I’m getting married to my partner later this year. 

We were at her grandma’s a few days ago for her 87th birthday (big up!) and her grandma said, as grandmas do,  ‘I wonder how many days it is to the wedding now, you must be so  excited’. 

Instead of saying yeah and moving on with my day, I remembered the countdown app I installed about 18 months ago and had the genius thought I’ll add the wedding to the countdown app so it will show me how many days are left until the wedding!

I reinstalled the app, opened it up, and boom – the one item I added into the countdown app, perhaps a year and a half ago: 

Death – expected: 18,077 days left

Wed 16 Aug 2073

Eesh. Completely forgot about adding that in. 

Counting the days 

Around that time, 18 months ago, I had the idea that I wanted to find a ‘mortality’ app, one in which I could make explicit to myself the number of days I had left in my life vs. the average life expectancy. I wanted to remind myself of my mortality, and therefore give myself motivation to live more deeply.

Of course, I don’t know when I’m actually going to die, it is an estimate, and I estimated about the age of 80. In the UK men are looking on average at about 80.90 years, so that’s reasonable.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find exactly the app I wanted, but I did find this standard countdown app into which I guess most people put things like ‘holiday’, or ‘birthday’, not ‘death’.

I appreciate some people may find this morbid, but I don’t at all. It’s all about framing. Yes, it is possible to look at it through the lens of something to dwell sadly on, but it is also possible to view it through the lens of my time is limited and precious, I must act now to live life on my terms.

Looked at another way, I could live life, do one thing I’m indifferent to after the next, not reflect on it and then one day keel over from a heart attack. I could also intentionally fill my life, my days, my minutes, my seconds with things that I honestly like and want to be doing. It doesn’t really matter to anyone except me. Only I can really tell the difference.

A stressor

However, it’s important to recognise that having a counter can be a stressor. For me, I can look at it and then feel the need to do a million things at once, but also simultaneously feel that I don’t have enough time, and angry at myself for not working out what it is I actually need to be doing. I want to be productive and conquer the world, but I also want to just chill and take it in, the wonder of simply being this miraculous concoction of particles. I think this frustrating feeling of urge-to-do-something-but-not-sure-what is just part of the buy-in cost, but it’s a good buy-in cost, because it’s telling me something and I have to work out what it’s telling me. On balance, I think knowing the days to the expected life expectancy is useful information to made explicit to myself, and then I can choose what to do with that information.   

Back to reality

Look, I’m giving it all that with this high and mighty stuff, and it’s a nice idea, but I haven’t opened the app since I initially put ‘death’ in until now. That’s why it came as a bit of a shock when I opened it again the other day.

Anyway, folks, if I were to live to the average age of death in the UK, of which there is no guarantee, I have 18,077 days left to live. I wonder how many days you have?

We’d better use them wisely!

Also, I have 109 days until the wedding, as I then informed her 87 year old grandma.