Forget those clocks which count down the day, or tell you the actual time – buy a life clock? You can get one HERE. Yes its a bit morbid – but then again, what have you got to be afraid of?
Warning – the hands only go round once and if it’s slow you may not notice for a number of years.
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Perhaps this counts as ruining the joke with pedantry, but to be entirely accurate the clock would need to gain more space as it ticks (or perhaps slow down its ticking and not be labeled in years).
Life left is a conditional expectation, whose value changes depending on what you condition it on. And as you age, you’re conditioning it on an older present age, which raises your life expectancy, because it means you must not, empirically, have died of various infant or childhood diseases which get averaged into the overall figure.
For example, the life expectancy of a 60-year-old in the UK is 23 years left (83 total), not 20 years left. And the life expectancy of a 90 year old is 4 years left (94 total), not of course negative 10. So really the clock should asymptotically approach death but slow down as it approaches it, to account for the fact that all non-dead people have non-negative life expectancy.
Wow – thats profound, almost Heideggerian in a way, i.e the ‘who’ is time separate from ‘what’ is time. But yeah – I don’t think the clock caters for relativism, such is its monstrous adherence to empirical time.
Still, they’ve only made 14 of them.
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