About LifePath
A life simulator for 217 countries, built on World Bank statistics. No account, no tracking of what you choose.
What this is
LifePath runs a life forward year by year. You pick a country and a family background, and from there you make the decisions that belong to each stage of a life: whether to stay in school, which job to take, whether to move for work, when to start a family. The point is not a score at the end. It is watching one decision close doors years later and open others.
It exists because the numbers that describe a life are usually published separately from each other. Life expectancy sits in one report. Schooling rates sit in another. Nobody joins them into a single life. LifePath does the joining, with the sources shown.
How it works
The whole simulation runs inside your browser. Your choices, your seed and the resulting life are never transmitted, because there is no server receiving them. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and it keeps working.
The mortality curve is fitted to each country's own published life expectancy and infant mortality, so a run ends on a draw from that country's real risk distribution. The full method is written out, and the data sources and their years are listed.
What it is not
It is not a prediction, and it is not advice. It runs on national averages, and no national average describes an individual life. It does not rank countries or the people in them. It does not model everything that actually happens in a life — no pandemics, no unexpected shocks, no luck that cannot be modelled.
Our editorial and data standard sets out the rules in full, including how we handle statistics, demographic groups and the language we use about mortality and poverty.
Why it is free
The site is supported by advertising. That is the entire business model — no account, no subscription, no premium tier, nothing locked behind a paywall. Advertising only loads after you accept it through the cookie banner; if you decline, the simulation works identically.
No advertiser has ever changed a statistic, a calibration or a conclusion on this site.
Corrections and contact
Statistics change as sources revise them, and we may transcribe one incorrectly. If you find an error, write to paomianll@126.com with the page and what you believe is right.
Data: World Bank Open Data. World Bank data is released under CC BY 4.0 Retrieved 2026-11-01.