I have measured out my life with coffee spoons
For some reason, this struck me as a great way to concentrate my mind, macabre as it indisputably is. So now my Mac tray icons on both laptop and desktop display a countdown timer (I couldn’t get it to say “Days until dead,” but that’s actually okay). Assuming that I live until my next birthday, and taking the longevity tables at face value, I can expect to have 9333 days left. I figure I’ll adjust it each succeeding year on my birthday, which should involve getting some amount of time back, since I’ve lived until that point.
But it’s not that much time. If you accept his argument that any project takes 5 years, and given that I’ve just started a new major project, that gives me 3 more rounds of work, more or less. Although a certain amount of parallel processing might be possible.
Samuel Johnson wrote that “the immediate prospect of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully.” I don’t know if a digital reminder of longevity will do the same.
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