It's just an info-graphic. A reminder at how important it is to have weekly goals. The squares toggle, so I could mark the current week, or a short period. I think it's pretty awesome you drew a smiley face :-)
Ever since the 60s, epiphanies and ideas like this are fads, fashion statements. How did George Romero say it? Something like "it was the 60s, everyone had something to say." The 60s never ended, people keep thinking they have something to say, and since nobody's listening to them on Twitter and Facebook anymore, they're just getting more creative.
The idea is nice (depressing, but nice). But what's the use, you can only turn tiles to red. Can't even drag the mouse to select many, state is also not saved :(. My 2c
Way too optimistic. Here, all rectangles look similar, but actually, quality of life in bottom rectangles deteriorates rapidly, medical expenses are skyrocketing, and basically everything sucks.
I am living in the country with such laws in place (Switzerland); but most old people I talked to really want to live. Nobody wants to die, unless they are in great pain.
You could possibly say the same thing about quality of life in the beginning. Lots of necessary medical care, making your parent's lives miserable, can't get up and make a sandwich, higher likelihood of death [1], etc.
Would it be great if you could select ranges of blocks and assign a color to each range according to how you felt those days, i.e. green: good, yellow: not that good, red: not good.
I did something like this in past, with colors, and contrarily to the expectations it actually cheered me up to see all those green blocks making up a huge chunk of life.
I'm not sure what it's attempting to do, but the data it provided me was completely wrong. It was claiming there were only 6 days left in the year, for example. (It's April 10th, so there are many more than 6 days left.) It said 20 minutes left in the hour, but it's 8:22, so there's more like 38 minutes left. WTF?
Reminds me of Pixar's Inside Out, where memories are portrayed as little colored spheres, with different colors indicating joy, sadness, disgust, fear, and anger. These spheres end up getting stored in enormous warehouses, with enormous splashes of various colors.
Here's a similar project where the dots fade as you get older to indicate chance of death (the opacity is based on actual US mortality data from actuarial tables).
Well, the latter is simply not true, and if it is the former I hardly see how it would pose a problem. Not that you're in a position to make such a diagnosis.
Assuming it is, though, how would one know whether they are or not?
>I hardly see how it would pose a problem
Being unable to feel a variety of emotions and feeling the same each day can indeed be problem -- an indication of incomplete emotional development / functioning -- which can affect many parts of life, most importantly decision making, relationships, etc.
Of course the web can't make the diagnosis, but an expert can, given an examination.
Of course you might also be saying it lightly, e.g. feel "more or less" the same everyday, as opposed to always exactly the same, and given that nothing especially nice or bad has happened to you and those you know all this time.
> Assuming it is, though, how would one know whether they are or not?
You don't have to know it, you just have to believe enough to pursue something. You can sit around saying "nothing I do matters," but if the end result of that is doing nothing, then surely that kind of thinking would matter even less than any alternative.
>Of course you might also be saying it lightly, e.g. feel "more or less" the same everyday, as opposed to always exactly the same, and given that nothing especially nice or bad has happened to you and those you know all this time.
I feel a good number of emotions, they just don't color my whole day. I don't have bad days, basically. There are doubts, joys, pains, and irritations, but that's pretty much true of every day.
I'm not sure whether this is more ridiculous overstatement or personal attack, but it contains enough of the latter not to be ok here. Please post civilly and substantively or not at all.
A good friend of mine has a 365x100 rectangle on his (high res) display. As a reminder that it is small, yet he has less days in his life than pixels in this rectangle. And every day spent not on a worthwhile project is a great loss.
I keep a journal since three years and I mostly write about current "projects" (be them work or my own things) and future ideas.
To answer, yes, a day in which I haven't done anything useful is not really worth as much as a day in which I have, and it will be forgotten (unless I happen to be traveling (rare) or have met someone interesting (rarer)).
Most people have life goals that filter into professional, personal, family, etc. Some goals might not sound like projects "go on more vacations with the kids," but require a sequence of things to be done in order for them to be feasible.
In "the end," the ones that are most valuable will probably not be the professional things, particularly in the technical space. Most because they'll feel especially inconsequential 10 years out. The professional projects I spent weeks and months on a decade ago are problems largely solved and turnkey in 2016. That said, they're fulfilling, and that's why we enjoy doing them and challenging ourselves.
So unless you're doing some really monumentally important-for-humanity professional projects, their value is probably ephemeral. They should play into a larger set of life goals.
The inverse being: Why don't I just end it all right now?
One answer possibly being: Hmmm, better find some stupid project, and occupy myself, before I really consider whether I'd find a convincing answer to that question. Oh cool, they open sourced this childhood video game!
There is an enormous range between working on a worthwhile project and end it all right now. The point was that very few people lay on their death bed and wish they spent more time working. Typically they wish for more time with their family, or in the general sense more experiences.
Personally, I love the experience of learning something new and hence enjoy a lot of programming. I will not be wishing on my death bed to have written yet another CRUD app. If I die before my wife, I will have wanted more time with her - traveling if possible.
An e-mail I received right before reading this post:
"THANK YOU for your excellent customer service. Your videos on YouTube -- while I little over my head -- tell how you have a passion for electronics and creating solutions. I have told several people about you and I hope it brings you business.
Thank you for sharing your talents with the world."
It is so hard to imagine that reflecting on this e-mail might bring me some satisfaction on my death bed ?
I've watched both my parents as well as several other close friend die, and none of them really expressed any regrets. What's the point? Most people live the best life they can, and I've never known anyone to spend their last years or hours mired in regret. They actually seem to mostly reminisce about the highlights of their life, whatever they were.
To me, worthwhile projects is about personal achievement, reaching your potential, and giving back to society. So yes, I do wish I had more time to work on more worthwhile projects.
No. It can be assumed that people here enjoy working on projects. Projects that interest them. The deeper meaning of this statement, in my opinion, is that every day you spend doing something that you dont like is a very big deal because, as this graph illustrates, there aren't really that many days available to waste.
Here "worthwhile projects" is not about more clients, money or the HN front page. It's not about work - it's about passion (often - hobbies, side-projects, etc).
Isn't really that no-one says at h[ei]r deathbed "I wish I wrote that book; now this story is lost forever."?
I wonder if the 'tick a box per day' model is a proper visualization of your life. You age, health and knowledge define your potential of doing and accomplishing things e.g.
-- the majority of your top quality relationships are build in the first third of your life
-- you are very attractive for females between 25-40
-- you can learn certain things very fast as a kid
-- you age exponentially after a certain biologic age et cetera
I immediately began marking some memories of my early teen, a period when I remembered being genuinely happy (memories of growing up in Central Africa with my heroic elder brothers). But then I began marking several squares in my late teens for doing things I regretted. I marked a few squares in my mid twenties for doing things I regretted. I marked more in my early thirties for things I regretted. All dumb shit, nothing serious.
I was about to mark a few more blocks towards the end of my thirties too for things I regretted ... I had by then realised that I was one colossal self-bashing negative joy-sapping son of a bitch. How do I stop this self-criticism, dear lord?
Nice tool! Maybe it can be modified to aid psychotherapy.
this is amazing. It so clearly shows the human aging process and why 27 is the hardest year/color. But if you survive it, you break on through to the next color. I think around 87 there is another tough year.
Crazy to think how many people will get up tomorrow morning and hate the outlook of their day. To me that is insane and something that future generations will look back on in awe.
Ahh yeah, this is from Tim Urban's Your Life in Weeks post [0], and way before Tim discovered and wrote his awesome posts about the AI Revolution [1] and cryonics.... I guess he knows now that 90 might actually be quite short sighted.
So, I'm forking and adding the estimated date where we trascend from humans to cloud-beings (around 2045, Kurzweil's™ prediction) [2]...
131 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] thread[1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_mas...
I think the point of the web site is to let people know that there aren't that many weeks in one's life time.
nothing more... nothing less...
Well done. This is an excellent response to the page and to life.
That sounds pretty painful.
[1] http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/booth/Risk/dyingage1....
I first thought this was a Google Calendar view for some reason.
I did something like this in past, with colors, and contrarily to the expectations it actually cheered me up to see all those green blocks making up a huge chunk of life.
Also, it reminded me of http://moriclock.com
I like your idea of coloring of the blocks. I had big plans of turning it into some sort of journaling application.
http://www.sampl.us/life-of-dots/
Edit--now available as a watch: http://mytikker.com/collections/tikker
Assuming it is, though, how would one know whether they are or not?
>I hardly see how it would pose a problem
Being unable to feel a variety of emotions and feeling the same each day can indeed be problem -- an indication of incomplete emotional development / functioning -- which can affect many parts of life, most importantly decision making, relationships, etc.
Of course the web can't make the diagnosis, but an expert can, given an examination.
Of course you might also be saying it lightly, e.g. feel "more or less" the same everyday, as opposed to always exactly the same, and given that nothing especially nice or bad has happened to you and those you know all this time.
You don't have to know it, you just have to believe enough to pursue something. You can sit around saying "nothing I do matters," but if the end result of that is doing nothing, then surely that kind of thinking would matter even less than any alternative.
>Of course you might also be saying it lightly, e.g. feel "more or less" the same everyday, as opposed to always exactly the same, and given that nothing especially nice or bad has happened to you and those you know all this time.
I feel a good number of emotions, they just don't color my whole day. I don't have bad days, basically. There are doubts, joys, pains, and irritations, but that's pretty much true of every day.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11468051 and marked it off-topic.
A modern, sobering memento mori, I would say.
I like that!
> And every day spent not on a worthwhile project is a great loss.
Does anybody really values days of life based only on the "projects"?
To answer, yes, a day in which I haven't done anything useful is not really worth as much as a day in which I have, and it will be forgotten (unless I happen to be traveling (rare) or have met someone interesting (rarer)).
Most people have life goals that filter into professional, personal, family, etc. Some goals might not sound like projects "go on more vacations with the kids," but require a sequence of things to be done in order for them to be feasible.
In "the end," the ones that are most valuable will probably not be the professional things, particularly in the technical space. Most because they'll feel especially inconsequential 10 years out. The professional projects I spent weeks and months on a decade ago are problems largely solved and turnkey in 2016. That said, they're fulfilling, and that's why we enjoy doing them and challenging ourselves.
So unless you're doing some really monumentally important-for-humanity professional projects, their value is probably ephemeral. They should play into a larger set of life goals.
One answer possibly being: Hmmm, better find some stupid project, and occupy myself, before I really consider whether I'd find a convincing answer to that question. Oh cool, they open sourced this childhood video game!
Personally, I love the experience of learning something new and hence enjoy a lot of programming. I will not be wishing on my death bed to have written yet another CRUD app. If I die before my wife, I will have wanted more time with her - traveling if possible.
"THANK YOU for your excellent customer service. Your videos on YouTube -- while I little over my head -- tell how you have a passion for electronics and creating solutions. I have told several people about you and I hope it brings you business.
Thank you for sharing your talents with the world."
It is so hard to imagine that reflecting on this e-mail might bring me some satisfaction on my death bed ?
Cheers mate :)
Seems sensible to make them as worthwhile as possible.
Here "worthwhile projects" is not about more clients, money or the HN front page. It's not about work - it's about passion (often - hobbies, side-projects, etc).
Isn't really that no-one says at h[ei]r deathbed "I wish I wrote that book; now this story is lost forever."?
-- the majority of your top quality relationships are build in the first third of your life
-- you are very attractive for females between 25-40
-- you can learn certain things very fast as a kid
-- you age exponentially after a certain biologic age et cetera
"Go now, and die in what way seems best to you." - Denethor
You might find this interesting - it adds a bit of dynamicness to it
http://learnforeverlearn.com/candle/
I was about to mark a few more blocks towards the end of my thirties too for things I regretted ... I had by then realised that I was one colossal self-bashing negative joy-sapping son of a bitch. How do I stop this self-criticism, dear lord?
Nice tool! Maybe it can be modified to aid psychotherapy.
"Man will always have shit days." -- Greek proverb
So, I'm forking and adding the estimated date where we trascend from humans to cloud-beings (around 2045, Kurzweil's™ prediction) [2]...
[0] http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html
[1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...
[2] http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2048299...