I started building life simulators because I had a simple 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: his wife’s faith, the fear of controversy, the missing mechanism of inheritance. But reading those explanations after the fact, knowing what happened, is completely different from facing the decision in 1838 when you are 29 years old and have 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.
How the Format Works — and Why It Has to Be 8 Decisions
Each simulator presents 8 decision points from a historical figure’s life. You read a brief narrative — what’s happening, what the context is, what you know and don’t know — and then you 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 read the reveal first, you’re rationalizing, not deciding. The point is to catch yourself in the act of making a choice based on incomplete information — which is what every one of these figures was actually 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.
Eight decisions is the right number because it’s enough to see a pattern without exhausting the reader. Seven feels short. Ten feels like homework. Eight lets you hold the whole arc of a life — early choices, middle crisis, late decisions — without losing the thread.
What I Expected vs. What Actually Surprised People
I expected the most popular simulators to be the most famous people: Einstein, Darwin, Newton. They’re popular, but not the most surprising. The most surprising, in my experience watching people play these, is 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 people reach that decision in the Newton simulator — whether to continue the alchemy given that his scientific reputation is already secure — the responses are split in a way that no other decision in the series produces. About half of players say: obviously stop, the alchemy is embarrassing. The other half say: if Newton thought it was worth his time, who am I to judge? The split reveals something about how we think about rationality and prestige that the biography alone doesn’t surface.
The other unexpectedly divisive simulator: Kafka’s final decision. Did he genuinely want everything burned, or did giving the manuscripts to a man who had explicitly told him he wouldn’t burn them constitute a form of assent to their preservation? Most people want a clear answer. Kafka didn’t give one. That discomfort — the refusal to resolve — is the most Kafkaesque thing about the simulator.
The New Psychology & Literature Series: Why Freud, Nietzsche, Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Frida Kahlo
The first 20 simulators concentrated on scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, and a few artists. They’re the figures you find in “most influential person” lists: the people who changed the physical world, started companies, won Nobel Prizes. They make for great simulators because 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 goes somewhere different. Freud, Nietzsche, Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Frida Kahlo made decisions whose consequences were primarily interior — about what to think, what to abandon, what to paint, what to write and to whom. The decisions are harder to evaluate because “the right choice” is less obvious when the outcome is a philosophy or a painting rather than a patent or a company.
That difficulty is the point. Nietzsche resigned his tenured professorship at 34 to wander Europe writing philosophy that sold fewer than 100 copies. Was that right? Kafka wrote some of the greatest fiction of the 20th century and asked for it to be destroyed. Was his friend right to disobey? Dostoevsky stood before a firing squad, survived, went to Siberia, developed a gambling addiction, and wrote Crime and Punishment under crushing debt in 26 days. Would you have done the same? The questions don’t have clean answers. Neither did their lives.
The Process: How Long Each Simulator Takes to Build
Each simulator takes roughly a day of concentrated work. The research phase is the longest part — reading biographies and primary sources to find the 8 decisions that are both historically significant and genuinely ambiguous. The writing phase is faster but requires careful construction: each option has to be plausible, not obviously wrong, and the historical reveal has to contain information the reader couldn’t have known before committing.
The hardest part is finding decisions that are genuinely hard in both directions. Bad simulators present one clearly right choice and two straw men. Good simulators present three choices that are all defensible — and then reveal that even the “wrong” choices were chosen by real people in similar situations, with real reasons. The goal is not to make you feel smart for guessing correctly. The goal is to make you understand why the other choices were tempting.
Play All 25 — Free, No Login
All 25 simulators are free. No login, no paywall, no tracking. They run entirely in your browser. The full collection now covers scientists (Einstein, Darwin, Newton, Tesla, Edison, Curie, Hawking), artists and composers (Van Gogh, Mozart, Beethoven, Da Vinci, Frida Kahlo), writers and thinkers (Kafka, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Freud, Rowling), and entrepreneurs (Jobs, Musk, Buffett, Oprah, Disney, Honda, Mandela) — plus one underdog (Zhang Xue, who beat Ducati at the World Superbike Championship on a Chinese-made bike).
If you’re going to start somewhere, I’d suggest: 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 we think historical decisions should have been made and how they actually were.
👉 View all 25 Life Simulators — Free, No Login Required
Related Reading
- Freud Life Simulator — Cocaine, the Seduction Theory, and Fleeing Vienna at 82
- Nietzsche Life Simulator — Resigned His Professorship and Wrote for a Future That Didn’t Exist Yet
- Kafka Life Simulator — He Told His Best Friend to Burn Everything. Max Brod Didn’t.
- Dostoevsky Life Simulator — Mock Execution, Siberian Exile, Crime and Punishment in 26 Days
- Frida Kahlo Life Simulator — 35 Surgeries, 55 Self-Portraits, Two Marriages to Diego Rivera
- Einstein Life Simulator — Failed Exam to the Manhattan Project
- Darwin Life Simulator — The 20-Year Delay That Almost Cost Him Everything
- Browse All 25 Life Simulators — Full Collection & Guides
- Building in Public Diary — All Entries
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