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Show HN: Day by Day – every day of my life
- gnfargbl 3y ago> 5th January 2023: Found out Rebecca was pregnant. > 7th February 2023: My father passes away. That's right up there with For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
- mrroryflint 3y agoWas a tough time - I wish I could have told him we were expecting but alas.
- gnfargbl 3y agoI'm sorry for your loss, and I hope fatherhood brings you joy.
- winrid 3y agoMy dad passed about a year before my first born. I really wish he got to meet her. Only 51 too. Stupid US medical system.
- PuffinBlue 3y ago>14th March 2018 "Read 'Yes Man' by Danny Boyle. Changes everything." Hmm, Danny Wallace[0] perhaps? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Man_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Man_(book)
- qingcharles 3y agoIt is a fantastic book. Different to the film adaption, but every bit as good. Danny Wallace is my God.
- mrroryflint 3y agoGood spot - thank you!
- pstorm 3y agoI love this. Is it open source? I would love to create my own with my milestones.
- pstorm 3y agoFound it with google: https://github.com/ruairidhflint/days-left https://github.com/ruairidhflint/days-left
- mrroryflint 3y agoI guess so? It's pretty janky and a day or two of light work in between more serious commitments but feel free to take it and do what you will!
- perilunar 3y ago> It's pretty janky There's 31,000+ divs generated. If you shave the unnecessary code from each one you could save several megabytes of repeated text in total. e.g. - replace all the inline CSS with a couple of declarations in a stylesheet - remove the class names on the round divs. Add a class only to the square ones. - data-tooltip-id="tooltip" data-tooltip-html="..." is also repetitive. You could replace it with simply data-text="..." - better still, add the text as content to the divs, hide it with CSS, and use :hover to reveal it.
- reality_inspctr 3y agoHi OP - you might be interested in something I tried to launch but didn't succeed at getting traction. sundialcalendar.com The idea is a calendar for your whole life. Would love to find a new home for it.
- mrroryflint 3y agoCool idea!
- davidian 3y agoWould love to have a similar and shorter representation dotting how much time you have left in your youth or being physically and mentally capable of doing things you love.
- mrroryflint 3y agoYeah I had thought similiar. One of the calendars on Tim Urban's blog article has quite a nice separation of youth, career, retirement etc but I think your delineations are more pertinent.
- aaronmoodie 3y agoThis is great. For me, visually representing this data always has more impact. If you’ve not read it, I recommend Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. https://www.oliverburkeman.com/books https://www.oliverburkeman.com/books And I just listened to this episode of Hidden Brain the other day which has a similar theme. https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/the-best-years-of-your-life/ https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/the-best-years-of-your-life/
- mrroryflint 3y agoThank you for both recommendations, will check them out!
- mrroryflint 3y agoThanks for the recommendation - I just got back from the local bookshop and managed to grab a paperback copy.
- abhaynayar 3y agoOh, I feel kinda sad now because I was working on a project doing this exact thing, I knew that these memento mori charts were out there but didn't know adding notes to it had also been done. Anyway, I guess I'll still finish my project.
- mrroryflint 3y agoPlease do!
- IAmGraydon 3y agoHaving a mortality crisis is common after your dad dies, as seems to be happening with the author of this site. This is definitely not the way to deal with it, IMO.
- mrroryflint 3y agoYou may be right! I would argue that these charts, which typically depict weeks, have been of interest to me from around 2008 when I saw a Calvin & Hobbes version on Tumblr. That being said, it is probably no coincidence that I made this soon after my Dad passed away. Though I think it is likely also the impending birth of my first child contributing also.
- dodgson 3y ago“Found out Rebecca was pregnant” really caught me off guard because I thought she delivered twins two weeks after the wedding! I suppose Bella and Trix are cats.
- mrroryflint 3y agoHa - yeah they are indeed.
- tayo42 3y ago> Life 38.10% complete well that was a downer on the night, i was already having a little struggle with feeling like time is running out.
- z7 3y agoHumans don't really experience time the way it is presented here - as an equally distributed sequence of quantities. I wouldn't take it too seriously. Why let clocks dictate to you how to feel about finitude?
- tayo42 3y agonot so much about the experience, the feeling there is only so much time left, to learn and get good at new things and hobbies, switch careers, have kids, travel, be fit
- spyrosk 3y agoCoincidentally, yesterday I finished reading "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals" (https://www.harvard.com/book/four_thousand_weeks/ https://www.harvard.com/book/four_thousand_weeks/). It's a great book if you feel overwhelmed with all the things you must/should/want to do and struggle getting the most out of your remaining weeks.
- mrroryflint 3y agoThanks for the recommendation - I just got back from the local bookshop and managed to grab a paperback copy.
- eimrine 3y agoWhat i learned from this project is that it will be way brighter if you started it a few decades earlier. Also i have a little complain that i need to wait for too long before a baloon appears at any black square while having an impression that a baloon to a gray dot appears almost instantly. I know this is due to a weak laptop with 1-core CPU which i am using right now.
- mrroryflint 3y agoThat's good to know - thanks. I am using a library called React-Tooltip and even on a very high spec computer it doesn't feel as fast as I would like. I will investigate!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pmatos 3y agoI am curious - nice interface BTW. Is the code for this anywhere?
- lumb63 3y agoMany commenters have remarked that this is “grim” or “depressing”. I couldn’t disagree more. It is the limited amount of time we have here that gives every day value. This is a reminder to make the most of every day, because our days are numbered. For myself, I’m 26. I’m more than a third of the way done with my life, and I feel like I’m just getting started. But it’s so easy to let each day slip by, without consciously thinking about what I’m doing on a given day, or why. When I see it put into perspective that a third of my life is gone, I feel motivated not to waste the remaining time I have; I think, what am I going to do with those dots?
- zimpenfish 3y ago> I’m more than a third of the way done with my life I'm just about to hit 61% and also feel like I'm just getting started (mainly due to wasting a whole bunch of years on trying to please other people, trying to fit in, etc.)
- tjpnz 3y agoIs 85 a little conservative for someone born in the 90s? On the flip side what have we achieved in the last thirty years which will allow for people to live beyond that?
- mrroryflint 3y agoGood question - for my own purposes I'd rather be conservative but you have a very valid point.
- throwkjsdhfkjds 3y agoI do some creative work is very important to me and that I publish as a github page. That's made me realised that in some way the heatmap of my github activity can be viewed as my own version of this.
- javiramos 3y agoCondolences on the loss of your father earlier this year
- nine_zeros 3y agoI look at things like this post and then look at my manager breathing down my neck for an artificial deadline. I have made the wrong choice more than once in life. I wonder - is my humanity lost? Am I going to end up being that old guy with soulless droopy eyes? With no friends? With no real connections?
- yasbhagchandani 3y agoMy dad passed away before 45 days and I can understand how it feels to loose an important person in your life. I am also trying to rethink what to do with life to make maximum impact.
- dattiimo 3y agoI love visual representations of time passing like this, they really help to put it in perspective. I use something similiar that only covers a year (kinda like GitHub's activity view) and it helps me visualise that future events, such as a half marathon that seems like ages away, is actually only 8 Sunday runs away.
- mrroryflint 3y agoGreat idea - is it online anywhere?
- dattiimo 3y agoI started with a simple paper template I print out[1] but I'm working on an web app for it. I'm hoping to make the web app available very soon. [1] https://github.com/dattiimo/yearplanner https://github.com/dattiimo/yearplanner
- lostmsu 3y agoSomething similar I made a year ago (way more detailed aggregates but no specific dates) https://lostmsu.github.io/life33/?life-full https://lostmsu.github.io/life33/?life-full HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29063094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29063094
- barrysteve 3y agoOh my lord, this is grim. For everything that could have been, your life is reduced to worker bee dots and squares on a graph? These look like tally marks in a Great Escape prison camp, but instead of four walls containing you, it's time. The West is dead, long live the West /s. Congrats on the marriage and new family.
- metabagel 3y agoI guess you wouldn’t like the WeCroak app. (Their website appears to have … ahem … died.) https://web.archive.org/web/20230528015034/https://www.wecroak.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230528015034/https://www.wecro... “The WeCroak app is inspired by a Bhutanese folk saying: to be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times daily.”
- haswell 3y agoI think this is really all about which framing you choose. For me, a visualization like this is more about trying to live life with a greater awareness of the passage of time and to give myself the choice to alter course more often. I don’t think I’d want to put this on my refrigerator, but it’s a useful periodic orientation thing. For me personally, I’ve found that contemplating these things head on reduces my underlying generalized anxiety, which seems fueled primarily by the uncomfortable things my brain wants to avoid.
- landgenoot 3y agoI would love to see something like this, but automatically generated using the pictures I took. My smartphone photos-timeline dates back to 2008, which I can scroll through chronologically. But there is no "overview".
- grapescheesee 3y agoDepressing and inspiring. My dad gave me seven stones once. He said each is a decade of time you have. Then took two away, and threw them. He said use the rest as you can.
- bicx 3y agoCan I at least have 8 stones?
- thih9 3y agoIf you eat healthy, exercise, have a family/pet/social life and don't stress too much, then likely yes.
- geekodour 3y agoI have a similar page that generates my life in weeks: https://diary.geekodour.org/ https://diary.geekodour.org/ It's a hugo site with the dates linking to hugo posts. I agree with the first comment, this definitely gets depressing at times but guess it is what it is :)
- mrroryflint 3y agoLooks great - I love the design.
- geekodour 3y agothanks! :)
- davidcollantes 3y agoCould you share how do you accomplish this? I would love to make a similar one for my Hugo site. Thanks!
- geekodour 3y agosure, it's a little personal but i just made the repo public, here you go: - https://github.com/geekodour/diary/blob/main/content-org/weeks.org https://github.com/geekodour/diary/blob/main/content-org/wee... - https://github.com/geekodour/diary/blob/main/layouts/partials/week_entry.html https://github.com/geekodour/diary/blob/main/layouts/partial... Basically it's very badly written elisp code that populates the same org file with metadata like week number etc. and then I have a custom hugo layout for writing out the weeks into posts. All of this is tied together by https://github.com/kaushalmodi/ox-hugo https://github.com/kaushalmodi/ox-hugo
- ge96 3y agoI have thought about this as well thinking it would motivate me but idk... if I really cared about not wanting to die I would devote my life to brain to machine consciousness transfer.
- dbrueck 3y agoMy OCD begs that you get rid of the dot representing the day before you were born, thus fixing that final line with one lonely dot on it.
- eagleseye 3y agoThe dots are spread out according to your window size, for my default view there is no line with a lonely dot on it.
- balder1991 3y agoReminds me of this video: https://youtu.be/JXeJANDKwDc https://youtu.be/JXeJANDKwDc
- turnsout 3y agoReminds me of this quote from Steve Jobs' famous commencement speech: Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
- beebmam 3y agoThere's a lot to lose, in fact. Anyone who has lived in deep poverty and watched as loved ones became homeless or suffer from painful/serious health conditions because treatment is too expensive knows how much there is to lose.
- sholladay 3y agoHaving seen both sides of this first hand, I certainly agree that the world can put a lot of pressure on you to behave or not behave in certain ways. You may need to take a job that you don’t like instead of starting a business. But if you want to get unstuck and break free from that rut, it’s important to take risks. Hard work and determination only gets you so far, you also need imagination and willingness to step outside of your comfort zone.
- maroonblazer 3y agoJust as there are different descriptions of reality depending on the scale under discussion - quantum vs cosmological and everything in between - there are different scales to describe experience and, in particular, suffering. I think this is what Jobs was getting at, albeit it perhaps a bit too obliquely.
- BizarreByte 3y agoExactly, it's extremely privileged to believe one has nothing to lose, because it implies they won't be that bad off if they fail. I grew up in poverty and fought to get out of it. I am well aware at any point I could fuck up and fall back into it permanently. I have everything to lose and long term stability is more important than taking risks in the hope they work out.
- 3y ago