The pitch

We hear clichés like these all the time. “Well, life is not an exam. it doesn’t have an answer key” or “Too bad life is not a video game. it doesn’t have a walkthrough guide and you just gotta figure it out yourself” Life doesn’t have a walkthrough because nobody has compiled it yet, but I have a plan to change that.

I was playing Persona 5 the other day and it has a mechanism where you can do too many things in your daily life. I get overwhelmed by my options easily. Do you ever feel like that but just for life? Wouldn’t it be great, even just for reference’s sake, to see if people who have tried the things you’re trying to do tell you if it’s worth it to spend your time like that?

How

I’m a STEM major so my go-to question is often "How do we get data?" But how do we condense our wants and needs, advice and learnings into data points? I think it takes the form of customer reviews, but for experiences. Every data point would consist of three parts: “Who is making the rating”, “What is the experience they are rating”, and most importantly “Do they think it’s worth it to experience it”? Of course, there are other metadata we can collect.

Once we have a large enough database of these ratings, we have a lot of ways to aggregate and present them. We can have a Wikipedia-style website that allows you to browse and decide on your next hobby. We can have people curate it to be a data-driven lifestyle magazine.

More excitingly, we can run recommendation algorithms on it, to see if people just like you think it’s worth it to do something. The more data we have, the more accurate it will be because there somewhere in the world, there will be someone in a very similar situation like you, except they’ve done the thing that you’re wondering if you should do right now.

Patterns will emerge from the data. If we see people who have done A find B more rewarding, then maybe A is a great prerequisite for B. If we see people who have done X don’t think it’s worth it doing Y, maybe they don’t mix well. You might benefit from learning a skill more when you’re younger, or you might only find a hobby enjoyable if you can keep it up.

For so long on all the social media, we’re doing this, but just in an unorganized way. We ask people on Reddit what else would I like if I like to play a particular game; we show people on TikTok “I’ve been sleeping on knitting and you must try it too”; we ask our friend “If I want to get into snowboarding, what should I do to prep”. If you think about it, this is just how Spotify finds your music and how Netflix guesses the movies you like, except we’re gonna do it for every possible thing in life.

What's next

For my next step, I’m going to make a website to allow people to rate their experience. (this one) I’m going to try also to do a very meta thing and document the process, and make it the first entry — "is it worth it to start a side project?"