Memento Mori: Your Life in Weeks
Every week of a long life is one small box. The ones you have lived are filled in.
Runs entirely in your browser
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Each box is one week of a life of 80 years.
Enter your date of birth to fill in the weeks you have lived.
Tap a box to see when it is.
Your date of birth stays in this page. It is never sent anywhere, and it is kept in this browser only if you tick the box.
A life of 80 years is about 4,160 weeks. Here each one is a small box, a row for each year of your life, and when you enter your date of birth the weeks you have already lived are filled in. The red box is this week. It fits on one screen, which is the point: the whole of a life, seen at once, is not very many boxes.
Memento mori, remember that you will die, was not meant as gloom. The Stoics used it to sort the important from the urgent: Seneca's letters open with the reminder that time is the only thing that is truly ours, and Marcus Aurelius told himself not to act as if he had ten thousand years. Counting what is left in summers, weekends and full moons makes the same point in numbers you can feel.
Change the lifespan to 70 or 90, see the same life in months or years, and tap any box to see which week it is. Download it as a phone wallpaper, to see each time you reach for your phone, or as a poster to print and fill in by hand. Your date of birth stays in this page: it is not sent anywhere, and it is kept in this browser only if you ask.
How to use it
- Enter your date of birth.
- Choose the length of life to plan for: 80 years is about what people in rich countries live today.
- Tap a box to see its dates, or switch to months or years.
- Download it as a phone wallpaper, or as a poster to print.
Questions
What does memento mori mean?
Latin for remember that you will die. It is an old reminder, found in Roman writing, in Christian art and above all in Stoic philosophy, used not to frighten but to keep the mind on what matters while there is time for it.
Why weeks?
A week is the unit a life is actually lived in: plans are made by the week, and a week is small enough to feel. Seen as 4,160 boxes, a life is countable, and a week lost is visibly one box. The idea of drawing it this way was made popular by Tim Urban's Your Life in Weeks.
How are the weeks counted?
Each row is one year of your life, from one birthday to the next, cut into 52 weeks; the last box of a row takes the extra day or two. The boxes filled are your whole years times 52, plus the weeks since your last birthday.
What lifespan should I choose?
Eighty years is close to life expectancy in most of Europe, North America and East Asia today, and a little over the world average of about 73. It is a calendar, not a forecast: choose the length that makes you think.
Is my date of birth saved or sent anywhere?
It is never sent anywhere; the page works it out on your device. It is kept in this browser for next time only if you tick the box, and unticking it removes it.
Your data stays on your device
Everything above runs inside your browser as WebAssembly compiled from Rust. Nothing you type is uploaded, logged or stored on a server. You can load this page once, go offline, and it still works.
This page makes no requests at all, to anywhere. That is not a promise in the copy: it is a Content-Security-Policy header your browser enforces, and connect-src on it is none. Open the network tab and watch nothing happen.