I recently contributed $39 for an online campaign to build a digital watch that counts down the seconds you have left to life.
The device, known as Tikker, is the creation of a Fredrik Colting, a Swede who works in publishing and who found himself confronting the prospect of death after his grandfather passed away. “I realized that nothing matters when you are dead,” Colting told Fast Company. “The only thing that matters is what we do when we are alive.”
The Tikker draws on such information as your age, body mass index and where you live to determine your life expectancy. (Unclear whether the Tikker factors in the ages of one’s parents and grandparents.) The Tikker also tells time.
Apparently Tikker’s fundraising push resonated. In just over a month the startup raised more than $98,000 or nearly four times its goal.
I’ve wondered why I pre-ordered the Tikker. I know intellectually that my days are numbered and that my life could end at any moment. You don’t have to wait for the Tikker to obtain a guess as to your life expectancy. I am expected to live for 78 years and to die on Friday, April 5, 2041, according to the Digital Death Clock, an online site that will give you similar information.
I don’t even wear a wristwatch.
Maybe it’s my journey this year, having stepped out of America and decided to live awhile in Africa. Maybe my support for the Tikker comes with my being in a profoundly different culture, or having to make my way as a freelancer or to figure out what problems to work on. Some days I feel as if I launched from a skateboard ramp into mid-air.
That’s to say there’s urgency. I have to do everything as soon as possible because there’s little time. I would like to meet everyone whom I hope to meet and to ask as many questions as I can ask and to write as many words as possible and to do all that as soon as I can because I don’t know and you don’t know how much time we have left in this life that we’re all passing through.
There are many things to do and to make and to discover. By putting the date of our death on our wrists, the Tikker aims to spur us to appreciate the life we’re living. That’s a Kickstarter for me.