Your life in weeks
“So teach us to count our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Psalm 90:12
One square is one week. One row is one year. The weeks you have already lived turn gold; this week glows; the rest wait. It’s a quiet way to see a whole life at once — and to notice that this week is the only one you actually hold.
The maths, done honestly
A year averages 365.2425 days — 52.1775 weeks. So an 80-year life is about 4,174 weeks, the figure behind Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. This calendar draws the grid to the Luxembourg average life expectancy at birth — men 81.1 and women 85.2 years (STATEC, 2023–2025) — which is a projection, not a promise. Plenty of weeks fall on either side of an average; the point is wisdom, not arithmetic.
FAQ
- How many weeks are in a life?
- A year is 365.2425 days, or 52.1775 weeks. An 80-year life is about 4,174 weeks — the ‘four thousand weeks’ Oliver Burkeman writes about. At the Luxembourg average life expectancy (men 81.1, women 85.2 years, STATEC 2023–2025) that is roughly 4,232 and 4,446 weeks.
- Is my birth date sent anywhere?
- No. The calendar is computed entirely in your browser. Your birth date is saved only to this device’s local storage, never uploaded, and never placed in the URL. The downloadable image is generated locally too.
- Why ‘memento mori’ — isn’t that morbid?
- The opposite. Seeing a finite grid tends to make the present week feel worth using well. The tradition runs from Psalm 90:12 (‘teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom’) to Stoic practice to Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. It’s a wisdom tool, not a countdown to dread.
- Where does the life-in-weeks idea come from?
- The grid format was popularised by Tim Urban’s 2014 essay ‘Your Life in Weeks’ on Wait But Why. This is a free, private, interactive version with a downloadable image and a reflective framing.
Want the weekly rhythm too?
The life-in-weeks grid also lives inside Christian Daily, a free faith-anchored habit companion — a verse each morning, a gentle streak, and your days counted one at a time.