Death Clock
thedeathclock.co
thedeathclock.co
The best part was the emails I'd get. Wow.
It hasn't changed much in 20 years, eh. https://web.archive.org/web/20000520091843/http://www.deathc... Really cool to see it's still up.
What were the emails like?
I've never been more curious. What sorts?
This is going to sound stupid but your website is one of my first memories I have of the internet. I was shown it by a school friend (we were about ~8 years old) and I remember being scared about the result, none of could read English well so pretty sure we filled out nonsense for the weight input :)
“YOU HAVE
NAN%
OF YOUR EXPECTED LIFESPAN REMAINING”
For me, I naively quit my job last year joining the indie hacker movement of creating my own online business. And now I'm just obsessed with finishing it and getting it to the same mrr as my last job's salary before I can do anything else.
I used to travel all the time but now all I can think of is my daughter's future. Pretty hard to go live your life when your financial situation becomes a mess :/
If you have debt or obligations that you arent willing to sacrifice or accept the consequences of sacrificing then don’t bother playing
But to answer your question, I started living for experiences more after big financial losses. I noticed that I was saving for something indeterminate and that after a loss I would have just been better off going to that festival or taking that vacation or something else consumptive
Eventually I got the inspiration and success to support my obligations and experiences. Probably not related, many paths possible, but I do think I meet more interesting people traveling to events than I did in an office setting
Easy bug to fix? LASt the very least I expect it to pick some arbitrary day of the month I enter.
I should tell my dad though that he is has about 13 weeks left to live. (Or should?)
The website is seriously malfunctioning. I guess it's just giving results of a different user.
A calculator which is much easier for me to use and gives more reasonable results is https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/population/longevity.html Its inputs are gender and date of birth. Gender has a big effect on life expectancy. This one shows 2.7 years left and a total estimated lifespan of 98.7 years. By this calculation he has about 3% of his life remaining.
That a person alive now is expected to die in the past?
> Consider that at 91-92 years you will have exceeded the expected number of years for your cohort.
The correct method for estimating remaining life is using life expectancy at current age not life expectancy at birth, since you want to know how long one is expected to live given that they have not, in fact, died already.
At 92, life expectancy is 3.54 years for a man, 4.2 for a woman, not some negative value.
This seems an uncharitable interpretation. Instead, I expect that the value shown is the "expected age of death" - "current age", which if your current age is beyond the average results in a negative number.
FWIW and as you note, this isn't the most useful result since alive people can't die in the past unless we accept some sci-fi premises.
> The correct method
While we're on the topic... More correct? Many factors that would improve the prediction weren't collected and used but a better prediction would take those into account.
So... Yes, your suggested method seems more useful and accurate yet I wasn't going for that goal so much as noting that it made sense to be that a lazy/naive/PoC/first implementation might get a negative result using exactly the formula above.
They were even more different in the past when life expectancy at birth was below 30, and most healthy adults lived past 70.
But they're still very different.
The 1918 flu epidemic killed even more (3 times as many), but not weighted as young; together it was a big hit on life expectancy.
Citation needed. Or, qualification of what you mean by "healthy adult".
Human Longevity has been around 70-80 years for thousands of years we know about, and possibly forever. It’s one of the common misunderstandings we get by learning about life expectancy.. I misunderstood it for a long time until my brother, an anthropologist, explained that there are historical records of people living to be 80 years old from a thousand and even 10,000 years ago. Life expectancy averages in a bunch of causes of early death, so it skews the average down. Longevity is what you’re left with when you factor out all the causes of early death. Life expectancy is going up because we’re eliminating the causes of early death mostly via basic medicine, clean water, washing hands, anti-bacterials. Not having wars helps. Vaccines help. Safer houses & jobs help. Etc. Longevity appears to have been increasing a little in the last century, possibly because life expectancy and longevity aren’t cleanly separable (nobody dies of old age, they eventually die of a disease or injury).
Adult young people and middle aged people died a lot more then today. Whether due to incidents that were more common and harder to treat or sicknesses.
If you limit the stats to "adults never never got seriously sick and never got injured" then the comparison is completely meaningless. Yeah, people did evolved to live longer, but we do expect more treatment and health.
Yes, but not that much. Mythology on HN makes them live basically as long as we do live. Completely ignoring adult accidents rates, ability to fix them or sicknesses and deaths while giving births. Ignoring sicknesses from stuff missing in food.
And of course using nebulous "past" as if forrest communities in 240 had same lifespan as 1950 city middle class. You imply deep past and all people. Then you argue by recent past excluding most common causes of death.
If you look at estimated length of life after adulthood, it is still lower then what was written here. If we were in the past, some of us would fall from roof, died of minor wound infection, tetanus, whatever we get vaccines for now, got tuberculosis or other now treatable sickness. Some of us would die while giving birth.
You’ve complained about my examples without providing any evidence of your argument at all. I’m not sure what your argument is either. Plato wrote about people living to be 80 years old. Bone samples from ancient native Americans show people living to 80 years old.
It’s an actual fact that surviving childhood before the last century produced a posterior probability that was dramatically higher than the at-birth life expectancy, where dramatically means 20-30 years longer life expectancy, precisely because something like 50% of people died between birth and adulthood. 50% is obviously a proxy for a number I don’t know exactly but could be anywhere from, say, 10% to 90% depending on when and where.
“Until the middle of the 20th century, infant mortality was approximately 40–60% of the total mortality. Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy during the 12th–19th centuries was approximately 55 years. If a medieval person survived childhood, they had about a 50% chance of living 50–55 years, instead of only 25–40 years.”
“Paleolothic : Based on the data from modern hunter-gatherer populations, it is estimated that at 15, life expectancy was an additional 39 years (total 54), with a 60% probability of reaching 15.”
“Classical Greece : Based on Athens Agora and Corinth data, total life expectancy at 15 would be 37–41 years. Most Greeks and Romans died young. About half of all children died before adolescence. Those who survived to the age of 30 had a reasonable chance of reaching 50 or 60. The truly elderly, however, were rare. Because so many died in childhood, life expectancy at birth was probably between 20 and 30 years.”
“Early Middle Ages Europe : Life expectancy for those of both sexes who survived birth averaged about 30—35 years. However, if a Gaulish boy made it past age 20, he might expect to live 25 more years while a woman at age 20 could normally expect about 17 years. And anyone who survived till 40 had a good chance at another 15 to 20 years.”
“Medieval Islamic World : Average age of scholars was 56–84.3 years”
Etc., etc., etc.
Interesting -- can you elaborate on whatever unrealities are forced upon life insurers by government?
You have -3.8% of your expected lifespan remaining
I assumed they would get this right, how sad.
We used different browsers, but the same machine.
EDIT: You can click the month and year directly. Meh, I don't like "invisible UI". And the result seems wrong, I doubt I have 61% of my life remaining at this point, alas... And the small dots stop at about 28... and the big dots stop at 70... no unit shown... Is this years? It's unclear. Guessing each dot represents a week? Maybe? 28 years is certainly wrong, as I'm 49. And at least on Firefox, the dot that the 20 lines up with and the dot that the 30 lines up with are actually 11 units apart, not 10... This is why I prefer backend dev, we have to be strict, while frontend can just... "does it look good? no test coverage? only a dozen JS errors that only other developers who actually care about JS errors will see? fuck it, wing it and post it to HN!!" lol
My age went from 20->60 and a few results in between with the same DOB. There's something screwy with this site when it's under high load. I think i'm getting someone elses input.
I would guess this is due to a disagreement between some part of the code that thinks there are 28 days in every February and another part that is aware that there are 29 days in a leap year. But it's odd that the bug shows up one-third of the way through February, instead of halfway through February, as I would expect if it were rounding to the nearest day. Quite a strange bug; it suggests that date calculations must have been done ad-hoc instead of using a well-tested date library.
Or in Montaigne’s words: to philosophize is to learn to die http://homepages.wmich.edu/~rvr5407/3140readings/That%20to%2...
No joke. The Buddhist perspective gets into that. The idea of dying tomorrow sets you up to worry about making the most of the future of the rest of the day, and you're still not really present. When we consider that these few breaths or bites or moments might be our last, we can release all the clinging and aversion because it's too late to do anything but be profoundly aware of being alive in this moment. And given that we usually don't just die, we get to experience that sense of life-flashing-before-your-eyes and immediate sense of love and compassion, and still an aspiration to make the very most of each moment (including planning for the future since that might be a thing).
This might be the final sentence you read. So, there's no reason to live each day as your last. It's okay to live each moment in whatever way it shows up. It's all we have, and there's nothing to do but to be aware of it. And, remarkably enough, once we stop striving and just let go, we magically find ourselves more attuned to our deepest values of love and compassion.
This writing might be the last action I ever do. Love to everyone and everything
Whatever you are doing right now, this could be it, and that's that. The magic is the chance to actually be present for an instant rather than just be lost in your anxieties and then be dead.
When you practice experiencing this as your last moments, you might just look out the window at the clouds and think about your most meaningful memories, but you also might as well keep washing the dishes and finally be really present with it.
If washing the dishes is your last moments, it can feel like a profound and meaningful experience of dish-washing. You can realize that you've been stuck in a judgmental low-level aversion to dish-washing and suddenly all the tension disappears, and you realize both the awesomeness and the mundaneness of it all at once. Water, sensations, plates are beautiful, you're living this life in some place, and it is what it is, and really it's amazing, we just constantly overlook it.
When you then do not actually die, you have the chance to prioritize being as grateful and loving as you possibly can in every moment going forward, at least whenever you can bring that presence back to mind. Whether that's when cleaning or being with others.
You might decide that there are activities you'd like to never ever do again.
But in the end, there's no right or wrong activities or context, there's only being present or not. We can be present even while the activity is making plans.
There isn't a duty to make the most of whatever period you are in. You don't have to die without regrets as you get to choose how you live for a large part.
If you die with regrets it means that there was a glimmer of vibrancy, maybe a sense of dreaming as you die albeit negative.
Friendly reminder not to waste some time, but work on important things instead...
This is a nice example of when you won't find a bug in your own app because you know how to use it :)
A bit of background about this and how it was built: I started back to work this week after some time off over Christmas. This year the company I worked for decided to hold a creative week to help get us back into work. I ended up being just 3 days as we presented them all to each other on Friday.
I know this is definitely still rough around the edges, it was just something I slapped together in a few days. Conflating life expectance to where you are born is obviously not perfect, but again, only had a few days.
If anyone is interested in how it work, or wants to fix the things that annoy them about it, pull requests are welcome!
That way they can bookmark it / share if they want.
Edit: found you can click the year, but why not just enter my full birthdate?
Edit: Also, just he focus on what one has lost (or in this case, spent), seems a tad counterproductive to extending one's healthspan...
But all of my UI design work is targeted at internal tools where looking good is way down the list below ease of use, so take my opinion with a grain of salt for anything customer facing.
Or, you could find yourself in a much better place in a year, and the time you spend doing that better is worth more in a year than the last 5 years where it was not better.
All that we can be certain of is this very moment and not much else. Live it up!
I think about 10 years ago I felt like I had already gotten plenty enough out of life not to feel short changed. Still love living, don’t get me wrong.
The next 40 is going to be interesting.
The next 20-25 will be interesting for you - after that you will just be telling people to get off your lawn, and making doctors appointments. ;>)
So in that sense you may not do all the living you've done all over again and then some.
For example, I'd say my 30s felt half as a long as my 20s, which themselves seemed to pass much faster than than 10-20, which felt very long indeed. And childhood, 0-10, seemed like an eternity!
This is true even at a micro level. E.g. a 3 hour car ride now does not feel like a big deal to me, but it seemed almost unbearably long to me as a child.
Another way in which you won't do as much living as you've already done is that in your early years you went through profound development -- both physically and mentally. That doesn't happen again; we mature, we refine, and (sadly, hopefully not too much), we decline, but it's nothing near as profound as we get to experience early in life.
FWIW, as someone in their early 30’s, the chances of you dying this year are somewhere in the 1% range. But your life expectancy has also gone up to 78/83 (male/female), from 76/81 where you were at birth.
More interesting is the quality of life, not how long you have =)
I just spent 8 years in jail simply because I was broke. What a waste of some of the best years of my life.
https://thedeathclock.co/results?life_expectancy=81&dob=1991...
On the other hand, if you are old and wealthy, you may be too frail to do anything.
It's a tricky balance, with no guarantees.
he YouTubers hit the road while they still could. Are enjoying themselves in a way many of us (still) only dream about.
Life is short, kids.
The rest of it is pretty accurate. My dad lived about 3 years after he retired, half of that he was too sick to do very much. My mom lived another 6 years after that but the last couple of years were not what anyone would really call living.
Don't assume you'll be a vital, active, world traveler at age 80. It might work out that way, it might not.
I know millionaire managers/directors of my age (around 50) say this for the past 20+ years and when I ask why they do not do it now because a) you might not like it b) you might not make it, they seem to find many excuses, some of which are even money related (and they have millions now).
[1] https://shop-us.kurzgesagt.org/products/lifespan-calendar-po...
That would be somewhat more useful....
Good job, good social network => life is just long enough.
Toxic job: life is a sluggish torture.
No job: life is going too fast and you have no time to choose which direction is best.
“Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).”
Since im on my phone im not gonna bother.
It would be much more accurate if the clock started when one of your parents or grand parents died and or could use that information to create a more accurate final day.
Nice.
I think I transcended life.
I'd love one that is e-ink or something super low energy if it is just doing a countdown to death. I love watches that don't tell time.
― Anais Nin
YOU HAVE NAN% OF YOUR EXPECTED LIFESPAN REMAINING
YOU HAVE
NAN%
OF YOUR EXPECTED LIFESPAN
REMAINING
Stoicism is very easily repurposed, because it is divorced from a religious praxis, and therefore easily assimilated. It is pithy and vague enough too, its maxims can fit on a bumper sticker. "Life is short!", honk if you agree.
The appeal for stoicism today is because it is aspirational; we no longer recognize the stoic hero in ourselves and our neighbors. Yet, we would wish we could marshal the inner strength we imagine the stoics of the past possessed.
When people broadcast stoic wisdom over twitter, or memes, or ted-talks, or through any other channels that exemplify the trite and vain nature of contemporary consumer media, it seems to scream despair, rather than confidence. A toddler trying to convince themselves they are not scared in the basement, if only they say it a loud enough.
Mu hunch is that is why you find a website like this annoying. Packaged for the internet, bland, vague, fast food for the brain.
I would agree. Up to a point.
Life is short indeed, gam gam has it on a plaque above her fireplace, she bought it in a trinket shop in Gatlinburg.
What is equally important, but unsaid, is what comes after. Both the stoic and hedonist will accept the premise, but will activate it very differently. Will you dedicate yourself to the future, or will you dedicate the present to yourself. I don't think that website makes any recommendation on the matter.
If you are designing a website/web app please use a html input type=date, at least on more modern devices and provide a fallback for older ones. The UX for date selection in modern browsers is very well thought through.
Apologies for being off topic.
EDIT:
This shouldn’t be the top comment, you should probably stop upvoting (currently 18)… I probably shouldn’t have posted it even.
I suppose we could let people mark their own comments off topic, which would drop them to the bottom of the page...
The UX of a date picker on the page doesn't clear that bar. That doesn't mean it's unimportant, just that the top of an HN page is not the appropriate context for it. Unless, of course, the story is about the UX of date pickers!