Personal Life Expectancy Influences Major Decisions

Subconsciously, each of us has an age that we believe we'll live to see. This is our personal life expectancy, and we may not be aware of it at all. In a new study, experts were able to show that this value – how long we expect to live – influences some of the most important decisions in our lives.

For the purpose of this research, experts defined major life events as including marriage, divorce, abortion, having a child and attending university, among others. They found that all of these decisions were influenced by perceived mortality.

This is not uncommon in nature. Many species are known to engage in certain types of behaviors – especially reproductive ones – in ways that enable them to produce the largest number of offspring, regardless of the death toll this implies.

As an example of this, experts at Queen’s University say, people who subconsciously expect to live longer tend to invest more in education than those with a reduced life expectancy, PsychCentral reports.