Hi! I made an interactive visualization of your life in weeks. Inspired by Tim Urban's Your Life in Weeks (Wait But Why) and Buster Benson's Life in Weeks.
Hopefully it's a fun thing to do together with family over the holidays.
I wrote about it on my digital garden: https://www.petemillspaugh.com/weeks-of-your-life
Any feedback is welcome. Top on my todo list is improving performance (reduce interaction lag).
This is a visualization of how I have been feeling for the last couple of years.
I'm in my mid 30s and lately have been going through what I'm sure is a mid life crisis. Seeing all these empty cells really underscores the point.
- Aware of my limited time
- Aware of my limited health (despite exercising, eating healthy, avoiding alcohol and drugs, sleeping well, etc... I don't feel like I did in my 20s)
- Difficulty finding meaning in my work / life ... lots of existential thoughts and worries.
- Bored and burned out, not really sure "what else" there is yet constantly reminded of time that is running out.
Anyone else been feeling this way? My "solution" has been to just accept it and take each day as it comes. I haven't given up, I'm just trying to chill out and let go a little bit. The last three decades were all about gas, gas, gas and maybe I need to just accept that I've reached a time in life where my body and mind is telling me to ease up on the accelerator, enjoy the small things, and accept that what will be will be.
Date picker is broken, also it is really slow webpage for what it is doing. Every web developer in 2024 and forwartd should have average device released at least 10 years ago to understand that what they are writing these deys using this horrendous web frameworks is unusable on these devices.
About 10 years ago I made an app called Bucket52 which challenged you to record one interesting thing you did each week. How did you make this week memorable.
It was amazing how challenging it was to do one unique thing a week. It didn't even need to be anything big, just "what will I remember about this week".
I think as a New Years Resolution, I may try it again this year.
> As far as I know, there’s no way to set a dynamic width for an HTML input with pure CSS (please lmk if that’s not the case). Setting max-content doesn’t work, for example, because inputs are replaced elements that have intrinsic dimensions and behaviors that are not fully governed by CSS.
This is the case currently, but when field-sizing: content; lands, you can do it with a single property.
Also I get a weird feeling when something like React makes simple things hard and low performance. The solution of pouring a lot of time into debugging and optimizing (in context of React) feels even weirder to me. Sure, you might not need React here, but what if you do? What's the next best solution? Integrate the React "frame" with an "island" of vanilla?
I don't know, something about having this issue puts me off in a major way.
> Any feedback is welcome. Top on my todo list is improving performance (reduce interaction lag).
Maybe don't have it render anything until a valid date post 1800 has been parsed in all fields?
I started typing a date and it rendered the year 0190.
One suggestion.... Make it faster to skip back and set the start date, or allow manual entry. I'm not even that old but it's a lot of months to click backwards on Android.
As the page said, it's inspired by https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html, but I prefer the version on his post: https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/201... , where a week with an event doesn't expand to take up so much space, and it's possible to add background colors to mark segments of your life.
I was making a similar app to learn Angular (and realizing the performance is lousy if each square is an Angular component), an interesting thing is, because of the day-of-week drift from year to year (Jan 1 2023 is Sunday, Jan 1 2024 is Monday, Jan 1 2025 is Wednesday, hello leap year 2024), the grid isn't always 52 columns wide, some years would need 53 weeks, because your birthday could be a Sunday (end of week in a particular year) and it'd be a Monday next year, meaning there'd be 53 Sundays between the 2 birthdays...
Nice job, was going to mention url size limits but then read your blog post and it already mentioned using urls to be able to share with others without a database.
One thing that might be interesting is being able to edit things in the future if you want to plan something out, but don't know if that's really in the spirit of the site.
Is it possible to run it locally or create backups or link it with some storage?
Only reason for asking it is that I was thinking of something similar and started keeping a daily diary in text files.
Can add summary of sorts for weekly thing.
But if someone is like me and has years worth of data, they'd want to be sure that data is going to be there in future as well.
Made a widget for Android using KWGT app which let's you create custom widgets. Free version at least let you copy past custom components and variables but you can't import saved files.
This widget simply highlights how many weeks of the year have been passed. Made it few weeks ago when a similar calendar was shared.
Here is the code you should be able to copy paste. Includes screenshot as well. https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/e54497e5e10f897d22f5de9e...
I get the urge to quantify life like this, but as a late bloomer in many respects I find it helpful (less stressful) to focus on who I've been rather than how long my flesh has been bumbling around.
It's all a continuum full of overlapping parts of myself, but I wasn't really recognizable as my current self before about 22ish. I don't find it terribly helpful to feel time-pressured about what that previous person spent those weeks on.
Think of it as a kind of persona bankruptcy.
Life is short, and my subconscious already spends enough time worrying about water under the bridge.
Nicely done. But I don't need the existential terror that it induces.
Measuring in weeks is not good enough, because too terrestrial. At least should mark on figures Moon phases (at least extremes), because, all life on Earth synchronized on tides, because water level changed not on shore only, but underground water also affected by tides.
And with knowing of Moon phases, you are armed and powerful.
Considering Moon phases, you could make the most from most fruitful part of Moon circle (when water level near top and raising), and avoid hassles from transitional part (from raise to decrease, especially, when combined with eclipses, which themselves could multiply tide near to twice), and better use decreasing part of circle.
Plus, good thing, to add Solar magnetic activity circles, which also relatively easy to calculate.
Yes, must admit, for most young people, Solar magnetic activity is mostly unnoticeable, but extreme parts of these, could even affect modern technology, for example, it could create potentials in railroads and in power lines, or even in large buildings, not too much, just about ten volts, but enough for wrong activation of some mechanisms or to trigger safety systems and to turn off part of railroad or power grid.
Also, these harmful potentials could affect copper communication lines.
And sure, Solar magnetic activity affect Earth weather, which is not so much important for terrestrial civilizations, but could very hard affect sea transport.
I have been wanting this for many WEEKS IN MY LIFE...
I want to clone this and run it locally and add pics and a family tree and and and....
I love this.
Another approach using spreadsheets: https://aaronbell.substack.com/p/visualize-your-life-the-eas...
On Android the hovers for a cell go away instantly. The age in year also looks kinda dumb if your birthday is at the end of the year like mine. 29 in 2012 when you're 28 until the last 2 days of the year for instance
Please tell me the author's birthday just happens to be the same as mine and it's NOT that browsers now have a way to share bday information with websites
but then with the example of DF Wallace wouldn't it make sense to stop counting the weeks of his life after his death?
no way i won't live till 22° century T.T
Fun how this makes a year seem so small
Love this
Oh god. No, no, no. This is horrifying.
Sometimes I think this concept is depressing because it increases the pressure to "do something" with your life. When you are presented with the finiteness of your life you feel pressure to fill each moment/cell with something "meaningful" or "worthwhile". When someone is enjoying a hobby they will lose track of time yet that hobby may be frivolous in the eyes of someone else. Do they want something like this to track how much time they "wasted"? To me there is this paradox of losing your sense of time with something you are passionate about (building a model, doing some hobby programming) and yet in trying to track it for some purpose of maximal utility will kill the passion.
[Edit] This post on the same page is related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38741982