed by Dr. Schwarzman, and then reinjected into their lips by a duly licensed aesthetician from the former People’s Republic of Wherever, where she used to be their Surgeon General but in America is only qualified to administer shots to your face and wax your bikini zone. The rest of us fatties have to subsist on Twinkies, french fries, and whatever genetically modified, congealed petroleum product Monsanto has dreamed up for us. And just when we were getting around to legalizing weed, somebody took the Twinkies away. It’s a world gone mad.

It’s actually cheaper to microwave a burrito and pop open a can of malted battery acid (read: Coca-Cola) than to prepare a salad. At least up front. Let’s not talk about the 190 billion dollars a year we spend on obesity related healthcare. It takes about 7 bucks a day to feed an adult mouth around here. That’s not taking into account the cost of utilities and appliances to refrigerate, boil, fry, bake, blend, puree or frappé your Pop-Tarts and tacos. So if you never, ever go out to eat, you can satiate your cake hole for one year at the bargain basement price of $2,555. Just shy of $200,000 over a lifetime. Maybe less, if you’ll buy Costco-sized pallets of freeze-dried, dehydrated, vacuum-packed for freshness, preservative-delivery foodstuffs with ingredients like sugar-enriched flour, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, polysorbate 60, and yellow dye number 5. Just everything a growing tumor needs. Don’t forget to add in the cost of your own forklift. Although I’m told they include one for free when you meet the metric tonnage requirements on your Sam’s Club punch-card.

The chances are you’ll drive around 33 miles today as you make the rounds of work, food, errands and entertainment. All the hunter-gathery stuff you have to engage in to sustain this constant need you have for caloric intake and BTU’s.  All that consumption gets expensive pretty quickly. Thank goodness for that job of yours. On average, you’re probably making around 17 bucks an hour, and you’ll work about 2,000 hours this year. That’s just shy of 25% of the year. Take into account the other 30% of the year you spend sleeping (you lazy git!), and you wind up with 45% of your life left to brush your teeth, wash your car, clean out the gutters, and buy shit on Amazon. To say nothing of those episodes of Mad Men you have filling up your DVR. Don’t forget to schedule that 4 hour window for TV watching each day. That way you hit your quota of 2 solid months a year, two weeks of which is commercials. Now what to do about those 10 other pesky months?  Facebook, anyone?

Considering that you’ll hunt and gather about 38-40 tons of food over your lifetime, enough to fill a 53 foot semi wall to wall and floor to ceiling, and then magically turn it all into a river of sewage that has to be pumped out of your life and into a treatment plant before going into the local river, you might need a nest to feather and tuck all 53,655,000 calories away into. I mean, that’s a lot of energy! What in the world are you going to do with it? Well for starters, you completely replace all 50 Trillion cells in your body every 7 years. That means you’re literally a new person every seven years. Maybe that’s why marriages only tend to last about that long. The person you married no longer exists by the end of that time, and you have a completely new model of them on your hands. The old switcheroo has been pulled. Over the course of your lifetime, there will be around 11 versions of you. Hopefully one of them is someone you can live with. 

So while you’re busy building all those clones of yourself and passing them off as the “real” you, you’ll  probably need a house to do it in. That’s the American Dream, after all. It’ll set you back about $180,800 right now, on average. That’s if you pay cash, of course. If you have $18,000 laying around for a down payment, you could take out a 30 year fixed rate loan and make 360 payments of $869.00 (not including taxes, insurance, or utilities, and assuming you never, ever remodel or make repairs) and wind up paying about $313,050 for your  $180,800, 1,200 square foot filing cabinet.

Make sure it has more than 1 bathroom because you’ll spend a year and a half of your life in there. Brushing, tweezing, waxing, washing, shaving and just generally beating back the unending tide of dead skin cells, hair, fluids, oils, secretions and bacteria that you produce on a continual basis. All of which must be scoured off of you every 24 hours to prevent a toxic buildup of halitosis, or whatever other thing the advertisers can dream up to make you hate yourself. It’s revolting really, but the only cure requires you to permanently assume room temperature. Even then your hair and nails continue to grow for some time. You’re unstoppable. 

Then, once you’ve got that all squared away, you’ll have to decide what kind of cutlery defines you as a person, and try to pick out a couch you can live with for a few decades. What a hassle. Maybe you should just get a weekly rate over at Motel 6 and spend about $1,860 a month for a kitchenette and never worry about running up your light bill or taking 2 hour showers. Then it’s all sporks, red Solo-cups, Hot Pockets, free basic cable and Wi-Fi. Plus a mint on your pillow every single day. They’ll leave the light on for you. 

That all sounds very daunting, demoralizing even. I guess it kind of is. But take heart, you’ll earn about $2 Million over a lifetime of work in this country, on average. That’s an all-in number. Salary, overtime, benefits, vacation, sick pay, maternity leave, disability, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, life insurance, inheritance and tax returns.  If you get a Master’s Degree, it’ll be noticeably more.  Unless it’s in Art History. If you drop out of High School, it’s substantially less. Unless you can sing, dance, or play the guitar, and know the right somebody.  

So make sure you think of that before you decide to rob a bank to finance all the crap you don’t need, but still want to have so you can impress all the people you don’t care about. The Big Payday better be worth more than $2 Million. And make sure to get it in non-sequential bills. Otherwise you can’t spend it anywhere, since a sequentially marked bill takes less than 72 hours to show up on the Treasury radar. And lift with your legs, not your back. Money is heavy. $2 Million in $100 bills weighs 46 pounds. Don’t ask me why I know that, plausible deniability is your best defense. 46 pounds is a bitch to run with. Try filling a Home Depot 5 gallon bucket with water, and then carry it around your house for a minute. A duffel bag full of cash weighs more than that.

Probably better to just do your workaday routine, than to wind up with a 10 year hole in your employment history wherein you are not earning that portion of your lifetime $2 Million in cash and prizes. After that, you have to check that box on the job application that says “Yes” to whether or not you’ve ever been convicted of a felony, and join the ranks of the 3% of Americans adults who are “under correctional supervision”.  That’s 6 Million people, about the same as in Stalin’s Gulag, costing about $30,000 a mouth to provide with food, healthcare, and cable. 2.4 Million of them are in for simple drug possession. Hmmm. I don’t have cable… Maybe that robbery thing is starting to look a little better after all. I’ve never even seen an episode of the Sopranos. I’m sure a little embezzlement could earn me 3 hots and a cot for 18 months at Danbury Minimum Security.  Just keep your head down and it’ll all be over in no time.

Of course, money isn’t everything. In fact, after about $80,000 a year it stops being reported as a source of satisfaction or happiness. Seems like the sweet spot is between $30,000 and $80,000, or to break it down, $15-$40 an hour. After that? Well there’s only so many boats you can water ski behind. And money can’t really buy you happier relationships with your family if you didn’t have them already. It doesn’t retroactively erase abuse, neglect, mistreatment or name calling. It doesn’t give you or anyone else a better personality. It can take you on vacation and buy you nice stuff, but not make your kids behave better or love you more. Once it reaches the end of its usefulness, you have a museum of knick-knacks and grown up toys to curate, and… what else? Still, I’d rather cry in a mansion than a hot-sheet motel, so obviously it has its uses. I mean, those kids of yours will cost you about $235,000 a piece to feed, clothe, house, and educate. And that’s just till they’re 18. If you’re paying for that college degree… well, I just hope they pick a decent rest home for you. Be nice! 

If you don’t feel like taking my word on the whole money thing, you could always try winning the lottery. Sure the odds are crazy against it. You’re more likely to be killed by a falling airplane part. More likely to be struck by lightning, multiple times. More likely to win an Academy Award. More likely to become President of the United States. More likely to be killed in an extinction level event involving an asteroid. Good news though, winning the lottery is still more likely than being killed by a shark. So you’ve got that going for you, which is nice. And if you actually win, you’ve got about a 50/50 chance of holding on to the money for more than 5 years. A little worse than your odds of making a successful go of a marriage for the same time period. Easy come, easy go I suppose.

If you really want to get into a pool where you have a much better chance of winning, consider joining this one. There is an elite group of lottery winners that enjoys a rate of 1 in 45,613, as opposed to the usual Megamillions rate of 1 in 130 Million or more. This group is made up of a fairly average cross section of Americans. They hail from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. There is surprisingly little discrimination, although there is some, to be sure. The winners do tend to be men over women, and non-Hispanic Blacks, at that. Don’t hate the player, baby, hate the game. But in a surprise twist, the game does tend to favor older folks over the younger players. The great thing about this lottery is that if you don’t win today, you have another chance tomorrow. And the next day… This group of 6,884 people woke up this morning and went about their business just like you and me because most of them had no idea that they were going to die today.

They eat, sleep, work, shit, shop, have sex and watch TV like everyone else. But unlike the rest of us, today doesn’t represent .004% of their lifespan. Today is the margin call; the loan has amortized and the vig is due in full. To some it comes as no surprise; it’s a relief even. In my years as an orderly in a retirement home I watched dozens of people die, often very suddenly, and became convinced that the majority of them chose the date of their deaths with some deliberation. On Birthdays, Anniversaries and Holidays most often. Anecdotal evidence at best, but quite convincing when you watch it happen yourself. 

But for many others the imminence of their demise comes as an unexpected shock. They go to church or out grocery shopping or to the movies in blithe ignorance of the fact that some worthless drunk with 4 DUI’s is finally going to match speed and timing perfectly to intersect with the life of the first person they’ve ever killed. We’ll all react with appropriate shock and outrage. Then we’ll sentence them to 10-15 years of free food, healthcare and cable that costs us more than $300,000. 

Somebody else has no idea that the bullet with their name on it has been loaded into a gun. As crazy as it sounds, the person that ends them is most likely an acquaintance, family member or friend. And you’re actually much more likely to die by gunfire if you’re a criminal. Apparently, they all target each other, and any kind of felony conviction ups the odds of your death by lead poisoning 7 times more than John Q.

But waaaay more of the winners have simply made the last installment on their layaway suicide plan. Fired down the last cheeseburger, Twinkie or cigarette. Heart Disease, Cancer, and Stroke. The Big 3. No single smoke, midnight snack, or run to Mickey D’s could ever really be held to blame, I suppose. Just like no single snow flake is really to blame for an avalanche. Of course, every avalanche is made exclusively of snowflakes. It seems everything counts in large amounts.

Of our 6,884 winners, the majority of them will pass from old age. 1,585 of them are over the age of 80, which is pretty much the outside edge of national life expectancy. Of course, no one dies simply from being old, there is always a cause, like injury or disease. But once you reach a certain age, every kind of death is considered a natural cause. 

Heart attacks edge out cancer by a nose. The big C takes 1,574 souls a day into the great unknown, but those heart attacks are 1,588. Strokes come in at around 355 a day. Various and combined diseases like Diabetes, MS, AIDS, Lupus, TB, the Flu, Meningitis, E Coli claim around 1,402. Even some old chestnuts like Bubonic Plague and Rabies will crop up to take out a few from time to time.

Suicides and car accidents are about neck and neck with 101 and 90 per day, respectively. Accidental poisonings and falls come in at 87 and 73. Then murder. About 45 per day. That seems pretty low in a certain light. Chicago is the place you’re most likely to be done in by foul play, although violent crime is way down this year across the board in every state. It’s oddly comforting to think that you’re more likely to take a spill off a ladder or slip in the tub than to be shot or dismembered by a serial killer. Cars, cigarettes, and donuts actually turn out to be more dangerous in the long run than assault rifles and nuclear weapons.

Together boats, trains and planes take out a combined 4 people per day. You would need to fly once a day, every day, for about 123,000 years to actually die in a plane crash. In fact, of the people involved in crashes, which are damned few to begin with, almost 96% survive. Only about 7 people a day die in fires. And remember the SARS “epidemic”? It had a survival rate of over 98%. You’d think it was the Zombie Apocalypse the way people freaked out about it. You know what has a worse survival rate? Almost everything. The flu. Taking a shower. Driving to work. It seems we’ve spent a lot of time being afraid of the wrong things. 

When I was 9 my parents had a renter in a glorified shed that stood on the back edge of our property. His name was Duffy, he was an aircraft mechanic for McDonald-Douglas. He was a Viet Nam Vet and just about the coolest cat a 9 year old kid could ever hope to meet. He had an epic mustache, and facial scars that he got from a piece of shrapnel that took out 4 of his molars as it passed through both cheeks. They looked like dimples. He listened to a lot of Skynrd and Three Dog Night, and he dated a hot, blonde hippy-chick name of Daisy. Think Meg Ryan with a little more Va-va-voom. She was the first person I ever met who wore leather pants. Absolutely scandalous to my 9 year old brain. It’s hard to overstate the kind of cachet they had with a good little Star Wars nerd like me. They would take me out with them for ice cream from time to time, riding around in an open-top Jeep blaring “Never Been to Spain” and “One Day at a Time”. It was awesome. Right up to the time that I noticed Daisy never, ever wore her seatbelt.

I was raised by a 24 year Naval Veteran who, in his youth, had exited a moving convertible the hard way. Straight through the windshield. Over 75% of people ejected from vehicles die. And of the few survivors, most are horribly disfigured or paralyzed for life. He threaded the needle and came out in one piece, probably not any uglier than he already would’ve been, judging by his brothers. Consequently, the discipline of wearing a seatbelt was ingrained into me before I could walk, and defiance of that rule was the surest route to a swat on the bottom. So Daisy refusing to wear hers, not out of laziness but pure, incorrigible willfulness, was practically sacrilegious. Even more scandalous than her leather pants, if that were possible. When I questioned her on it, with the kind of concern and earnestness that only a child can generate, she told me that she had survived a car accident because of not wearing hers. She too had been ejected from a vehicle that had then rolled down an embankment and killed two of her friends. She had lived once because of doing the wrong thing. The stupid thing. The kind of thing that would have earned me a red bottom. The idea that my Dad’s advice and training could be so wrong, as evidenced by the practice and philosophy of the infallible hotness of the leather clad Daisy, was existentially horrifying to me. Perhaps my very first crisis of faith.

When I confronted my Dad with the evidence, all atwitter with my new knowledge, he did what he always did. He took a fear-filled kid being driven by emotion and, with infinite patience, shone the light of reason on the situation. He disarmed my fears with rational facts, like an Aikido Sensei easily redirecting an opponent’s energy back on itself. Daisy had somehow found one of the two times a day that a stopped clock told the right time, and then she'd set her watch by it. Sure, some people survive accidents because of not wearing a seatbelt. But the odds are 5 to 1 against. And you play the odds. The race may not always be to the swift, nor the battle to the strong… But that’s the way to bet. 

Every day we wake up in America, the lottery fires up again and selects its 6,884 winners. The gross odds are 1 in 45,613 that today will be your day. Of course that’s not really meaningful in a scientifically accurate statistical study. It goes down if you don’t smoke, goes up if you’re a non-Hispanic Black man of a certain age, etc. The only thing that’s certain is that sooner or later everybody’s a winner. We all know this, it’s not news. But we go right on with whatever our thing is. Skydiving, maybe. But more than likely it’s sitting in front of a screen of some sort, and combining our two favorite activities: eating and not moving. Worrying about—(Insert boogeyman here)—when we’re already doing the thing that is ending our lives one breath at a time. 

Somehow we convince ourselves that we are special. Beautiful and unique little snowflakes for whom the normal rules do not apply. But the quickest way to become a statistic is to imagine that you are not one. Numbers define our lives. For an actuarial analyst, everyone fits into a category, even those who think they’re rebels. That’s their category. Imagining that you’re not in a category, is a category. Actuarial tables exist for every kind of scenario and a surprising number of variables. One legged albinos and tap-dancing pimps have predictable life-spans that pan out if the statistical sample is big enough. Everything counts in large amounts. On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everything drops to zero. But you play it by the numbers. Because, really, what else is there?

Whatever it is that we are all so busy doing, one thing is certain: The one who dies with the most toys… still dies. The hunting and gathering, the careers, are all fine and dandy, and necessary to sustain life. But to what end? What are you staying alive for?  Because whatever your particular thoughts of the afterlife, or lack thereof, the last number I’ll throw at you is 1. That’s how many times you go around, how many shots you get at it. The percent that is singularly you. 1.

But that does make you unique. Just like everybody else.