Viral Chart Shows How Likely You Are To Die This Year

A spectacularly morbid chart is at the top of Reddit's Data Is Beautiful section at the moment. There's no denying that the data is put in a beautifully simple way, but we're not sure we can describe it as a thing of beauty in itself. It mainly just makes us feel a deep sense of foreboding.

The graph, put together by maxandron, shows the probability of you dying based on how old you are. More specifically, it tells you how much the likelihood of you dying increases by the time you reach the next age bracket, just to scare the crap out of you every time you hit another birthday.

It uses data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which records the number of deaths per 100,000 people at each age on a chart. The data can be used to show the risk of death at each age (more on that later), but maxandron used it to show the increase/decrease in likelihood of death as compared to your previous age bracket.

Brace yourself and have a glance.

Scary looking graph, huh? As you'd expect, the likelihood of dying goes down quite steeply during very early childhood. After a bit of a wobble in adolescence, the graph shows a steady incline all the way up to your late 90s. Year on year, your risk of death increases quite steadily, until you hit 100, where it suddenly rockets.

Data from the Social Security Administration shows that by the time you hit 100, the percentage chance of you dying that year is 35 percent if you're a man, and 30 percent if you're a woman. By the time you're 118, this goes up to an 84 percent chance for both men and women.

We thought we'd present a slightly more reassuring graph based on data from the Social Security Administration that shows your percentage likelihood of death each year. 

As you'd expect, the risk of death climbs earlier for men than it does for women. The difference doesn't really begin to stand out until the age of 72. The average life expectancy in the latest available data from the World Bank for Americans is 79.