Show HN: Weeks of Your Life(weeksofyour.life) 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). |
[Edit] This post on the same page is related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38741982
I’ve spent a bunch of this holiday sitting on the couch, relaxing or letting my mind wander or just enjoying being near a warm fire. I don’t think I’ll regret that at the end of my life (provided my life isn’t all sitting on a couch)
I’d argue if you feel pressured to do “meaningful” things that apparently don’t bring you joy, you’re just miscalibrated about meaning of your life?
tho I agree the popular notion is to > fill each moment/cell with something "meaningful" or "worthwhile".
and I would add, there is pressure to achieve something "unique"
It's important to think about the things you have done and accomplished in life (happiness is more meaningful if you focus on celebrating what you have rather than chasing= what you don't have), and if you use this as an exercise to remind yourself of what you have accomplished/done, it might be helpful.
It could also be motivating. Perhaps you see all the things you've done and you're proud of and it encourages you to set out and do more things. Or the things you haven't done enough of, but are within your control to do more of in the future.
I quite like this kind of view on my past.
We increase that pressure.
So what? That's missing the entire point of <hobby>.
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.
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.
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.
It was refreshingly simple and, despite being more verbose, it was clear what everything would happen once a certain event would happen. With a bit of clever refactoring dealing with elements factories wasn't too bad, even without a templating engine.
Not having to think "How is this going to be rendered by React, is it going to be efficient or trash performance" was great and I think it's intrinsic of picking a certain abstraction and we'll always have that.
Sure, the better the abstraction the less this problem happens eg. Solid is calling the component function once, which makes things easy to reason about
And yeah, this definitely set off my alarm bells like "maybe I shouldn't be using React here." I guess the initial goal was just getting something that works out there using the thing I know best (React), and the second phase could be a rewrite using a better tool for the job-open to any thoughts and suggestions on that.
Unfortunately I don't have more specific suggestions, but just in case the verbosity of vanilla is a turn-off, I will namedrop Bliss.js.
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.
I just pushed an update to only update the grid of weeks once the date picker is unfocused (onblur event) rather than recomputing unnecessarily on every change event. I suspect that is what caused the bug you're describing, but let me know if it's still broken.
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...
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.
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.
Maybe I could add an export feature that downloads the data in a .csv or something. The URL storage is definitely a bit wonky, but more robust persistence felt like overkill (maybe I'm wrong about that, though!).
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...
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.
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 want to clone this and run it locally and add pics and a family tree and and and....
I love this.
Damn, "I got married" and one mouse scroll later, "Officially divorced". And it wasn't even to the same woman, he got married and divorced twice within 1 desktop browser viewport's worth of weeks.
"Lots of ink spilled on the coming of age, but no one prepares you for middle age: losing a parent, confronting the reality of passing time, and the resulting reevaluation of life’s priorities. More art should explore this period of life."
It struck me at the same age as you. It doesn't seem to be unique and I didn't find the solution. What I think is that there is no solution, just acceptance and making sure we do things that we feel are worthwhile whilst avoiding that "auto-mode" at work.
For me, it was the fact that I live 8000km from my parents. The last 2 years were just so fast it became a blur. But seeing them grow old scared me so much that I'd rather lose out on my career but try to spend more time with them and live closer.
Instead of chasing startups and VC glory, I would like to work on problems that I care about and build small things that are fun despite them not bringing full-time income even if I just do it on the side. My professional goals are around working on worthwhile things (subjective) with a small team of awesome people. The dream setup is to have 5 smart friends and work together on cool shit we all enjoy whilst earning a living.
Also exploring all these emotions and feelings is interesting. I found that having dire nostalgia and melancholic feelings about the past (and hence passing time...)probably signals something. However, if left unexplored it doesn't lead to introspection. It's meta but even thinking about why the feelings that you described exist leads to interesting internal and external conversations. Journaling, therapy, SO conversations.
"Spending your time well" is an art that is hard to get right.
Would love to also hear about more resources on this topic.
what do you mean by this?
Although I've had a lot of success by conventional means (I run my own company solo, work for myself, I'm married with children, I own my house with no mortgage, etc).
My sights are still higher and I feel like I'm still playing catch up. I've been debating about what to focus my time on these days-- do I push more on my business and attain more success? Do I allow myself time to pursue interests that have little to negative financial upsides? Do I forget all of it and just spend that time with my family?
Wish I had a solution or answer for you, but I'm still figuring it out.
If I were you I'd probably spend time with my kids. They're only young once and getting to enjoy those years would probably mean the most to me.
I do have a few hobbies I can enjoy doing to just forget about all those things. I don't think there is a "solution" though, everyone needs to find his/her own remedy someway.
Runner's high or the sense of accomplishment from a 100 mile bike ride or a tough day hike make me feel more alive than any party ever did.
Another perk of getting old ;)
(I didn't know the browser had a native date picker.)
And yep, the browser date picker (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/in...) is a major time saver. This project uses the native color picker, too.
It's about building the memories and the trust (in both directions) that anchors the family together. That'll pay off as they grow older and come into their own identities and start to drift away from you into their own lives.
It's partly about setting up opportunities for the big events that people idealize and have nostalgia for. If you're not there, you can't have those great experiences.
It's partly about having the bad experiences. Sometimes those matter more in the long run for building the deep, meaningful, and lasting relationship.
The day-to-day often sucks and often isn't "enjoyed". But the cumulative results of the time and the good and the bad - that takes long-term investment.
I admit I don’t know that many parents personal enough to know if most are feeling more burdened than not. I would hope that is not the case.
It is enjoyable to watch them grow and putting energy into kids when they are young feels rewarding.
Pretty much everything a kid does is important and/or rewarding biologically to the parents.
I've noticed parents don't talk about it in public, they've forgotten what it is like to be single and wrapped up in work.
Parents often only say that 'you should have kids' and 'it's great' with no further description of what it is like.
Parents are a strange phenomena, they become tribal and grounded, once a man becomes a father.
