The way he quits, the feeling of "liberation", it borders on sociopathic in some ways. Pretending you're going on holiday when in reality you're going to die, who has time for such games when they've got a 30 day timer running.
It reads like a movie, not like my experience with reality.
You had much experience of being told you have 30 days to live?
This line is an incredible clue that it is fake:
>I do not want to go into details about the disease. I do not want to go into the particularities of my life. And because time is short, there will be no comments, no contact address.
Hard to prove false when literally no information is given.
These two lines are interesting though:
>I am 58 years old and I never will 59. I will die in 2013.
>Yesterday, I had the whole life ahead of me. Thirty or forty years, at least. Today thirty days.
Either he's losing track of his lies, he's bad at math or he has unrealistic expectations about life expectancy. If a 58 year old had "thirty or forty years, at least" ahead of him that means that he was expecting to live to "at least" 98 years old.
EDIT: Here are links to Day 2 and Day 3 translations.
At the age of close to 60 I'd assume that you would have some indications of whether you'd live short or past the average life expectancy. Obviously with no guarantees...
Of course, the trend could accelerate, but it could also easily plateau (or even reverse in an extreme case, perhaps due to environmental influences). Current trends don't seem to show 100-year average life expectancy before 2100.
* Edit: this was combined stats for men and women. For men, you can subtract a few years, and for women, add a few. Also, I realise I'm just linearly extrapolating the data, but it's not like the data shows some kind of exponential growth; if anything, it's flattening out.
This is important because I don't think that life expectancy for a 60yr old has changed dramatically ... it's just infant care is better, so fewer people die <5 yrs old, and that raises the long term average too.
This might suggest that your estimate is too liberal — not too exciting. On the other hand, we are working hard, as a society, on some gnarly medical issues, and it's possible we'll make a huge break through and figure out how to deal with obesity, heart disease, or cell aging and totally change the situation over the next few decades.
1. They did not die during their first year of birth. About 6 babies in 1000 die during the first year of birth in the US. 2. They did not die as a youth from depression or driving their car into a tree.
That being said, this histogram (logarithmic scale) suggests that one's odds of living to 100 are still somewhat low: http://www.benbest.com/lifeext/number.jpg
I've never seen anyhing to back up your assertion. Do you have a source for your life expectancy prediction?
Source for historic life expectancy: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
Also isn't it funy how incredible things are always "20 years away"? You might want to rewatch the movies 2001 and 2010 to see where many people thought we would be technologically over a decade ago.
"Do you have a source for your life expectancy prediction?"
I can't get to it now, as I'm sitting on it. In other words, I'm not a biologist and I was making a wild guess. I was trying to make the point that our life expectancies may be significantly longer than we think because they are partly the product of medical knowledge that does not exist now but will be created during our lives. But I should not have used a specific number.
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
According to that, a 58 ear old male in 2009 can expect to live to 80. That link represents the best information we have available today. Could there be some miracle cure for aging in the next 20 years? Probably not but maybe. Will it help the person who is 78 when it is discovered? Almost definitely not - the aging damage has been done!
I'll give you a few example: "Can I steal this from you?" => "I'm certain you are OK with me borrowing this for 2 minutes.". "Buy enough beer for 3 dozen people" => "We're 6 but we really want to have a good time."
I think most of your clues are inconclusive, but I don't care one way or another. I'm just going to sit back, relax and hope that the emotions I feel from this blog are less real than the actual blog. Because that is what a story is, and one way or another this man is telling a story.
Hey, you forget how health care is so great in France :p
[Edit] Link to twitter https://twitter.com/uncondamne/following
>Mon fils me montre comrent tweeter depuis mon téléphone. Tweeter me suggère de suivre plein de journalistes. Amusant!
>My son shows me how to use tweeter from my phone. Tweeter suggests me to follow a lot of journalists. Funny !
(plan pension is a literal translation from dutch: pensioen plan)
It does looks very fake. The engineer says he is also a hobbyist writer, so maybe he has a taste for romanticism, but i think it is way too much stylized to be a real testimony. It definitely reads like what contemporary french author writes.