Show HN: Visualizing Your Life in Weeks

https://www.failflow.com/life

by shahahmed • 7 years ago

126 55 7 years ago

shahahmed14• 7 years 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/

[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21227298

seltzered_2• 7 years 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.)

shahahmed14• 7 years 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.

mncharity3• 7 years 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.

xwowsersx• 7 years 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".

shahahmed14• 7 years ago

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

makach2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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...

shahahmed14• 7 years 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!

zeroego• 7 years ago

Even the bad things are good.

This piqued my curiosity. Would you mind elaborating?

maroonblazer• 7 years ago

Not the parent but I get this. Some things can inexplicably open your eyes to how valuable life is; a cursory study of Buddhism and later Stoicism did it for me.

I'm convinced the secret to happiness is simply reminding yourself how much worse life could be.

jedberg2• 7 years ago

I built a similar app, but without the money factor. It just tells me what percent is left of the day, month, year, and my (estimated) lifetime.

I'm just about to hit 50% on the life meter. It's very motivating.

trox• 7 years ago

I'm just about to hit 50% on the life meter. It's very motivating.

I feel like the exact opposite of this. Thinking about hitting x% on the life meter makes me feel kind of depressed. Could you share your mindset behind this thought?

netsharc• 7 years ago

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...

makach2• 7 years ago

yes.

endymi0n• 7 years ago

I don't want to be reminded, it depressed me.

I wholeheartedly agree. Weeks are a powerful visualization, but by comparing yourself to others in this way, you're setting yourself up for failure. Extreme success as pictured takes a mix of discipline and brilliance that's mixed with privilege, luck, health and extreme focus on a single area (leaving behind large sacrifices in others).

As my therapist used to say: To compare means to hurt.

The only race you should ever be running is the race against yesterday's Yourself and a visualization like this isn't helpful for that.

If you're after success and still procrastinating, the solution isn't adding more pressure, it's self-forgiveness [1], refusing to judge yourself [2] and being good to yourself.

If you do a week calendar, take the second picture of Tim's Wait but Why and make every week one where you either improved someone's life or had fun, preferably achieving both.

Everything else is irrelevant.

Source: I've been struggling with this all my life.

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/dont-delay/200903/... [2]: https://www.tinyhabits.com/book

shahahmed14• 7 years ago

Thanks for checking it out and sharing your experience! I feel that building that tool or seeing this visualization helps certain people make your realization.

bshimmin• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

tempsy• 7 years 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.

shahahmed14• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

shahahmed14• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

shahahmed14• 7 years ago

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

mncharity3• 7 years 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 [2] http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/QEt9x

ddsea• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

no need to enter your exact personal info to try it out.

shahahmed14• 7 years 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)

jcims• 7 years ago

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

Enginerrrd2• 7 years 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?!

reificator2• 7 years 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.

Enginerrrd2• 7 years 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.

shahahmed14• 7 years 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.

bgdkbtv2• 7 years ago

That visualization is anxiety inducing

shahahmed14• 7 years ago

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

bgdkbtv2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Christ this scares me. No thanks!

shahahmed14• 7 years ago

Sorry! But thank you for checking it out

tzs• 7 years ago

I'm getting a pretty good instance of the Hermann grid illusion [1] from it.

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

apnkv2• 7 years ago

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

shahahmed14• 7 years 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

timestripe is definitely much more snazzy and robust - I like it!

apnkv2• 7 years ago

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

maury91• 7 years 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.

Show HN: Visualizing Your Life in Weeks

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