Life Capital is a 60-second reflection, not a test. It turns five quick self-ratings into a picture of where your life might be drifting over the next decade — and the one area worth protecting now. This page explains how, in plain language, with the mechanics for anyone who wants them.
The most important parts of a life rarely fail all at once. They erode quietly — a fitness habit that slips, a friendship that goes a year without a call, a sense of purpose that gets crowded out by what's urgent. Life Capital borrows the language of money to make that visible: the things you tend to compound through small, repeated deposits, and lose through slow drift.
The five dimensions are research-informed, not arbitrary — each is grounded in primary studies:
These overlap with broader flourishing frameworks such as PERMA (Seligman), but Life Capital is not a validated psychological assessment.
The curve is an illustrative scenario based on your self-ratings. It is not a diagnosis, a forecast, or an estimate of your lifespan. The deposits are modeled as slowing drift and protecting capacity — not predicting a score. The further out the curve looks, the more it's a shape, not a number: longer horizons are there to show how small deposits compound, in the spirit of planning for the decades ahead, not a year-by-year prediction.
Your focus isn't simply your lowest number. It's the area most vulnerable to quiet drift at your life stage — which is what makes it the place a deposit matters most right now. Because the overall curve is weighted toward health and relationships, your focus often isn't the single biggest driver of the slope. That's deliberate: the curve answers "where am I heading?" and the focus answers "where would one small action go furthest?"
The honest version: this is a mirror, not a measurement. It's built to provoke one useful reflection — not to grade your life. For anything that actually matters, a real expert, or someone who knows you, will always beat a 60-second tool.
The dimensions, weights, and curve are a fixed model — AI doesn't decide your result. AI only helps you act on your weekly deposit: where it's useful, you can copy a ready-made prompt into ChatGPT or Claude to turn your one deposit into a concrete next step. Nothing about your reflection is sent to an AI on your behalf.
You don't need any of this to use the tool. But if you want to see exactly how five numbers become a curve, here it is.
A single function — lcModel(ratings, effort, horizon) — produces both the on-screen chart and the shareable card, so they can never disagree. Everything below feeds that one function.
Your current direction is a weighted blend of the five ratings. Lower-rated areas add drift pressure; the weights sum to 1:
| Health | 0.24 |
| Relationships | 0.23 |
| Family & belonging | 0.19 |
| Purpose | 0.17 |
| Mind | 0.17 |
| Total | 1.00 |
On top of the weights, health and relationships carry a little extra drift sensitivity — reflecting how strongly long-running research links them to long-term wellbeing. This is why much of any curve's slope can come from those two even when your focus is elsewhere.
The horizon factor is sub-linear — hf = (H/10)^0.7. A longer horizon stretches the curve less than proportionally, on purpose: a 20- or 30-year view should read as a shape, not as false precision about a distant year.
Age shifts the illustration's maintenance load by life stage and nudges which area is most worth protecting now (health, for instance, weighs more heavily later) — but it never changes your ratings, your score, or anything about your lifespan. Effort sets the size of the deposit: Tiny holds the line, Steady protects, All-in builds.
Sustained effort can lift the protected path slightly above today — but that upside is gated by life-stage runway, how much room a low starting base has to grow, and effort, then hard-capped. It will never show small actions producing an unrealistic soar. The honest ceiling is the whole point: deposits are modeled as protecting capacity, not manufacturing a better score.
If several areas are rated very low, the model shortens its horizon and surfaces a quiet, non-clinical support note instead of a long projection. The aim there is care, not a forecast.
It is not fitted to your data, not validated as a psychometric instrument, and not predictive. It's a transparent, rule-based reflection — every number above is a design choice, not an estimate of you.
Life Capital is not medical or mental-health advice. If you're struggling with your wellbeing, please reach out to a doctor, a therapist, or a local crisis line — a real person will always be more help than a reflection tool.
Mandsager 2018 (JAMA Netw Open) · Holt-Lunstad 2010 (PLOS Med) · Harvard Study of Adult Development · Alimujiang 2019 · Ryan & Deci 2000 · Ryff & Keyes 1995 · Seligman / UPenn (PERMA) · Attia, Outlive (2023).