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Life Stats (neal.fun)
270 points by memorable on July 7, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 64 comments



This is cool, simple but fun.

One improvement I'd suggest is using an international date format (yyyy / mm / dd) or perhaps a dropdown for months.

Even with the date placeholder text I managed to mess up the date!


Even on the simple site like this, even the contentious topic of implementation of dates pops up. :-). The dates are a pain to do well and agreeable to everyone.


It doesn't have to be contentious, an international resource should favor the agreed international date format. The contentiousness usually comes from ethnocentrism.


Don't feel bad, you are not alone.

At least the width of the YYYY entry box could be twice that of the MM and the DD boxes.


It took that comment to realize why the form wasn’t working for me.


Yeah, I messed up the date as well. drop down would be perfect :)


This is beautiful. It reminds me of the early Internet, but done in a contemporary style.

I wish the modern Internet were more like this.


Perhaps it already is, but discovery is terrible.


Sort of a "if a tree falls in the forest"-type of situation


For folks born after 2020 (I wasn't; my kid was), lots of NaN's. Quite literally; uncertain times.


I didn't know that the numbers of grandmothers are rapidly increasing.


It's OK, they probably can't read or validate the results anyway.


Wow two consecutive days on the front page Neal Agarwal. I don’t think I’ve seen that before.


I'm surprised and sad that 15% of my cohort is dead already. 8(

It says a dollar in the year I was born (1963) is the same as $8.4 today

As a reminder to myself about the meaning of hard money... I carry around a 1901 dollar... minted in New Orleans, that you might have got as change in 1963.... that's worth $19.20 melt value today. More than twice the $8.4 amount.

Not in my wallet is a 1852 dollar... worth $84.48 today in melt value. It's too soft, and too darned tiny.


For me (1981) it's already 9%. That would mean that approx. 1 in 10 friends would already have died. I don't think thats remotely true for me. Most likely the global distribution of deaths is really uneven.


Most died before you knew them, since under 5 mortality is the most significant component at this age, especially globally.


Seems true for me at least (1980 birth). One of my first friends died of a cat allergy at 12, another shot himself the next year at 13, my sister's best friend was murdered by her mom's boyfriend right after I graduated, my best friend from high school died from alcohol withdrawals in 2016, and it seemed like for a few years after high school, at least 1 or 2 people were dead from car accidents that I'd known from school every summer I came back from college. A guy I worked with in college broke his neck and died in basketball practice. Probably not fair to count people I met in my 20s since I was in the Army during the Iraq/Afghanistan years, but deaths were pretty regular. I wanna say my 20 year reunion had 12 deaths out of a graduating class of about 200? That isn't quite 9%, but doesn't count those who died before we graduated.

And yeah, clearly the rate is likely to be much higher for people living in Bangladesh or Djibouti or something. I grew up in the Los Angeles suburbs.


Fellow 1981 here too. Maybe I balance that statistic as unfortunately a couple of my fiends died.


Guess I'll have no friends to avoid their deaths then.

You're welcome, ex-friends!


They’ll still be dead to you. ;)


I'll start to worry when the rich and famous of my cohort start dying. They usually have the best medical care you can buy, and when they start dying, it would mean my time is probably near too.


> You're one of the lucky ones. 8% of people born in 1986 didn't make it to 2022.

Would love to see the source and a breakdown of causes


That population increase statistic was a little shocking (+2.7B in our lifetimes). I suppose I knew it already, but it hadn’t clicked how crazy that is.


I just realized we're less than 1 year away from reaching 8 billion people on Earth. A bit scary.


It would be much scarier if it was decreasing or staying flat, though.


Why?

I don't doubt you, I just don't know anything about this. My first guess is that economically it would be potentially catastrophic.


It’s hard to give an exact answer without more granular data than I can find given that it changes year to year. However, very approximately:

0.5 percentage points (pp) infant deaths (birth defects, delivery complications, neonatal death, etc.) 6.5 pp deaths under 5 from infectious disease (primarily pneumonia and diarrheal diseases) 0.5 pp injuries (fairly evenly split among homicide, suicide, drowning, road accidents, other accidents, but with the last two taking somewhat larger shares)

Over the next decades most in your cohort will die from heart disease, stroke, or COPD.


Directly followed by

> And you still have a long way to go.

> Who knows what else will happen in your lifetime?

I feel slightly threatened ;)


That’s a great looking life you’ve got there, full of promise… it’d be a shame if anything happened to it.



Me too, I was 1984 and it was the same percentage.


Same for 1983. And 1982.


Given it's 9% for my cohort (1980), I'd say childhood mortality is mostly focussed on the first year.


Wait, the human body makes a million red blood cells a second? That's kind of mind blowing.


The human body has 20-30 trillion red blood cells, roughly 80% of the total cell count in the body. So it’s not that surprising.


That's what surprised me, too. Our bodies don't really "feel" all that active (even on a cellular level).


And that’s -only- the red blood cells. Consider how that’s only a tiny portion of your body. Think of all the other cells everywhere else. Constantly dying and being born. Isn’t it every 7 years or so that pretty much every cell in our body’s rotated out?


The red blood cells are actually roughly 80% of all cells in your body.


The S&P is up 1000%+ since I was born. I hope the $100,000 I put in an index fund for my daughter when she was born recently has the same performance.


And inflation slows down!


Yeah but more inflation == bigger numbers == more growth!


Inflation: keeping the masses motivated by the illusion of gaining wealth


I put in that I was born in 1901, and it still told me that I still had "a long way to go"


Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42891/stopping-by-woo...


Did the same, was surprised that 1% of my 121 yo cohort was still alive.


Nothing wrong with being a glass is .05% full kind of a person :)


Experience on mobile is quite smooth. Thanks for sharing!



This is super interesting. But, if anything, it had the opposite effect on me to what was intended.

I'm 25, and I've been a bit stressed recently about how I've been working in the same company since I was 19 (took a year out and graduated uni when I was 21). I've started to feel like I've been wasting my 20s not taking enough opportunities or not seeking a more exciting job, just settling for one that's relaxing and good enough for now.

Seeing just how tiny my career has been so far, in comparison to retirement age, really made me reflect how things aren't that bad. I've got plenty of time to enjoy a comfy job and make some money before I go off taking crazy risks.


> just settling for one that's relaxing and good enough for now.

There's nothing wrong with that! I think it's okay to enjoy life for a few years without looking for anything "better" (whether that is in terms of career, how exciting the job is).. I was planning on doing my masters soon (I'm 23) but figured my mental health is finally tolerably stable, I live with people I enjoy being around, have a circle of friends, enjoy work.. i could do this for another 1-2 years and just try to be happy for once, instead of looking for what the future will bring.


I think this one is a lot less positive


"You're one of the lucky ones. 99% of people born in 1901 didn't make it to 2022."

Congratulations to the stubborn 121 year old keeping that 100% away. "And you still have a long way to go".


I can't click the Go button after entering the date. I am on Firefox.


Beware, it uses Month/Day/Year which is some strange format hopefully nobody else uses.


Lot of US-built tools use this format and it is very annoying. From Photoshop to Googlesheets to WhatsApp, Month always comes first. I tried for around 15 mins to change to date-first format in Google Sheets and failed.


Changing locale works fine for this in gdocs.



Same issue for me. Tried mm dd yyyy - still didn’t work.

Edit: I was trying to add 2022 as the year, which didn’t work. Changing that made it work.


Well this happened to me. You would have inputted date in the month field. The format is MMDDYYYY.

There is no warning shows for the validation


No such issue here on v100.0.1.


> Life expectancy went up 10 years for all people.

This is strangely misleading.


If you look at the life expectancy statistics there's usually one chart based on your current age, and incidentally I looked this up just two days ago. I am close to 40 and have an average of ~40 years to live. If I was 40y old at the time I was born, it was only about ~30 years left. At least that's my interpretation of this sentence in there.


Love it! And happy to be among the lucky ones who survived to this day from the early 70s ;-)


Apparently it can’t handle dates in 2020. Got a lot of NaNs…




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