How to play

The five things that happen

1. 1.A birth is drawn

   The draw uses each country's share of world births that year, so a baby born in India in 2023 is far more likely than one born in Iceland — exactly as in the real world. Sex comes from the country's own sex ratio at birth, urban or rural from its urban share, and family income from a uniform quintile draw.

2. 2.You make a few decisions

   Between two and five in a typical life. Each one is a real fork: stay in school or leave at 15, move to the city or stay, start smoking or not. The options you are offered depend on where and when you were born, because a decision that does not exist in a place should not be offered there.

3. 3.Every year, one focus

   Study, work, rest, see people, or look after your health. The effect is small and diminishes if you repeat the same focus, because a fifth consecutive year of the same thing does less than the first.

4. 4.The record accumulates

   Every event names its source. Tap a source chip to see the table or the method behind it. Nothing in the record is invented prose: each line is generated from the event's type and its values.

5. 5.You die, and the record closes

   The age is chosen by one draw against the country's life table, shifted by the choices you made. The death screen shows the age, the cause group, where you sat in the survival distribution, and three people born the same second as you.

What the choices can and cannot do

Your choices move your survival by at most 6 years in either direction, in any country. That bound is computed per country and per sex from that country's own life table, not asserted globally. Where you were born moves it by decades. That asymmetry is the point of the simulation, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

How the model works

How long it takes

About two minutes if you read every line, under a minute if you let the decisions run automatically. There is no timer and no way to lose.

What is stored

Finished lives are kept in this browser only — the last ten. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no account. A transfer link carries a life to another device in the URL fragment, which browsers do not send to servers.

Questions this page answers

Is there a right way to play?

No. The decisions have no score, and the auto policy — which fills in each choice using the country's own published rates — produces a statistically more typical life than most players do. Choosing for yourself is the interesting part, not the optimal part.

Can I choose my country or year?

Not on the first draw, because a chosen birth is not a drawn one. Country pages offer a life born in that country, and every country page lets you pick any year from 1950 to 2023.

What happens if I close the tab mid-life?

An unfinished life is not saved. Finished lives are, and they stay on the shelf. Nothing is lost that was ever stored.

What is stored

Press Be born. A country, a sex, a birth year and a family income quintile are drawn from that year's published distribution. You then make a few decisions — school, work, where to live, health — and watch the record fill in until the life ends.