Or the proper subtitle: on why I am neither on death's door nor a superman -- where the implication might have been that I once thought myself a superman -- but now I think I am just an average American man...sort of.
The following post* is a chat with Grok after I had a "prostate cancer genomic classification" test come back recently with a really bad and off-putting score. The purpose here was to contextualize for myself -- using my amateur actuary-sleuth blog past -- the received score (which said I had a 15 year expectation of mortality of 29.1%) and the concurrent two thoughts:
1) "holy sh*t, that's really high" and
2) "hey, wait a second, isn't that new estimate pretty close to the actuarial expectation for, like, every man? ...isn't that more or less all of us, that is if we are not superman?"
This chat is bit long, a little repetitious, and a little esoteric. Some of the AI response-summary stuff below kind of get's to the point a little faster if you want to speed. The TL;DR is that my now "updated" (a bit of an abrupt update I must say) at-age-66 fifteen year mortality expectation from the diagnostic test is now maybe a little farther away from the healthy cohort (eg SOA IAM tables) that I thought I was in and now a lot closer to the US average (e.g., SSA longevity tables). This means that I am not nearly inside the looming dramatic death sentence it looked like at first i.e., the "reframe" path has been from: "I am super-duper healthy and I will live forever" to "near-death-gasp!" and then back to "I guess that this isn't really the end of the world yet, is it?"
Without further set-up:
* And you thought this blog was dead, lol...