Would you like a watch that tells you when you will die? Buy a Tikker Watch, fill out a medical questionnaire, subtract your age from the result and you’ll get a “death score” to enter into the watch, and then the second-by-second countdown begins.
“Macabre!” you say. Who’d want to do that? That would make you miserable, surely.
Well, its inventor, Frank Colting calls it ‘The Happiness Watch’ and claims it has been designed to help people make the most of their life and cherish the time they have left.
Not many seem to be convinced. Only 200 have backed the project so far on Kickstarter.
Although, of course, no watch can predict our deaths, the selling points seem eminently biblical (e.g. Psalm 39:4). As the cartoon characters in the video tell us:
- Knowing how long you have to live will change the way you live.
- We must learn to cherish time and the life we have been given, to honor it, suck the marrow from it, and the best way to do this is to realize that hours, days, and seconds are passing never to come again.
- Remembering that time is marching onwards to death will help us to choose forgiveness over anger, a smile over a frown, happiness over sadness, etc.
Or as Moses said: “So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12).