Draw
Birth country weighted by annual births, sex by the birth ratio, family wealth by the country's income distribution. What your parents do for a living is drawn too.
1 in 8 billion
Eight billion people are alive right now. You drew one of them.
Birth country is drawn by how many babies each country has in a year, sex by its birth ratio, and your family's wealth by that country's income distribution — the same weights the real world uses. When the life ends, you are put back among the eight billion to see where you stand.
8,300,678,395
Alive right now
+0
Born since you opened this page
−0
Died in the same time
Of this year's births, will not reach five
“Eight billion” is shorthand. The UN 2026 estimate puts the living at 8.3B right now.
The deck is not countries. It is people.
If every country were equally likely, China and Iceland would be equally likely. The world does not work that way: of every 100 newborns, 18 are born in —. The shading on the map is the thickness of the deck.
Population from UN WPP 2024; areas computed on the sphere from 50m boundaries. 61 small territories that the 110m base map cannot draw are shown as dots; the very smallest islands may still be missing, so the map covers 99.7% of the world’s people, not all of them.
The same second
Four people are born every second.
You are only one of them.
What you draw is not “a life” but a position in this second. The other three live theirs for real, on the same statistics and the same life table — you will see what they are doing at every age, and who goes first.
The four below were drawn live, with exactly the weights you are about to draw with. One of them is you; which one, you will only know after the draw.
Put back
When it ends, you go back into the world
Most life simulators stop at the moment of death. There is one more step here: your adult income is placed back into the global distribution, and you see where you rank among eight billion.
The 93rd percentile at home can be the 54th worldwide. Not two people — the same income, a different ruler.
The panel on the right is not a mock-up: it is a life produced by the same engine, with a fixed seed, identical every time you open it.
How a run goes
Live
Every year you pick one focus: health, study, career, family, saving, rest. At eleven ages the run stops and asks you once, and every option has a cost.
Return
Age at death is tested year by year against the country's life table, not set in advance. Afterwards you are placed back into the global distribution: where you rank at home, worldwide, and among which hundred-million.
Where you will be drawn
Birthplace is weighted by each country's births in a year. A baby is likelier to be drawn in India or Nigeria than in Korea or Germany — not because those countries matter more, but because more children are born there.
| Country | Share of world births | Chance of being drawn | Life expectancy | Income per person |
|---|
What makes this different from other life simulators
Ranking is global, not only national
Telling you “you rank 12th among your compatriots” puts a Norwegian cleaner and a Nigerian doctor in the same cell. Every ending here is placed back into the distribution of eight billion, with the national and global percentiles side by side.
The people born in the same second actually live
Their lifespan is not invented at random. They run the same engine and the same life table, so they die of causes from the real distribution — and may outlive you.
Every number can be reproduced
Data is fetched, merged and filled from the UN and the World Bank, then checked byte for byte at build time; the same seed always produces the same life. Do not take our word for it — run it yourself.
Where fact ends and fiction starts
- RealBirth counts, life tables by sex, income distribution, education, mortality — from the UN and the World Bank
- FictionYour name, your parents, what happens to you, the choices you make
- ModelledMortality after 2023 is back-solved from the UN's life-expectancy projections; the global ranking is built from national distributions weighted by population