10,000 Days of Life

A data visualization documenting a lifetime.

I recently turned 10,000 days old! (aka, just over 27 years old) To celebrate, I made a visualization of what I’ve done with my life for those 10k days. I worked with my mom to record the dates of some life events (thanks Mom!) and loved seeing where life has taken me.

It’s easy to think of time in terms of months and years, but seeing a lifetime of days all at once revealed a different perspective. In some ways, time seemed to move a lot quicker when counting the individual days. But, while 27 years doesn’t feel like a long time to have lived, 10,000 days feels like quite a lot.

Seeing 10,000 little squares that represent every day of my life made me think about how I’ve spent my time. I’ve been fortunate to have spent most of the days of my life in school getting an education. I’ve had health issues that helped me focus on doing the things I care about and spending time with the people I love. Reflecting on early milestones that I don’t remember — like my first steps, my first word (“Dracula” 🧛🏻), or my first camp-out with my dad — made me realize how full and precious even the mundane days of life are.

Another 10,000 days and I’ll be in my 50s, which feels like waaaay more than 10k days away. I don’t anticipate that it’ll all be smooth sailing, but I’m sure there are many more happy events to come in the next phase of my life. Maybe I’ll even revive this project to celebrate 20,000 days…

You can swipe through the original project here on Instagram, or check out the modified images of the project in this post. Enjoy, and live a good life. ✨

Here’s the animated legend for how to read this data viz:

Each square in this project represents one day, and each column of squares represents a month. Each year is grouped together, and periods of schooling are color-coded. Special events are labeled with emojis.

Made with Adobe Illustrator, magic, and After Effects.