Let’s say your after tax income is $100k/year. And you have a choice to buy disability insurance that pays you 70% of your income (70k/yr) if you become disabled and cannot work for a 2500 annual premium.
Your options are basically a four box grid:
no insurance, no disability 100K income
no insurance, disability 0 income
Insurance, no disablity 97.5k/yr a
and
insurance, disability 70k/yr.

Life insurance is a little different- though I wouldn’t go so far to say it has no benefit to the insured. I find tremendous benefit while living in knowing that in the event I die (future income 0) my family will have assets to adjust to my absence.

So- given that I find benefit- the question becomes term (cheap, but not likely to pay off) or whole life (more expensive but guaranteed to pay off)

In my mid 20′s I chose whole life for several reasons: I didn’t want to ever have to be concerned about becoming uninsurable; I knew that someday the premiums could stop though the coverage continued and if I outlive the policy, it pays me.
Yes- if I used the same actuarial tables and assumptions as the industry, I could have bought term, invested the savings and done better on the investment side. But most term expires unpaid- so you do worse on the insurance side. Since to me the whole point was risk managment- not investment- I focusde on managing the risk, even though the investment value would under perform.

Now- since life expectancy increases have improved faster than the actuarial assumptions of my youth, my premiums have been theoretically too high. But since I should also outlive the table, my payout would come well before my death.

But either way- it’s risk management- not investment. And not really gambling- though both mathemateically and economically there are important similiarities.

Perhaps a “life settlement-backed security” is a better hybrid. I’ll have to check it out.