My Life in Weeks

I’ve been preoccupied with how to make the most of what little time we get here in this life for as long as I can remember, and it’s only increased with age and brushes with illness. Over ten years ago, this Wait But Why piece by Tim Urban on visualizing the entirety of your life as a finite number of weeks (versus years or months) made a big impression on me.

A week is a short enough time to hold in your head, and long enough time for big things to happen. Then there are eras of your life that span collections of weeks.

This image from Urban’s article really sank in:

Just look at the life expectancy points, and how many weeks we spend working versus growing up or if we’re lucky, retired. Yep, that about tells it.

The natural reaction to this is: What does my life look like? When a friend made a web-based version of his life in weeks and shared his code, I knew I had to make My Life in Weeks.

After checking with him, I copied his code and went to work implementing the design and build changes I wanted. I added a decades navbar with a shrinking header, modernized the tooltips, made the page mobile-friendly, picked new type and colors, ported the site-generation from Jekyll to Hugo (decreasing build time by 3x), and added color-coding to approximate WBW’s grid. My updated Life in Weeks code is here. In the README, I listed some no-code tools to make your own, and I invite all forks and riffs on my design and templates.

Compiling the 90+ events I added to my weeks grid was a process. It required a lot of reflection, digging through old photos and calendars, and checking my memory with my wife and family. In some cases, I approximated dates and qualified the description with “Around this time.” I went back-and-forth about what events were important or transformational enough to note in this high-level view, why that was, and what brief words I wanted say about them. Since I planned to make this map public, I was mindful about omitting or generalizing private details.

When it was done, I deleted the events and made each row display a year of weeks like the WBW version. Then I zoomed way out on my life so far:

It’s neat to see the eras of my life as collections of weeks color-coded by where I was based and what I was doing at the time. They look like layers of sedimentary rock, or maybe rings in a cross-section cut of a tree’s trunk. It’s weird how different and the same I was in each time period. I spent a lot of time in school! I spent even more time working! Except for a few terrifying boxes after graduation, and maybe a few slow weeks during my freelancing years, I have had very little time off until now!

They say retrospect is the clearest vision. Putting the events on the map helped me see new stories about my path, like:

• My access and privilege thanks to my family: I had a story that I didn’t grow up wealthy or privileged. Mom was a public school teacher, Dad sold elevator controllers, and while we always had food, housing, and clothes, there weren’t fancy family vacations or many extras. I started working babysitting jobs at 13, I was able to do college thanks to a scholarship and a loan, I didn’t have my own computer or car till my 20s. But! Putting together this map, I see the opposite story so clearly. My grandparents immigrated to the U.S. between 1900 and 1905, chose New York City as the place to settle, and after they were married, bought the newly-built house they raised my mother in, and then my parents raised me in. Dad spent way more money than he should have, Mom let him know, on a personal computer in 1984. He was probably able to do this because they didn’t have a mortgage. I also watched Dad kiss Mom hello when he got home from work every night until the day he died. A paid-off house in New York City, USA, with married parents who loved each other enough to kiss each other every night, and a family computer? It doesn’t get more lucky and privileged than that, and that’s because of choices my ancestors made 120 years ago that made it possible for my parents to create a certain life for our family. This is the definition of generational wealth.
• My siblings paving the way: As the youngest of 4 kids by far, I often felt small and overlooked growing up, and resented my older siblings, whose big and complicated lives seemingly took all my parents’ attention. On reflection I realized how much my siblings modeled life for me, and created scaffolding and opportunities for me. I chose the high school I went to and always had a summer job because of my sister. I went away to college because my siblings went away to college and I rode in the car to drop them off and saw what that meant. I went to the same grad school program my brother went to, and worked with and for him at my first job, which I got due to pure nepotism. I moved out of my parents’ house and in with my sister, to whom I paid rent, but who I was much more comfortable living with than if I had to go out and find a stranger to split rent with. Later, at a time we were not eligible for a mortgage because I was a freelancer and they only accepted W-2’s as proof of income after the 2008 financial crisis, I co-bought a house with my sister thanks solely to her W-2. Having several older siblings, it turned out, paved the way of my life.
• Who I knew mattered as much as what I knew: Looking at this map, I can see a thread of relationships that led me along my path. I got to go away to college thanks to my parents and siblings. There I met T and fell in love. I also met K, who knew C. When I wanted to leave the family company job and do my own thing, C got me an interview at Bolt. There I learned HTML and web development deeply. Inspired by my Bolt coworker G’s site, I started and wrote my personal blog at night and on weekends. T knew E who was married to S, who wrote a blog. At S and E’s holiday party I was delighted to meet famous blogger A, and A knew M. When M posted on her blog that she was hiring someone to help with Kinja, A connected me, and M read my blog and gave me an interview. At Kinja, I saw M navigate the process of her former company’s acquisition, which was educational. At Kinja I also met N, who read my blog and asked me to work on Lifehacker. At some point I emailed P, whose blog I greatly admired, and he agreed to take a walk in Prospect Park because he read my blog. Later, A and I co-founded a company. Even later, P started Postlight, and wondered if I wanted to interview. And on and on. Getting to know people, many via publishing online, greased the tracks of my career during a particular moment in time. Speaking of…
• The impact of time and place: I happened to be in my teens and early 20s during the dawn of the web. I happened to be in New York City as the early blogging community blossomed post 9/11. These were perfect conditions to launch the career of an introverted writer who loved self-publishing. Any other time or place that valued different skills would have set my life on a different trajectory. If I had been older or had already had kids I wouldn’t have had nights-and-weekends time to devote to my personal blog. If I didn’t figure out just enough HTML, a nascent skill, to get myself a web developer job that paid enough to cover rent, if outsourcing or AI had already made those jobs scarce, I would not have had my career. If T and I had actually moved to PA like we talked about. Being in the right place at the right time meant I got to have some incredible experiences later on in life, like starting and selling companies, singing happy birthday to the President of the United States in the East Wing of the White House, and going on a submarine dive. It’s pretty wild how small circumstantial events can compound over time in the right conditions.

I listen to my aging parents retell the stories of their lives at family gatherings, and I see that getting older makes you want to tell your story before it’s too late. I’m sure that’s a part of what made me want to do this project. I described My Life in Weeks as a self-indulgent sabbatical project to a friend. When a high-traffic site linked it recently I both celebrated and cringed, aware that my life is so mundane to anyone who isn’t me or my close people. But sharing even my mundanity online has had a net positive effect over the course of my life so far (save a harmless weirdo or three).

So, here’s My Life in Weeks, a little web programming and design project, a big-picture reflection, and a desire to make the most of however more remaining weeks I have.