A life on one sheet
The tail end is the remaining in-person time with someone after most of those days are already gone — usually not because life is almost over, but because you no longer live in the same house.
Each mark is one week. Graphite already happened. Winter blue is still ahead. Gold is the remaining face days with a parent, converted into this unit.
These are assumptions, not predictions. Change them until they feel like your life.
Count the units
Years look long until you stack them. Months are a tighter weave. Weeks make the paper feel honest. Days are almost too sharp: every mark is a Tuesday or a Sunday, and they still fit. The sheet above is yours. Move your age and the graphite line crawls forward.
Count the repeats
A year can hold one winter, a handful of books, a swim you keep postponing, a meal you think you can always have later. If the rate stays as it is, the rest of your life is a short list of last times. Add your own event. Watch the stack shorten.
Count the people
Childhood spends parent days at a furious rate. After you leave, the year shrinks to a few visits. If that new rate holds, the days still ahead can be fewer than any single year you already lived under their roof. The thick block is the house. The gold thread is the tail.
On the day you left home, about 93% of all in-person time with this parent was already spent — if the later rate is the one you set now.
If they lived in your city and you kept ten times the visits, remaining days would be about 3,000 instead of 300.
Old friends follow a similar curve: hundreds of shared afternoons in one short season, then a room that holds all of you a handful of times per decade.
What the numbers ask
People in your city can receive an order of magnitude more of you than people a flight away. Your sheet currently says about 3,000 remaining days nearby versus 300 at the visit rate you set.
Remaining face time is mostly a ranking: who you keep putting on the calendar. If a name is high in your life and low in your year, the gold edge is already that thin on purpose.
You are in the final 5% of in-person days with this parent, if your numbers hold. That is not a mood. It is a count. Keep it in the room when you are actually in the room.
The tail end is the remaining in-person time with a person after most of those days have already been used. For many adults, that remaining slice is small even though decades of life may still be ahead — because the high-frequency years were childhood.
No. Every figure is an assumption you control: how long people live, how often you visit, how many books you finish. The point is to make a rate visible, not to forecast a death date.
The model uses two rates. Until you leave, it counts most days of the year as shared. After that, it uses the yearly visit days you set. That single change is why so much of the total is already behind you.
Tim Urban’s 2015 essay The Tail End is the source of the framing: life as countable units, and relationships as time that is not spread evenly. This site is an original interactive tool inspired by that essay, not a copy of it.
Only in your browser (localStorage) and, if you choose, in the page URL so you can share a snapshot. There is no account and no server-side profile.