ZuoGuoHuaDiao: A Life Calculator That Tells You Whether This Life Was Worth It
Published:
“这b人生过的值不值” — roughly, “was this damn life worth it?” — is a phrase that does a lot of emotional work on the Chinese internet. ZuoGuoHuaDiao (做过划掉) is a small web tool that takes the phrase seriously and tries to answer it with numbers. Try Live Demo
Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01
The Premise
Most life-planning tools focus on the next move: pick a job, pick a city, pick a partner. ZuoGuoHuaDiao goes the other direction. It asks you to look at the life you have already lived and estimate, honestly, whether the trade-offs added up.
The result is not a verdict. It is a mirror.
What It Measures
- Experiences accumulated — places, people, milestones.
- Skills and growth — what you became capable of.
- Money and security — the boring but necessary axis.
- Relationships — depth and breadth, not just count.
- Regret weight — the things on your “should have done” list.
You assign your own weights. The point is the act of weighing, not the final number.
Try It in 1 Minute
Open https://ktwu01.github.io/ZuoGuoHuaDiao/. Inputs stay in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Why I Built It
Spreadsheets are good at answering “is this worth it?” for one decision. They are bad at answering it for an entire life, because the categories that matter most are exactly the ones that resist quantification. I built ZuoGuoHuaDiao not because I think you can put a number on a life, but because the act of trying surfaces the questions you have been avoiding.
Tech Stack
- JavaScript, no backend.
- Hosted on GitHub Pages.
- Mobile-friendly, since most reflection happens on a phone at 1 a.m.
A Note on the Name
做过划掉 (“did it, crossed out”) is the wry energy of completing a checklist for the wrong checklist. The tool keeps that flavor while still trying to be useful.
Contributing
Open an issue or PR at github.com/ktwu01/ZuoGuoHuaDiao. If you have a better category or a smarter weighting model, I want to see it.
A life calculator cannot tell you if your life was worth it. But it can show you what you have stopped counting.