I started building these because I had a question I couldn't answer by reading biographies: what would I have actually done?
I'd read that Darwin waited 20 years to publish the theory of natural selection. The biography explains why. But reading that explanation after the fact — knowing how it ended — is completely different from facing the decision in 1838 when you're 29 with no idea which way it goes.
Biographies give you understanding. They don't give you the feeling of the choice.
That's the gap the simulators are trying to close.
The Format: Why It Has to Be Commit-First
Each simulator presents 8 decision points from a historical figure's life. You read what's happening, then commit to one of three options — before seeing what the person actually did. The historical reveal comes after your choice, not before.
The order matters. If you see the reveal first, you're rationalizing, not deciding. The point is to catch yourself choosing with incomplete information — which is what every one of these figures was doing. Einstein didn't know the atomic bomb would kill 200,000 people when he signed the letter to Roosevelt. He knew some things, guessed at others, and made a call.
The simulator puts you in the same epistemic position, compressed to 30 seconds.
Why 8 decisions? Seven feels short. Ten feels like homework. Eight lets you cover the arc of a life — early choices, midlife crisis, final decisions — without losing the reader.
What I Built It With
Pure HTML/CSS/JavaScript. No framework, no build step, no database. Each simulator is a single self-contained HTML file. The whole thing runs in the browser with zero server calls.
function choose(btn, num, correct) {
const block = btn.closest('.decision-block');
const opts = block.querySelectorAll('.dopt');
opts.forEach(o => o.classList.add('disabled'));
if (correct) {
btn.classList.add('right');
score++;
} else {
btn.classList.add('wrong');
// highlight the right answer
opts.forEach(o => {
if (o.getAttribute('onclick')?.includes(',true)'))
o.classList.add('right');
});
}
document.getElementById('r' + num).classList.add('show');
answered++;
updateProgress(answered / TOTAL * 100);
if (answered === TOTAL) setTimeout(showEnding, 800);
}
That's the core of every simulator. Choose → reveal → score → progress bar update. The simplicity is intentional: the tool should disappear and leave the historical content visible.
What Actually Surprised Players
I expected the most popular simulators to be the most famous people: Einstein, Darwin, Newton.
The most divisive turns out to be Newton — specifically the alchemy. People know Newton as the rational scientist who described gravity. Almost nobody knows he spent 30 years on alchemy, wrote over a million words on it, and may have damaged his own mind with mercury from alchemical experiments.
When players reach the alchemy decision, the split is about 50/50: half say "obviously stop, this is embarrassing for someone of his reputation." The other half say: "if Newton thought it was worth his time, who am I to judge?"
That split reveals something about how we think about rationality and prestige that the biography alone doesn't surface.
The other unexpectedly divisive one: Kafka's burn instruction. Did he genuinely want everything destroyed, or did giving the manuscripts to a man who had explicitly told him he wouldn't burn them constitute a kind of permission? Most players want a clear answer. Kafka didn't give one. That discomfort — the refusal to resolve — is the most Kafkaesque thing about the simulator.
Why I Added the Psychology & Literature Series
The first 20 simulators covered scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Their decisions had measurable outcomes: you can see exactly what happened when Tesla tore up the Westinghouse royalties, or when Disney went ahead with Disneyland against everyone's advice.
The new series — Freud, Nietzsche, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Frida Kahlo — goes somewhere different. These people made decisions whose consequences were primarily interior: what to think, what to abandon, what to paint, what to write. "The right choice" is harder to identify when the outcome is a philosophy rather than a patent.
- Nietzsche resigned a tenured professorship at 34 to write books that sold fewer than 100 copies. Right call?
- Kafka asked his best friend to burn The Trial and The Castle. His friend Max Brod didn't. Who was right?
- Dostoevsky stood before a firing squad at 28, survived, went to Siberia, developed a gambling addiction, and dictated Crime and Punishment in 26 days under crushing debt. Would you have made it through?
The Numbers
- 25 simulators completed
- 200 decision reveals across the full set
- ~1 day per simulator to research and build
- 0 dollars spent on tools or hosting (Hostinger shared hosting, ~$20/year)
- 0 login required to play any of them
Play Them — All Free
The full collection is at https://ordinarymantrying.com/why-i-built-25-life-simulators-building-in-public/. No login, no paywall, works on mobile.
If you're picking a starting point: Darwin (the 20-year delay), Newton (the alchemy), Kafka (the burn instruction), or Dostoevsky (the firing squad). These four produce the most unexpected answers about the gap between how historical decisions should have been made and how they actually were.
Built by one ordinary person trying to understand how extraordinary people made their choices — and whether, given the same information, we'd do any differently.
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