Show HN: Visualizing Your Life in Weeks

I remember I built this exact same thing. I was bored at work and made a small counter of how much money I earned per second, and I enjoyed very much how the number was incrementing. I started gold plating the application, adding features, animations. Soon I was able to configure how much would I make pr day, how much remained of the day. How much remained of the week..<p>Then I started thinking about averages, and added in configuration to the timeline that would show approximately how far I had progressed until retirement, and then approximately estimated lifespan remaining.<p>I had it running for a day or so, and just by watching the time tick away made me realize something, I discovered something profound and important to me. The application disgusted me, and I deleted everything.<p>I don&#x27;t want to be reminded, it depressed me. Today, I try to cease the moments, and enjoy every seconds. Even the bad things are good. Everything is precious and specially wonderful. I am fortunate to have a unique perspective and my life is easy.<p>Some things are better not to know, to think about or speculate about.

Excited to share this interactive visualization builder. I have a similar graphic on my personal site that counts down the weeks left in my life, and lots of people found it either interesting or very depressing (mostly depressing) [0]. So I wanted to build a way to let others see their own!<p>Based on the waitbutwhy article with the same title [1], this visualization builder let&#x27;s you see the life calendar for your own life. It also includes milestones of some successful people, denoting which week in their life they reached a certain achievement.<p>I initially submitted this to HN a few months ago and it got flagged for the title being click-baity, which makes a lot of sense [2]. Though the site itself is the same, I&#x27;ve made the title more accurate and more descriptive and am adding this explanatory comment! Thank you to the HN moderators for giving me insight into why it was flagged the first time. Would love to know if this is still pushing it. Definitely open to any criticism and feedback!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;galeeb.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;galeeb.com&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;waitbutwhy.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;life-weeks.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;waitbutwhy.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;life-weeks.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21227298" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21227298</a>

am I the only one who thinks tools that induce time anxiety aren&#x27;t really healthy?<p>i&#x27;d rather use a carrot than a stick. this is a psychological stick.

This is pretty cool. I like this: &quot;If it takes 50 weeks to become advanced at any skill, you can learn about 44 new skills during your career or 64 if you include retirement. Might as well pick something for this week&quot;.

Years ago, back when I had a cube with my own personal white board at work, I covered it in 80 rows each containing 12 boxes each, with the boxes in the first 32 or 33 rows all crossed out. Every month, I&#x27;d cross another one out.<p>It was quite a conversation starter.

Pedantic, but I think on the initial screen this should say &quot;Enter your birthdate&quot; (or &quot;date of birth&quot;) rather than &quot;birthday&quot; - the former is when you were born, the latter is the thing you celebrate every year.

Date of death calculators were all the rage back in the day of cgi-bin, and the new fangled javascript.<p>Must be something about working in I.T. which makes you wonder how much more of it you&#x27;ve got left.

I liked how you built the &#x2F;die&#x2F;{n} URL so that you can just bookmark it and it will update for you. Nice work.

I really hate webpages where things don&#x27;t zoom consistently. Zoom should scale everything the same. Just like how zoom works in real life, or essentially any other context with optics, or bringing something closer to read it, or further away to see more of it.<p>If I&#x27;m zooming, I don&#x27;t want your buttons and graphics to adapt themselves to be relatively bigger. That&#x27;s godawful behavior that ruins the usefulness of zoom entirely. I&#x27;m perfectly capable of zooming back to click your buttons if I really want to. (In other news, the percentage of time I click these buttons is low, on the order of 1&#x2F;200. They aren&#x27;t as important to me as they are to you.)<p>Why is the web full of this behavior?!

Nice. But optimistic as it assume you will get to live to 90.<p>I think there are actuarial tables where you can get an estimate based on your age. Or just mark ~75 as expected and use a different color for extra time beyond the expected.

Check out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;timestripe.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;timestripe.com&#x2F;</a> — a similar thing, but fancier

It will be nice to use geolocation to use the life expectancy of the country the person lives on (with a couple of areas that have their own numbers: Sardinia, Okinawa, Icaria, Nicoya, Loma Linda).<p>I can say 91 years old is a little bit pessimistic (at least for where I live) based on the fact that I have a couple of neighbours that are over 100 years old and still in &quot;perfect&quot; shape.

That visualization is anxiety inducing

Christ this scares me. No thanks!

I&#x27;m getting a pretty good instance of the Hermann grid illusion [1] from it.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Grid_illusion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Grid_illusion</a>

I can see the point, but any website that starts with asking for confidential info is a turn off. Makes me think about privacy policy, which is a time waste.

500,000 hrs is a reasonable approximation of the waking hours in a human life.

Another way to visualize it is to view each decade as a chapter. Say that you live to 80, so you have 8 chapters. So if you are 40, half of your book is done.