I created a Life Log — 20 years in the making

I got curious last week what would happen if I dumped every export I have about myself onto one timeline, so I did. Untappd, RateBeer, Foursquare, TripIt, my photo library, this blog, a fuel log and the watch I wear to bed along with a dozen or so other health trackers I’ve been using for the last decade. I’ve been calling the result the Life Log and the version I’m comfortable sharing is here.. Hover over things. There’s more in the tooltips than I’m going to type out below.

You can just stop now and read the file that required 15 gigabytes of data to produce (thanks Claude Fable 5.1 and $150 in credits)

The raw totals are 11,841 beer check-ins, 17,666 place check-ins, about 93,900 geotagged photos, 298 trips, 332,000 miles on cars and motorcycles, roughly 1.6 million words between this blog and RateBeer, and 1,430 nights of measured sleep. None of that was collected for any reason. I checked in to things because it was fun and I blogged because I like to write, and it turns out if you keep your exhaust for 23 years it adds up to a pretty honest picture of how you live.

The thing that surprised me most is the photos. I would have bet the peak was the smartphone years but it’s 2009 and 2010, the San Francisco years, at 7,000 to 8,800 photos a year. It dropped to 892 in 2015 when I was mostly just living in New Hampshire and not looking at anything other than snow and beer, and it’s back up to 11,545 in 2024 with the arrival of my child along with some international trips. The beer side is more predictable but still funny to see in a chart. Stouts went from 12% of my check-ins in 2012 to 35% in 2020 and then IPAs took over and doubled to about 40% last year. Hill Farmstead is 2,603 check-ins, 22% of everything I’ve ever logged and more than the next three breweries combined. The only 10 I’ve ever given a beer was Hill Farmstead’s Art, and four of my top six are theirs, which I’m sure surprises nobody who’s read this blog. I also rated their Juicy 0.25 or 0.5 on eight separate occasions while the crowd gives it a 4.40, so I’m either a contrarian or I just really don’t like it.

My reviews changed more than my taste did. In 2012 the most common word in my RateBeer reviews was “nice” and by the end it was eleventh. “Juicy” didn’t exist in my vocabulary in 2013. I also rate about 0.16 higher than the Untappd crowd on average and my scores crept up over the years, which the page reads as me drinking fewer, better chosen beers. I’ll take that. The whole day moved earlier too. In 2012 to 2014, about a third of my check-ins happened at 9 PM or later and now it’s 14%, with a peak hour of 6 PM instead of 8. In 2010 I was checking in at 2 AM and these days the evening is over by 11.

You can also read the career off the top places by year without a resume. A startup and the San Francisco MUNI in 2010, TomTom’s office for about a decade, Credit Karma for two years and King Arthur since. In between there’s the lake, the Co-op and the brewery. Travel peaked at 59 trips in 2012 and bottomed out at four in both 2017 and 2020.

Matilda shows up in the data and I didn’t need a chart for most of it. I assumed my sleep fell off a cliff when she was born and it didn’t. Before and after I’m averaging about seven hours (7.00 versus 6.94) but the time I’m awake inside the night went from around 18 minutes to around 27, and the first 90 days averaged 44 minutes a night. Same hours, worse hours. The motorcycle miles are the other giveaway. The bikes ran 8,000 to 14,500 miles a year from 2016 through 2024, then 2,580 in 2025 and 1,068 so far this year, a fifth of my 2024 pace.

A few caveats. The beer numbers are floors, because if I didn’t log it, it isn’t there. The early years assume a 14 ounce pour which probably runs a little high for 2012 to 2016, and the page says so. Mileage is estimated from gallons because my odometer entries were often blank. This is also the public edition, so places are shown at the city level and my home is a label, not a dot. There’s a private edition that I’m keeping to myself.

The farthest I’ve ever checked in from home is the top of the Burj Khalifa, 10,677 km away. I’m a little proud of that and a little embarrassed that I checked in.

P.S.

There’s a second version of the Life Log that I’m not linking to. It has everything in the public one plus my Apple Health export, a Withings Body Comp Scale, an Oura Ring and the clinical records from my health system portal. I’m not going to publish the page because those numbers belong in a doctor’s office more than on a blog, but reading it changed how I think about a few things and I’d rather say that out loud than act like I didn’t read it.

The first is the weight. I peaked at 295 pounds in late 2014, lost about 40 of that in 2015 and 2016, drifted back up and then lost another 52 pounds in 17 months starting in 2023. I’ve held between 207 and 215 ever since. I had been telling myself that was drinking less and walking more and the records say that’s not really what happened.It was extreme calorie deficit of around 1100 calories a day for 2 years. It was difficult but it worked.

The second is the drinking, which is the part I didn’t enjoy. I’m above a heavy drinking threshold in 11 of the 15 years I’ve been logging, including each of the last three, and by the numbers from the biggest study on this, where I sit now costs somewhere between one and two years of life expectancy at my age compared to drinking much less. What I found more interesting than the life expectancy figure is the sleep. My watch says I sleep the same seven hours whether I drink or not, but my sleeping heart rate goes up and my heart rate variability goes down with each drink, and almost all of that happens in the first four. Saturday is my longest night of sleep and also my worst recovery of the week, so the longest sleep is not the best sleep.

There was some good news, which I’m glad for. My cholesterol is in the low risk range, the liver numbers that were off before the weight loss are normal now, and nothing in any of it points at sleep apnea. My blood sugar sits at the top of normal with a family history of diabetes, so that’s the one I want to keep an eye on.

I was surprised when I took into account motorcycle riding. The national numbers put motorcycle fatality risk at about 28 times a car per mile. Applied to my own logged miles, my yearly risk at the 2024 pace was nearly double the annual risk of dying from everything combined for a 40 year old man. I ride geared, sober and careful, which puts me well under the average rider, but nobody has a study that says how far under. My mileage dropped to about a fifth of that after Matilda arrived, which is the most protective thing in the whole data set and wasn’t part of any plan.

So I’m going to cut back to around seven drinks a week, add some steady cardio because my fitness estimate has been sliding and the weight loss didn’t fix it, and carry the epinephrine pen I was prescribed for a bee and wasp allergy, because I live on a lake and ride a motorcycle and that’s a better bet than any of the above.