7 ms·

Show HN: Visualizing Your Life in Weeks

126 points by shahahmed 7y ago

shahahmed 7y ago
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! Based on the waitbutwhy article with the same title [1], this visualization builder let'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. 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'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! [0] https://galeeb.com/ https://galeeb.com/ [1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21227298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21227298
- seltzered_ 7y ago
  I think another way to design this is less around 'accomplishments', but design it around yourself and the ages of people you care for (relatives, friends, loved ones, etc). Possibly more interesting to work in our age relationship compared to animals (the ones we eat, the ones endangered, etc.)
  - shahahmed 7y ago
    Thanks! Yes I agree this is a bit accomplishments oriented. Part of me wanted to make it more gut-wrenching, but I like the idea of relating it to people in your life.
  - mncharity 7y ago
    > design it around yourself and the ages of people you care for (relatives, friends, loved ones, etc). A fun exercise is to take ruled paper, number the lines as years, and sketch in your life vertically. Here I was in grade school; this summer I did mumble; etc. People often have a lot of difficulty reconstructing their own lives. Then take someone else's paper(s), and overlap it, aligned by year, or by age. It can result in very interesting conversations.
    - seltzered_ 7y ago
      Ooh, doing the exercise with friends would be interesting.
bshimmin 7y ago
Pedantic, but I think on the initial screen this should say "Enter your birthdate" (or "date of birth") rather than "birthday" - the former is when you were born, the latter is the thing you celebrate every year.
- dariusj18 7y ago
  To be more pedantic, the thing you celebrate yearly is the anniversary of your date of birth. Your birthday is the same as your date of birth. Plus, "date of birth" is a pleonasm IMO since "birthday" is shorter.
xwowsersx 7y ago
This is pretty cool. I like this: "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".
- shahahmed 7y ago
  Thanks for checking it out! I'm thinking about fleshing that point out into its own section.
makach 7y ago
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.. 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. 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. I don'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. Some things are better not to know, to think about or speculate about.
- fhbdukfrh 7y ago
  I built something similar called "wage clock" that ran in the system tray. The killer feature was you could set sub timers for things like going for coffee or to the bathroom. All of us 20-somethings in our first real job loved it and it was a big reason i quit my big corporate sales job and returned to school to study comp sci. I too now think it's unhealthy to equate time so directly with rewards, but overall i have fonder memories than you i think...
  - shahahmed 7y ago
    I think it would be funny if you could have a counter for a meeting i.e. how much is this meeting costing us in salaries. Then keeping the meeting short would be appreciated!
    - davewasthere 7y ago
      I did that in one place I worked. We had big scrum retrospectives that dragged on a lot. I used to comment how much the meetings cost. Might have made myself a little unpopular. :)
tempsy 7y ago
am I the only one who thinks tools that induce time anxiety aren't really healthy? i'd rather use a carrot than a stick. this is a psychological stick.
- shahahmed 7y ago
  Thinking about it as a stick makes sense, but I think being more cognizant of the finiteness and appreciating it makes it more valuable.
- samcodes 7y ago
  I don’t think everyone agrees that this is a stick. There is space between the observation (my life is finite) and the emotional response (I have anxiety about my life being finite). I think the idea of these tools is to help people identify that space, and be able to experience the observation without the emotional response.
coding123 7y ago
I liked how you built the /die/{n} URL so that you can just bookmark it and it will update for you. Nice work.
- shahahmed 7y ago
  Thank you! I was also debating if a weekly email would be valuable, let me know if you'd be interested in that.
huherto 7y ago
Nice. But optimistic as it assume you will get to live to 90. 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.
Diederich 7y ago
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'd cross another one out. It was quite a conversation starter.
elfexec 7y ago
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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- shahahmed 7y ago
  Do you think it's valuable to zoom in and out of timescales for a tool like this?
  - mncharity 7y ago
    > Do you think it's valuable to zoom in and out of timescales for a tool like this? Years back I did a zooming prototype that went from dots as seconds like [1], through days like [2], up to dots as billion years, with customizable grouping/layout. IIRC, when zooming out, it was kind of fun to see the highlighting of your life contract to a pixel or two and fade out. If personal information were available, zooming could interestingly trade off aggregation vs detail, as with zooming maps. But without it... don't know. [1] http://www.clarifyscience.info/assets/day_of_dots_clock http://www.clarifyscience.info/assets/day_of_dots_clock [2] http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/QEt9x http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/QEt9x
    - shahahmed 7y ago
      This is really cool! I noticed this creates grids of img's, any chance you have a public repo for this site?
      - mncharity 7y ago
        Thanks. :) The dot per second page? Yeah, ancient 2001 pre-canvas kludgery. Javascript handles short-term updates, and the server refreshes the page periodically, to limit the number of images ancient browsers needed to deal with. No repo. Nothing one would write today.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ddsea 7y ago
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.
- rsl7 7y ago
  no need to enter your exact personal info to try it out.
- shahahmed 7y ago
  I was thinking about that! I left a default that you could use under the prompt (it uses my bday, you can have it haha)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jcims 7y ago
500,000 hrs is a reasonable approximation of the waking hours in a human life.
Enginerrrd 7y ago
I really hate webpages where things don'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. If I'm zooming, I don't want your buttons and graphics to adapt themselves to be relatively bigger. That's godawful behavior that ruins the usefulness of zoom entirely. I'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 1/200. They aren't as important to me as they are to you.) Why is the web full of this behavior?!
- reificator 7y ago
  > Why is the web full of this behavior?! I believe the root cause is that zooming in and out triggers breakpoints, so the page thinks it's now on a phone instead of on a desktop.
  - Enginerrrd 7y ago
    That actually makes sense, and I was on a desktop at the time, although I often find it especially aggravating on a phone because it matters more when. There's less screen real estate to begin with.
    - reificator 7y ago
      On a phone, pinch to zoom typically doesn't act like resizing the window, so most sites should behave fine. Sites that don't behave when zooming on mobile are probably going out of their way to break things.
- shahahmed 7y ago
  I definitely feel this. I made a tradeoff decision to get the experience I wanted in the default view, but it screwed up what I expected the zoom to do (it's because i relied on the vw css element). I tried having a fully zoomed out version lower on the website - but I agree, it's an unfortunate experience. And wholly due to my laziness.
bgdkbtv 7y ago
That visualization is anxiety inducing
- shahahmed 7y ago
  Sorry it caused anxiety - do you have any thoughts on how to keep it a bit jarring, but not as anxiety-inducing?
  - bgdkbtv 7y ago
    Nothing to be sorry about, and even though its anxiety inducing, I've bookmarked it ;) It isn't the app that causes it, I think. It is the ability to see how much is left until the end and how much has already passed.
hanoz 7y ago
Date of death calculators were all the rage back in the day of cgi-bin, and the new fangled javascript. Must be something about working in I.T. which makes you wonder how much more of it you've got left.
unixhero 7y ago
Christ this scares me. No thanks!
- shahahmed 7y ago
  Sorry! But thank you for checking it out
tzs 7y ago
I'm getting a pretty good instance of the Hermann grid illusion [1] from it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_illusion
apnkv 7y ago
Check out https://timestripe.com/ https://timestripe.com/ — a similar thing, but fancier
- shahahmed 7y ago
  Are you the founder of Hype Machine? Haha, because Anthony said the same thing on my product hunt post: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/you-will-die-in-x-weeks https://www.producthunt.com/posts/you-will-die-in-x-weeks timestripe is definitely much more snazzy and robust - I like it!
  - apnkv 7y ago
    I like how people can arrive at so similar ideas :)
maury91 7y ago
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). 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 "perfect" shape.

126 points by shahahmed 7y ago

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! Based on the waitbutwhy article with the same title [1], this visualization builder let'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. 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'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! [0] https://galeeb.com/ https://galeeb.com/ [1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21227298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21227298

seltzered_ 7y ago
I think another way to design this is less around 'accomplishments', but design it around yourself and the ages of people you care for (relatives, friends, loved ones, etc). Possibly more interesting to work in our age relationship compared to animals (the ones we eat, the ones endangered, etc.)
- shahahmed 7y ago
  Thanks! Yes I agree this is a bit accomplishments oriented. Part of me wanted to make it more gut-wrenching, but I like the idea of relating it to people in your life.
- mncharity 7y ago
  > design it around yourself and the ages of people you care for (relatives, friends, loved ones, etc). A fun exercise is to take ruled paper, number the lines as years, and sketch in your life vertically. Here I was in grade school; this summer I did mumble; etc. People often have a lot of difficulty reconstructing their own lives. Then take someone else's paper(s), and overlap it, aligned by year, or by age. It can result in very interesting conversations.
  - seltzered_ 7y ago
    Ooh, doing the exercise with friends would be interesting.

bshimmin 7y ago

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

dariusj18 7y ago
To be more pedantic, the thing you celebrate yearly is the anniversary of your date of birth. Your birthday is the same as your date of birth. Plus, "date of birth" is a pleonasm IMO since "birthday" is shorter.

xwowsersx 7y ago

This is pretty cool. I like this: "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".

shahahmed 7y ago
Thanks for checking it out! I'm thinking about fleshing that point out into its own section.

makach 7y ago

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.. 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. 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. I don'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. Some things are better not to know, to think about or speculate about.

fhbdukfrh 7y ago
I built something similar called "wage clock" that ran in the system tray. The killer feature was you could set sub timers for things like going for coffee or to the bathroom. All of us 20-somethings in our first real job loved it and it was a big reason i quit my big corporate sales job and returned to school to study comp sci. I too now think it's unhealthy to equate time so directly with rewards, but overall i have fonder memories than you i think...
- shahahmed 7y ago
  I think it would be funny if you could have a counter for a meeting i.e. how much is this meeting costing us in salaries. Then keeping the meeting short would be appreciated!
  - davewasthere 7y ago
    I did that in one place I worked. We had big scrum retrospectives that dragged on a lot. I used to comment how much the meetings cost. Might have made myself a little unpopular. :)

tempsy 7y ago

am I the only one who thinks tools that induce time anxiety aren't really healthy? i'd rather use a carrot than a stick. this is a psychological stick.

shahahmed 7y ago
Thinking about it as a stick makes sense, but I think being more cognizant of the finiteness and appreciating it makes it more valuable.
samcodes 7y ago
I don’t think everyone agrees that this is a stick. There is space between the observation (my life is finite) and the emotional response (I have anxiety about my life being finite). I think the idea of these tools is to help people identify that space, and be able to experience the observation without the emotional response.

coding123 7y ago

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

shahahmed 7y ago
Thank you! I was also debating if a weekly email would be valuable, let me know if you'd be interested in that.

huherto 7y ago

Nice. But optimistic as it assume you will get to live to 90. 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.

Diederich 7y ago

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'd cross another one out. It was quite a conversation starter.

elfexec 7y ago

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.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
shahahmed 7y ago
Do you think it's valuable to zoom in and out of timescales for a tool like this?
- mncharity 7y ago
  > Do you think it's valuable to zoom in and out of timescales for a tool like this? Years back I did a zooming prototype that went from dots as seconds like [1], through days like [2], up to dots as billion years, with customizable grouping/layout. IIRC, when zooming out, it was kind of fun to see the highlighting of your life contract to a pixel or two and fade out. If personal information were available, zooming could interestingly trade off aggregation vs detail, as with zooming maps. But without it... don't know. [1] http://www.clarifyscience.info/assets/day_of_dots_clock http://www.clarifyscience.info/assets/day_of_dots_clock [2] http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/QEt9x http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/QEt9x
  - shahahmed 7y ago
    This is really cool! I noticed this creates grids of img's, any chance you have a public repo for this site?
    - mncharity 7y ago
      Thanks. :) The dot per second page? Yeah, ancient 2001 pre-canvas kludgery. Javascript handles short-term updates, and the server refreshes the page periodically, to limit the number of images ancient browsers needed to deal with. No repo. Nothing one would write today.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ddsea 7y ago

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.

rsl7 7y ago
no need to enter your exact personal info to try it out.
shahahmed 7y ago
I was thinking about that! I left a default that you could use under the prompt (it uses my bday, you can have it haha)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jcims 7y ago

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

Enginerrrd 7y ago

I really hate webpages where things don'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. If I'm zooming, I don't want your buttons and graphics to adapt themselves to be relatively bigger. That's godawful behavior that ruins the usefulness of zoom entirely. I'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 1/200. They aren't as important to me as they are to you.) Why is the web full of this behavior?!

reificator 7y ago
> Why is the web full of this behavior?! I believe the root cause is that zooming in and out triggers breakpoints, so the page thinks it's now on a phone instead of on a desktop.
- Enginerrrd 7y ago
  That actually makes sense, and I was on a desktop at the time, although I often find it especially aggravating on a phone because it matters more when. There's less screen real estate to begin with.
  - reificator 7y ago
    On a phone, pinch to zoom typically doesn't act like resizing the window, so most sites should behave fine. Sites that don't behave when zooming on mobile are probably going out of their way to break things.
shahahmed 7y ago
I definitely feel this. I made a tradeoff decision to get the experience I wanted in the default view, but it screwed up what I expected the zoom to do (it's because i relied on the vw css element). I tried having a fully zoomed out version lower on the website - but I agree, it's an unfortunate experience. And wholly due to my laziness.

bgdkbtv 7y ago

That visualization is anxiety inducing

shahahmed 7y ago
Sorry it caused anxiety - do you have any thoughts on how to keep it a bit jarring, but not as anxiety-inducing?
- bgdkbtv 7y ago
  Nothing to be sorry about, and even though its anxiety inducing, I've bookmarked it ;) It isn't the app that causes it, I think. It is the ability to see how much is left until the end and how much has already passed.

hanoz 7y ago

Date of death calculators were all the rage back in the day of cgi-bin, and the new fangled javascript. Must be something about working in I.T. which makes you wonder how much more of it you've got left.

unixhero 7y ago

Christ this scares me. No thanks!

shahahmed 7y ago
Sorry! But thank you for checking it out

tzs 7y ago

I'm getting a pretty good instance of the Hermann grid illusion [1] from it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_illusion

apnkv 7y ago

Check out https://timestripe.com/ https://timestripe.com/ — a similar thing, but fancier

shahahmed 7y ago
Are you the founder of Hype Machine? Haha, because Anthony said the same thing on my product hunt post: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/you-will-die-in-x-weeks https://www.producthunt.com/posts/you-will-die-in-x-weeks timestripe is definitely much more snazzy and robust - I like it!
- apnkv 7y ago
  I like how people can arrive at so similar ideas :)

maury91 7y ago

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). 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 "perfect" shape.