How to set up your lifespan

Your lifespan is one of the most important personal settings in Left. It affects how the app shows your life left, how your profile feels, and how reflective views inside Left understand your age and time remaining. Left does not treat lifespan as an exact prediction — it is an estimate used to make time visible.

What lifespan is used for

Left uses your lifespan setting anywhere the app needs to understand your life as a timeline.

That includes:

1. The Your life view inside Time Left.
2. Life widgets and life-based visualizations.
3. Your profile and You screen.
4. Lifespan progress.
5. Life stages and personal reflection charts.
6. Sleep, awake, activity, and relationship-style lifespan views.

If your birthday or lifespan is missing, some of those views cannot be personalised properly. Once they are set, Left can show your life in years, months, or weeks and calculate how much of that timeline has already passed.

Step 1 — Open Your lifespan

To find the setting:

1. Open Settings.
2. Tap Account.
3. Tap Your lifespan.

This opens the lifespan settings screen. The title at the top is Your lifespan.

Step 2 — Set your birthday

In Your lifespan, set Birthday.

Your birthday tells Left where your personal timeline starts. Without it, Left cannot calculate your current age or show life progress accurately.

The birthday picker only allows dates up to today. Choose your actual birthday if you want the most accurate reflections in Time Left, widgets, and the You screen.

Step 3 — Choose how to see your life

Use See your life in... to choose how the life view is displayed.

You can choose:

1. Years
2. Months
3. Weeks

Years gives the simplest view. Months makes the timeline feel more detailed. Weeks makes life feel more granular and can be more confronting because it shows many more individual units.

You can also turn on Hide Life in Left view if you do not want the life view to appear inside the main Time Left view. This does not delete your lifespan settings. It only hides that life section from the Left view.

Step 4 — Calculate your lifespan

Tap Calculate your lifespan to open the lifespan calculator.

The calculator asks for broad factors that can influence life expectancy, including:

1. Gender
2. Country of birth
3. Exercise
4. Regular smoker
5. Alcohol consumption
6. Diet type
7. Sleep hours
8. Stress level

Left uses these factors together to estimate a lifespan. It does not simply add or subtract a fixed number of years for each answer, and the app should not be read like a medical assessment. It is a general estimate based on the information you provide and broad statistical patterns.

At the top, Left shows Your life expectancy is followed by an approximate number of years. When available, you can use the Calculate button to generate an estimate from the selected factors.

Step 5 — Set your lifespan manually

If you do not want Left to estimate your lifespan from factors, you can choose Set your lifespan manually.

Manual lifespan means you choose the number yourself instead of letting Left calculate it. This can be useful if you already have a number you want to use, if you prefer a symbolic lifespan, or if you want the app's life views to match a personal belief rather than a statistical estimate.

Manual lifespan changes the number directly, so use it intentionally. It will affect how Left scales your life views, widgets, profile reflections, and time-left calculations.

Important notes

Your lifespan in Left is an approximation. It is meant for visual reflection, not medical advice, financial planning, or a guarantee about the future.

Changing your lifespan changes how life-based views are scaled. If you increase or decrease the lifespan value, your life progress, years left, months left, weeks left, widgets, and profile reflections may change.

The setting is personal. Use a number that makes Left useful for you: realistic enough to make the app meaningful, but not something you treat as a certainty.