Show HN: Life calendar – use the concept of Memento mori to embrace every week
life-cal.com
life-cal.com
> “Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.”
- William Martin
The idea that one needs to do something memorable every week sounds like a recipe for disaster, burnout at a young age or depression. So no thank you, I'll take my ordinary life which is full of ups and downs.
Sidenote: The fact that a sign up is needed to download a PDF makes me think that you're using this as a way to farm for user data and makes me distrust your intention.
I'd like to add another detail, which is that people generally accept the idea that "deathbed perspective" is a highly privileged perspective, but with no real justification for this position. Here's a good article that questions this idea: https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-deathbed-perspective-consi...
I get that it's more a heuristic for living a good life. But life is so uncertain and your goals subject to change significantly every 5-10 years.
For me, stuff I regretted wasting time on while younger (e.g. too many video games) bring back much better memories than doing things I (mistakenly) thought had more value. Quitting gaming in my early 20's was, in retrospect, not a great idea.
But yeah, I agree with you somewhat. A lot of people who live to a fairly old age actually have said that if you live long enough, you'll realize that "nothing matters". So probably not best to put too much weight on their perspective.
https://www.nsta.org/q-if-tree-falls-forest-and-theres-no-on...
Only through solipsism one might think that nothing would exist without the current conscientiousness stream.
I don't fancy the life calendar stuff. I am very curious by nature, and curiosity I find the most important in 'doing'. I really don't need to stimulate that, just like I don't need psychedelics or weed to get open minded (been there, done it).
Mindfulness is a product of an industry seeking to capitalise on the yoga pants (and later suits) demographic, to great success. Let's not legitimise it by using it as an example of healthy thinking, because it's not.
There are some legitimate reasons to be wary of the push for mindfulness -- for example, when it is pushed by employers to try and increase employee satisfaction and retention, in lieu of actually improving their quality of life -- but that certainly doesn't mean the practice itself is bad.
The fact of death isn't what makes things valuable or meaningful.
The fact that our time span to enjoy things is limited also isn't what makes them valuable or meaningful.
The quote is describing much more than mindfulness. It's saying that values and meaning are right in front of us. To reduce that to mindfulness misses the value in what it's saying.
>> When you realize that this tomato could be the last tomato you’ll be eating
You're confusing Stoicism with Mindfulness.
I agree, which is why I try to view the little things as memorable. Laying on the couch with my dog or cooking for my wife is a little thing, but amazing and memorable. Doom scrolling, not so much.
For example meeting a particularly friendly dog on the metro, a peculiar piece of graffiti, or just something a friend said that I found particularly funny.
It’s these small little moments that when stitched together over time that make up a “life well lived” in my opinion, much more so than setting large lofty goals or striving for doing “memorable” things.
Memento mori doesn't mean every moment needs to be absolutely epic. But a mindful approach can alleviate daily stresses, concerns, fights etc. You're gonna die one day, so just relax and enjoy this moment, whatever you happen to be doing!
Seems tech people love them some memorizing. Live a memorable moment, load it into an Anki deck, then review memorable moments for the remainder of your days. Do one last review right before you check out.
The "Login after customizing everything" and "Pay to remove the watermark which renders the calendar useless" are borderline dark patterns.
But on the positive, it gave me an idea to make my own version of this calendar, sans the money grab.
I would really like to have one That has labels external to the life calendar itself poking into it like a giant cactus. I don’t want to create want to go, I figure it’ll take me a full year to actually populate the thing with the events that I either recapture by residing old photos, journal entries or otherwise talking to my wife.
What can I say, I’m old and remembering important events isn’t going to happen all at once.
[0] https://shop-eu.kurzgesagt.org/collections/existential-dread...
Then I got stuck filling it out: Is week #1 (the square in the top left corner) the first calendar week of my birth year? Or is it the first week of my life? The latter makes more sense, but then it gets really tedious to translate timestamps for university graduation etc. (OP takes the birthday into account and offers month markers. Good idea.)
The life calendar is now posted next to my desk, still empty half a year later. Once/if I get to filling it out, I should mark this long period of time where I have it but don't use it. Time flies.
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The worry comes from what you can do. If you did not want this power you would not ask for the information and explicitly say you have power over it.
- https://memento-mori-calendar.vercel.app/ - https://www.bryanbraun.com/your-life/ - https://www.ekn.io/calendar/
This would make me think (obsess) about running out of time and on toiling to make a "legacy". I like the exact opposite, _not_ thinking about mortality or legacy. This gives me the freedom to just enjoy every week and try to do things that make me happy.
I will probably be murdered in my sleep by the person in charge of maintaining the code I'm writing right now. So, that.
But more to the point: I write code, I like writing code, and I have embraced the fact that writing code makes me happy. At the risk of sounding like the comic book guy in the Simpsons movie, I will probably look back and say "I regret nothing". I never regretted the weekend nights I spent exploring the Web with my 56k modem, and I don't think I'll start now.
I remember thinking that my biggest regret was that I had prioritized my job over my health. I’d stopped exercising and was overeating because my work was in a bad place and I was trying to scrape together every moment to make progress, and I’m sure that had a deleterious effect on my spine health.
I resolved that going forward I would prioritize my health (and my family) over my job.
I succeeded at maintaining those priorities for a while, and luckily my back healed relatively well. But I’ll admit that job stress ramped back up, and as I felt physically better it was all to easy to shift back into the same old patterns.
Which lists the same things, same concept, but instead of a pdf, it gives you a jog of same grid.
I personally used an excel sheet with first column listing my age in years, like 0,1,2, all the way till 90.
First row has months spanning across four columns, so B1:B5 will be Jan, & so on till Dec. Last column has year in YY format, so it starts from 84,85,86 etc for total 90 years.
First row & first column, i.e. headers are fixed view.
Each of the actual cells are all light grey border, with month bounry (every 4th column) a bit darker grey. The overall boundary, 12x4= 48 columns and 90 rows have thick black border.
All columns have vertical center text, and left aligned.
All cells, columns, rows have exact same width height, not headers.
Each of the month is roughly divided between 4 parts, 1 to 7, 8 to 14, 15 to 21, & 21+.
First entry simply says Born. On my birthday.
Then school classes, they all start in April first week. First, Second etc.
Then college.
Some personal events, like birth of my siblings.
Every time something major happens (like relocation), I change the background of those cells to another pastel color.
Text left aligned, so overflow flows over to next columns.
Someday I will make a blog post at davinder.net & will attach a blank all setup excel sheet, for no money :)
When you're young, constantly focusing on your deathbed is frankly a waste of time. Focus on your friends. Focus on having experiences that make great stories to share with your friends. Enjoy life.
Don't worry, as you age, you'll certainly focus on mortality. But I'm firmly convinced that having a full, joyous life always trumps striving for doing things you'll recall on your deathbed. Once I get there, if I feel loved, that will be enough.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.machineryc...
I decided I wanted the weeks bigger so I deleted the already passed weeks, and changed the end date to proposed retirement at 65. It's not fun. I've lost the file but easy enough
The talk https://youtu.be/arj7oStGLkU
The preview on the right seems to be blank, but if you click on the 'Download' link, it generates the PDF correctly/as intended.
To get a sheet where you get to cross off everything on your own, just use 0 as the age in the input box.
Now I'm thinking of pivoting this thing, maybe someone want to collaborate? The siteL https://motley.place, sorry but the intro video is in Russian.
Why would I need to remember ANYTHING on my death bed? It's not even clear that it will be a "bed". Climate change, nuclear war, next pandemic, political violence could kill me. Even if I am happy enough to have a "bed", I will spend my last minutes watching the transition and not giving a sht to my memories.
My wife thought it was pretty morbid. I never thought to deliberately punctuate each week, though. It was motivating at first, but wore off.
1) need to register to get the pdf...i did it but i consider it really too much for such service so i used a throwaway email account
2) i couldn't download it using chrome (is it me only? i can download files from everywhere)
3) on Safari i downloaded the pdf but it was blank except for the quote written on the footer of the page
However, why on earth do I have to sign in?
Tip: If you're from the EU, A4 paper pages with 0.5cm lines perfectly fit 52 weeks x 36 years. No printer needed.
I guess I'll guide my son to find some passion early in his life, so that even though his life might as well be a boring one, he himself may have the luxury of regarding it as a slightly more interesting one.
May I suggest you make it clear from the front page that the design costs 10$ ?