
Show HN: Visualizing Your Life in Weeks - shahahmed
https://www.failflow.com/life
======
makach
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.

~~~
netsharc
> Today, I try to cease the moments

You mean "seize". Ceasing moments sound like you're a meditating monk trying
to shut down any thoughts...

~~~
makach
yes.

------
shahahmed
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_
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.)

~~~
mncharity
> 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_
Ooh, doing the exercise with friends would be interesting.

------
tempsy
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.

~~~
samcodes
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.

------
xwowsersx
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
Thanks for checking it out! I'm thinking about fleshing that point out into
its own section.

------
Diederich
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.

------
bshimmin
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
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.

------
hanoz
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.

------
coding123
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
Thank you! I was also debating if a weekly email would be valuable, let me
know if you'd be interested in that.

------
Enginerrrd
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
> _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
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
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.

------
huherto
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.

------
apnkv
Check out [https://timestripe.com/](https://timestripe.com/) — a similar
thing, but fancier

~~~
shahahmed
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
I like how people can arrive at so similar ideas :)

------
maury91
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.

------
tzs
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)

------
ddsea
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.

~~~
shahahmed
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)

------
bgdkbtv
That visualization is anxiety inducing

~~~
shahahmed
Sorry it caused anxiety - do you have any thoughts on how to keep it a bit
jarring, but not as anxiety-inducing?

~~~
bgdkbtv
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.

------
unixhero
Christ this scares me. No thanks!

~~~
shahahmed
Sorry! But thank you for checking it out

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

------
elfexec
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.

~~~
shahahmed
Do you think it's valuable to zoom in and out of timescales for a tool like
this?

~~~
mncharity
> 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
This is really cool! I noticed this creates grids of img's, any chance you
have a public repo for this site?

~~~
mncharity
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.

