Follow your heart, it may contain ads

It’s currently early in the morning, and I’ve gone down a rabbit hole of searching for “life countdown” apps for my phone. I remember seeing some little Javascript project a while ago that showed your average life expectancy as a large sequence of little boxes, and colored the box once the day had passed. It seemed like a useful thing to have on one’s phone.

There aren’t many apps for Android focused on this, but I did find an interesting one. Like a good number of obscure apps one stumbles across on an appstore, this was clearly written by a non-native English speaker and contains some awkward phrasing. I always enjoy digging through these kind of apps, trying to decipher the author’s intent.

This app has two modes: a life and a death mode. The life mode shows your age up to the 8th decimal point, as a constantly updating number. The death mode displays an hour glass, a countdown of the number of days you have left (given a target age you think you’ll live to), and a list of some things you could accomplish in that time.

It also has some other features: what appears to be a wish list/goal tracker, some poorly formatted quotations, and a lockscreen. And now we get to the heart of the matter: the button for enabling the lockscreen. It reads, “Remember our time is limited, please follow your heart. It may contain ads.”

I don’t have any particular grand meaning or observation about this, it simply struck me as an excellent contrast to the somewhat macabre “death mode”. A reminder of the absurdity of life. Follow your heart, it may contain ads.

While interesting, this app is somewhat buggy and has no widget. I’ve been wanting to develop an Android app for a while, and a nice minimal app like this (along the lines of that Javascript project I remember) may be a good starter project for me. Because everyone needs some perspective sometimes, to give a frame of reference for days that often pass by too quickly. I know I do.