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My Life Countdown (2007) (kk.org)
123 points by yapcm96 on Oct 23, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 54 comments



See also the chart "Life of a Typical American":

* https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html

Across the top it has column labels going form 1 to 52 (for the weeks of the year). On the left, it has row labels going from 0 to 90 (for rough life expectancy). These rows and columns are color-coded for different periods of most people's life: Early Years, Elementary/Middle/High School, College, Career, Retirement.

Go down the left-hand crows until you find your current age and you can see how much life you've lived and (roughly) how much you have left.

Some famous deaths (Hendrix, Mozart, JFK, Lincoln, Steve Jobs) listed/marked in article.

You can buy a 24x36" poster (US$20) or high-res PDF ($2) if you want a memento mori:

* https://store.waitbutwhy.com/collections/life-calendars/prod...

* https://gumroad.com/l/life-weeks

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori

Someone created a page where you can enter your birthday and it will fill up the table:

* https://www.bryanbraun.com/your-life/weeks.html

* https://github.com/bryanbraun/your-life


Interesting! I tried printing out a blank week chart and highlighting different periods of my own life. It needs work, but it's a great form of visualization.

I remember when I was only 60% as old as I am now that I thought I would do a "method of loci" project about the years of my life mapped to numbered streets in San Francisco, photographing different objects representing different life events on street corners corresponding to the ages that they happened at. Unfortunately I didn't get around to it at the time, and of course now it's harder (to remember earlier parts of my life, and also to find high enough street numbers in the City!).


I have on my back burner to create a visualization like this for myself, backed by an "event database", to which I'd slowly import every bit of archive I can find. Location data, text messages, journals detailing what happen. Goal being, to have simultaneously a nagging countdown to death, and a reflection on various periods of my life.

Between various cloud services and me dilligently copying over data from old computers to new ones, I do have a substantial archive of personal history that goes back to when I was around ~10 years old.

EDIT:

'Brajeshwar has found someone doing roughly what I envisioned! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24866193. I'll have to steal this :).


I made a web version too:

* Weeks to go (Warning: May cause existential angst) https://weeks.louiechristie.com/


I guess I will be the downer dude.

What KK's analysis elides is the entire concept of mental and physical decline. We are working with population distributions here, but generally speaking, there is a non-trivial likelihood that your 60s are going to be less productive per unit hour, than your 50s. And your 70s, vs. 60s. KK speculates what if he gets to 99! Amazing what he could accomplish. Yeah well this 59 yo can still do decent endurance feats. But I find it very hard to stay bent over a floor tiling mosaics, a very deep love of mine. And the management has to manage the bending over the plants in the garden.

Of course though, I am still as mentally sharp as I was at age 28, when the string of cool things started to happen. Or maybe not. I have an arsenal of well maintained skills to keep me productive, but not seeing much new to add to it.


Don't worry, you can still become president in your late 70s.


That seems more like a status thing than a productive thing.


With Twitter, you can leverage it into an unprecedented impact on the shape of the world.


I think there is one implicit advantage elder people have: they are generally out of trouble of taking care of kids and retirement gives them even more free time. But again their energy level is lower so maybe those free hours don't add up.


countdown to mental decline, now thats a downer haha


Sometime in this century humans will likely figure out how to add a couple extra healthy decades to the average lifespan.

Depends on our effort to discover it, of course.

Take care of yourself now.


In the last 100 years, the average life expectancy of a 50 year old male in, say, western europe has increased by less that a decade.

Several decades more? Not gonna happen.


“The life expectancy at birth for men has increased by 20.5 years, from 58.8 years in 1920–1922 to 79.3 years in 2009–2011.”

Not sure what it would have been given you were 50 years old in 1920.

Anyway, you seem to not believe that science over the next 60-80 years will advance much.

People live to be over 100 today. Now it’s just a matter of figuring out why.

Science will advance more in the next 50 years than it did in the last 100.


I was talking about life expectancy for a 50 year old. Life expectancy at birth has increased significantly more because of reduced risk of death for newborns, infants and even teenagers. But once you are of a certain age, those risks are gone, and there not much has changed.

No, I don't believe in scifi. Theses are all fantasies. Just as little as I believe in living on mars being a great alternative to earth. Nice scifi story, but in real life, things are different.

If you just look at the spread obesity in the U.S. and its effect on life expectancy, please tell me again with a straight face that you expect "people live to be over 100" in the future. And no, they don't today. You are talking about a really really small minority, and that minority was already there 50 years ago. In 1970.

Edit: Life expectancy for a 50 yeah old in 1920 in Sweden was about 9 years shorter than today.


Why, yes people do live to be over 100 in certain groups:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think we’ll figure out how to extend this to more people.

Sure, if you don’t take care of yourself, science can only do so much.


Interesting post. I've tried this sort of thing before, being more conscious of "time left", but I found it just made me anxious and depressed. I'd continually second guess whether or not I was working on the most meaningful thing, felt guilty, and I'd be overly impatient and agitated when forced to work on something I didn't care about.

I have had better success thinking in terms of 3 year chunks; seems to be a good balance between giving myself time to get big projects done without feeling overwhelmed, but not so far off that today's actions seem too insignificant. Still practicing though. (On a side note, just about everything I work on takes more time than I'd like, which is continually frustrating. I haven't found a good way of thinking of self-set deadlines in a helpful way.)


I've been doing something similar and have come to the conclusion that thinking in absolute terms, like "X days left", won't do any good since it results in vain attempts at trying to fit everything into a specific time-frame.

The important thing is to be aware of the fact that one doesn't live forever, and that if we truly want to achieve something then it should be done now, rather than later. It's not that I don't have long-term plans or anything, it's just that I keep future opportunity into account when taking decisions. "If I want to do something, but not today, will I be able to do it tomorrow?".


The corollary is this: "There's no way to predict the long future on an individual level."

There's a hidden trap in thinking about "I have X days/weeks left" and that's the assumption that you realistically grow that old. The reality, though, is that plenty of people suffer cancer, cardiovascular diseases such as heart failure or strokes. Or they end up caught in traffic or work-related accidents.

You could derive probabilities from population statistics and agree that, depending on your specific situation and with the information you have today, the probability of dying from any of those might be quite low. But that doesn't mean it's impossible. My personal - quite sobering - experience is having attended a fair share of funerals of people who passed away before they even hit 35.

That doesn't mean that one should live life as if every day might be your last. That's not maxim I like to live by. It's important to keep perspective that you might live for many decades to come; but by the same token, one should remind themselves regularly that the opposite scenario exists too.

In culture, this reminder is called "memento mori" (Latin: Don't forget to die) and it has been expressed through music, architecture, literature, poetry and so on many times. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori


> "memento mori" (Latin: Don't forget to die)

It's slightly different (by your link [1]): Memento mori (Latin 'remember that you [have to] die')


Precisely. I don't expect to die tomorrow, but I probably don't have more than 30 years left either (based on average life-expectancy at the time of my birth). The actual expiry date is most likely somewhere in-between, but the fact is that very few people get to know until it's too late. Personally, I wouldn't want to know either.


Life expectancy at birth is quite different from life expectancy at say 50.

Back in Roman times, newborn life expectancy was about 25. But life expectancy of a 25 year old was beyond 50. The remaining time increased. That's not the case today anymore, especially in developed nations, but you get the idea. Your countdown ticks with less that one second per second.


Meta: It might be worth investigating whether you have ADHD. Several things in your message point at it, and treatment can help.

(Apparently needing deadlines to get things done, finding it tricky to self-set deadlines, getting agitated when forced to work on things you don't care about, worrying about relative insignificance of day-to-day actions)


I did something similar, but in reverse. Rather than give myself an arbitrary "death day", as the author did, I instead chose to make a life clock. It's just a display of my age in years, months, days, and seconds.

The advantage of this is that it is 100% true. There are no mental tricks you can play. Things like: I know my clock says 8500 days, but I'm sure I have more than that.

I find I get much the same feeling watching the values ever increasing as I would watching some arbitrary number increase. You're watching the grains of sand fall through the hourglass.


That sounds interesting, I'd like to try that


I turned 40 this year. That brought a significant shift in how I think about spending time; I'm much more aware that there are a finite number of books I'll read, programs I'll write, stories told to children etc

This mindset has been surprisingly freeing because it encourages me to say "No" more often, to the things that if I looked at them objectively feel more like an obligation ("sigh, I should really finish this book before I start a new one") than an opportunity.


(2007)

Meta: he states "I am now 55 years old." Given that he was born in 1952, that would mean this article is from 2007:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Kelly_(editor)


I've been kicking around a related idea for a while. A static "death day" is great because you can internalize, and countdown towards it, but it loses the distribution behind life expectancy. A single day is probability's expected value, but there's a huge range of days that could be your last - even today!

My idea is a daily (or weekly/monthly/etc) notification that re-computes a "death day" for you, on that recurring basis. Each notification would include a day, and together, they'd form a distribution that faithfully represents the variance in days you're likely to die.

For example: me; 28-year-old male. I'd regularly get "death days" that are ~50 years out. Occasionally, maybe they'd be 25, or 55 years away. And very rarely, they'd be things like 10, or even 5 years away. A perfect reminder to play hooky, or call up a friend, or tick off a bucket list item every once in a while!

Anyone interested in this? I'm kind of fishing for an excuse to build it...


There is a spiritual practice to go to bed everyday like on a death bed, visualising completely and clearly that I will not wake up tomorrow morning, this is it, this is the end. It does change life profoundly, no computation needed :)


Something like this?

https://repl.it/repls/CyberFluidRoute#main.py


I went swimming in the sea yesterday evening, it crossed my mind that there was a non-zero chance I might die ..

If I wrote online "Gonna go swimming in the freezing sea, in the dark" I can imagine my death-day estimate could easy move by many many years!


May be misinterpreting it, but sounds a little like futureme.org but automated?


Interested.


Interesting...I wrote this to display a countdown in the i3 status bar:

  #!/usr/bin/env sh

  DIFF_DAYS=""

  death_clock () {
    DEATH_DATE=$(date --date 'YYYY-MM-DD -u' +%s)
    TODAY=$(date +%s)
    DIFF=$(expr "$DEATH_DATE" - "$TODAY")
    DIFF_DAYS=$(expr "$DIFF" / $(expr 24 \* 3600))
  }

  i3status | (read line && echo "$line" && read line && echo "$line" && read line && echo "$line" && while :
  do
    read line
    death_clock
    echo ",[{\"full_text\":\"days left: ${DIFF_DAYS}\", \"color\": \"#0000FF\" },${line#,\[}" || exit 1
  done)
Definitely not polished but seems to work if you fill in the "YYYY-MM-DD" with your expected date of departure.


You might like to try out the template[1] from Buster. Look at his demo at https://notes.busterbenson.com/life-in-weeks

He uses a simple Jekyll setup to do this.

1. https://github.com/busterbenson/notes/blob/master/_layouts/l...


But remember that your death clock does not tick linearly: because life expectancy rises with age, each actual day that passes, less than a day of your remaining life passes.


That's true, though I wonder if the life expectancy table mentioned in the article accounts for increasing life expectancy.


It can't. The point you're replying to is that being alive at age X gives less information about longevity than at X+1. For the younger person we don't know whether they'll make it to age X+1. For the older person we have the additional data that they did make it. That data is what makes the older person's life expectancy higher.


Not sure what you mean, the table [1] is expressly in terms of current age. The better way to approach such a "death clock" I think would be to slow the countdown rate to match the curve implied by that data.

[1] http://www.health.state.ny.us/health_care/medicaid/publicati...


Pretty sure this is a Bayes' Theorem thing, but happy to be wrong and learn something.

I think we both agree the table talks in terms of current age. But making it to age 50 doesn't mean you'll make it to age 51, so you can't add that extra bit of life (the one you think of in terms of a day lived counting a little less than a day against your life expectancy) to the age 50 row in the table. You can't add that bit until you actually are age 51. Otherwise you're counting both a known thing (you did make it to 51) and an unknown thing (whether you will make it to 51 if you're only 50 today) to a predicted thing (when you'll die if you're 50 today). Not exactly double counting, but taking for granted something that's not yet proven.

I believe that extra bit is what the other commenter was wondering about.


It does, in fact current age is the only thing the table [1] accounts for, which makes the death date adopted by the author actually somewhat arbitrary (being based solely on when the author happened to first think of this concept): they seem to indicate no plan to adjust it as they age, mentioning that one day they may even pass the date.

[1] http://www.health.state.ny.us/health_care/medicaid/publicati...


Seeing a timer ticking away on you can cause anxiety, which could help you focus.

However jotting down the things you have done with each passing day feels a lot more rewarding. With time, your memory wears out and you start forgetting the little achievements, feeling like you've wasted your time. Seeing your daily jog or journal of thoughts preserved, memories made, helps you relive the good parts (if that's what you've written down) and that makes the best parts of life last longer as they are relived, re-encountered.

I'm building functionality to help people preserve those memories/personal logs in an ads-free way and make them privately share-able with loved ones at https://www.dreamlist.com . However I also own the domains journalee.com and braingarden.net. Debating whether to explore those. What do you think?


I the past year I have been convinced the desire to get things done is a partial root of my unhappiness. I have been working a lot on learning to just be and perhaps do also.


You will have, if you're lucky, 500,000 conscious hours in this Universe: 85 years, 2/3 spent awake.

How much of that time can you devote to others?

- 2 people: 250k hours each.

- 20: 25k

- 200: 2.5k -- roughly a year's full-time work.

- 2,000: 250

- 20,000: 25 -- just over a day.

- 200k: 2.5. This is roughly 1/3 the number of citizens a US Representative stands for. Reps serve 2 years, allowing 83 seconds per citizen, per term.

- 2 million: 15 minutes. Andy Warhol's truism is Small World only.

- 20 m: 1.5 minutes

- 200 m: 9 seconds

- 2 billion: 0.9 seconds

- 8 billion: 0.225 seconds Roughly, present global population.

If someone devotes a quarter second to you, you're getting more than your share.

Thank you for your time.


Actuaries (like a life insurance company) don't take the average life expectancy from birth.

They take your current age, and find your life expectancy from then. At 55, Kevin Kelly was expected to live 25.5 more years, or 80.5...

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html


There is Mortality New Tab (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mortality-new-tab/...) I used to use.

It is a modern-day “memento mori”. Quite ironically, it motivated me to live to the fullest. With each new tab, I asked myself “Is opening this website the best thing I can do with this piece of time?”. It didn’t hold me for entertainment; it held me from making time pass through my fingers, unintentionally.


> I was in perfect health and in the middle of a ten-year round the world trip, so this interruption was unexpected and strange.

Wow 10 years! I just completed a 5 year trip so I can only imagine what he saw and experienced during that time. (still abroad for now)

This is something that I think about all the time. I spent the last two years not working at all. I took a huge amount of money I saved up and have spent almost all of it.

Was it crazy to tank my career? Probably, but when when that faithful day arrives where I die, I'll now I spent most of it living fully.


I love the idea. Maybe there is a way to calculate the expected residual life more scientifically, based on life style and other parameters? I think the Acturial society might have something and I did pass a few exams, sadly I forgot most of the knowledge.

I'll also need to program an app that shows up as Windows 10 lock screen, so that every time I slacked I got notified.


Another idea I’ve heard is to take your life expectancy in days as beads into a jar, and move one each day (or night) into another jar.


Or kill two birds with one stone and get ones medication script filled for all remaining days of life.

What could go wrong?


Worth remembering, on the other hand, that the counter could easily be 10X, 100X... a 1000 times off, fragile as we are.


“”” BEING JUDGMENTAL IS A SIGN OF LIFE

Days left: 18,879 “””

Everyday I get the new day count and a Jenny Holzer poem sent to my phone. Not sure if it’s a good idea or not, but I haven’t stopped counting days since I was 19.


I use Notion with https://indify.co/ to add a widget to my homepage that contains a “life” bar.


way too morbid for me.


Morbidity involves abnormal and/or unhealthy interest in death. How is optimization (or at least an attempt at doing so) morbid?

It certainly does sound exhausting though.




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