A Clock That Reminds You You’re Going To Die
‘Memento mori’ technologies are grim, but maybe we need them
Back in the ’90s, I was drinking in a pub in Galway, Ireland, and I met a guy who described an Irish order of nuns. They had a daily ritual: Every afternoon each nun would wander into the graveyard adjacent to the convent and dig a small scoop of what would become, in time, her own grave.
“After a few years, they’d start to have a decent indentation,” he told me, “and after a few decades they’d be pretty far down there, like five feet.” He took a long draw from a pitch-black pint of Guinness. “Doing that every day would clarify the mind, wouldn’t it?”
No doubt it would.
I never found out which convent he was talking about; he might have been making it up. But I’ve always chosen to believe the story is true, because it’s such a wonderfully intense example of a “memento mori” technique — a way of meditating, routinely, on the fact that you’ll one day die.
I thought of that old story today when I stumbled upon the clock above — the “Shortlife v2”, by the artist Dries Depoorter.
A clock to remind you that life is short.
‘ShortLife’ is a small device showing how much…
