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Methods
How this was counted
One light is one day. The count is 81 years long: 61 ordinary years and 20 leap years make 29,585 days. Every scene rearranges the same 29,585 lights. None are added, none are removed, and the ledger below is checked when the page loads.
Each pile is a published daily rate, spread over the ages it fits, then counted in days. From 15 the rates are the US American Time Use Survey, 2025. Below 15 they come from national child time diaries. Everything is at today's rates: what people of each age do now, held still across one life, which no real life does.
The film opens on a real workday (8.2 hours of work, for people who work that day) and melts it into the life average (2.7 hours), because a life includes childhood, weekends, holidays and retirement.
Your birth year is used only to find today, the full moons and your age (1 July of that year is taken as your birthday). 81 years is the length of the count, not a forecast: about six in ten boys and three in four girls born now reach it (ABS life tables). Nothing is stored or sent.
Tiers
M read from a national table, or exact arithmetic. E derived or modelled: a measured part times an assumed frequency, or from another population or era. Modelled figures are marked on screen.
The ledger
How it felt
Ratings are the consensus of four studies: Kahneman et al. 2004 , Krueger et al. 2009 , the ATUS well-being module (Robinson 2015) and Mappiness (Bryson and MacKerron), rescaled 0 to 100. They are small or specific samples. Kinds of hours not rated in enough of them (sleep, school, reading, other leisure) are left out rather than guessed. Pile size does not predict feeling: across the four sources the rank correlation runs from −0.24 to +0.03.
Who was there
From the ATUS who-with questions, 2010 to 2024, via Our World in Data , ages 15 to 80. It excludes sleep and grooming, and company can overlap (a dinner with a partner and friends counts twice), so each year's waking lights are shared out in proportion. Time with parents is modelled for every age from child diaries, Australian family studies and Pew 2024 visit frequencies: between 70% and 91% of it falls before 18, depending on the assumptions, so the film says "most". Below 15 everything else is marked as not surveyed.
Back to today
The last ring places each light at an hour its kind of moment usually happens, drawn from BLS table A-3 (the share of people doing each thing at each hour, 2024). Full moons are counted from a known full moon (21 January 2000) at the synodic month of 29.53059 days: about 1,002 in 81 years.
A note from the author's other work
About 700 days of a life go to buying things. The paying itself, at 1.67 card payments a day and 15 seconds each, is about a week. The friction is in the shopping, not the paying. More in Paid It .
Credit
After an idea in Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman (2009), in which you relive your life with every experience grouped by kind. A film by Manu Zafar.
A Life, Added Up: 29,585 days. A data film in six scenes. A working day holds about eight hours of work; averaged over a whole life, from birth to 81, work is 2.7 hours a day. Brushing your teeth, 45 seconds about 1.7 times a day, adds up to 25 days. Every moment of a life adds up to 29,585 days, one light for each. Sorted by kind: sleeping 11,466 days, working 3,335, watching TV 3,031, nobody wrote down 1,348. Blinking blanks your vision for about 540 days; every laugh adds up to about a week, every hug about six days. The three best-feeling kinds of hours fill about 9% of waking life, the three worst about 22%. Time with friends peaks at 18 and half of it is used by 35; by 18 most time with parents is behind you; the biggest pile in the end is time alone, about 6,100 days from 15 to 80. About a thousand full moons rise over a life. Sorted, a life is a list. In order, it is a life.