What's With The Short Lifespans?

A sim on Normal Lifespan in Sims 4 can live around 90-100 days, birth through death. If you're starting at a later life stage (YA) then yes, you do loose about 40 days from the younger stages, so about 50-60 played sim days of life.

I almost never play on Short lifespan (though I am setting up a save for that, but I'll be playing a Vampire) but I'd expect that to be half of what I get for Normal Lifespan. so about 45-50 days birth to death, and about 25-30 days if I start as a Young Adult, as you noted.

I usually play on Normal or Long life (and Long is sometimes a bit too long for me) so I have plenty of time for my sim to experience life.

I also don't think of 1 sim day = 1 RL year. Sims simply don't age the same way we do. But even at 25 days on Short life span = dying at 25 years old ... did you spring into existence as a fully grown adult?

Sim years are like dog years. In one sim day, they age about four human years. That's why I play with aging off, otherwise nothing gets done.

I play long lifespand in my rotation and my sims live 5 IRL years or so. I mean form 2017 to 2022, actual years. I've never converted their in game days to years like you did. I would actually like there to be a lifespan between normal and long or a custom option, but as I don't use mods I've settled using long.

I think you missed that there are 3 different settings which you can use for lifespan in the game, if you set it to the longest the Sims live for freaking ever. 364+ days.

I do agree that it sucks how they didn't give us sliders to adjust it precisely in TS4 like they did in TS3, especially when you consider they also gave us only 3 rather than 5 options. Just as a comparison:
https://64.media.tumblr.com/ebd121c8bb43cd27e320725b5b74f225/4ec2c3e39ff4e79b-4c/s500x750/4783fc59b90878ebd2524741bef4fc566913dd2d.jpg
Fortunately, for those of us willing to use mods, MCCC lets you adjust the lifespan ranges by lifestage to whatever we want.

Hi @ImDragone I think you might like the long lifespan setting.
Or you might like to use a Potion of Youth (from the aspiration rewards panel) when you feel you want more time for a particular sim. It resets age to the beginning of the current lifestage.

Personally, I used a fan of adjusting the lifespan as needed. For example, my sims usually end up being vampires but when I needed/wanted the sim world to change a little faster I'd switch to short lifespan. However, I'd change it to long/normal depending on what the situation called for. After a couple playthroughs that felt a little like cheating so I'm trying out a simple long lifespan and seeing if I can do it without getting too bored.

I use MCCC so what I did was use the "Normal" lifespan, but increased some of the lifestages a little bit. I added about 20% to all of them except toddler, baby and elder and then I added 7 more days to Young Adult so my Sims can attend 4 terms of university without it feeling like they used all of their young adult life to get one degree.

I simply play on Long and I use MCCC, but have never fooled around with the settings for how long each age level is going to be. Although I was a Huge fan of Epic in Sims3. Also, whenever I send a group of YAs off to university, I set the game to aging Off to preserve the number of days left in YA. Also to ensure the older Sims in my game don't die off before the YAs can get married and start families of their own. So, you're not trapped in a very short life for your Sims. I suspect there's more to your angst than what you've admitted. It's no sin to prefer one Sims game over another. You don't owe the other players anything. We all play the iteration of the game we love and we play the game the way it makes us happy. No excuses needed.

Happy Simming, no matter which iteration you choose!

I preferred Epic in Sims 3 as well. They should really change their options here. I feel like their lives are way too short. By the time I get a sim good and happy, they die. That's just not fun.

When playing, I generally customize aging because I play on normal but I switch aging off whenever I want. That means that I slow it down if I'm really interested in playing with a sim household or want to develop things more. A lot of my sims are born in game so I get the longer lifespan. I also slow down some of the stages that I'm most interested in. If I really like a particular elder, I'll even turn off aging to give them more time at the end. Ultimately, I tend to play the game with the passage of time as part of it so I do let them go.

Other people can play with aging entirely off if they want to just focus on a specific character or set of characters. It's just a matter of what you want to do but it helps to be comfortable with going into the settings whenever you want. That's pretty much my approach. I use the settings in any way I want to influence the gameplay for how I want to play. It's cool if other people use mods for that.