Jason Fitzpatrick
Every time you open a new tab—be it to screw around on Reddit or check your work email—this Chrome extension reminds you life is, well, fleeting.
If you haven’t messed around with your default Chrome start page then the page is just populated with your most frequently visited sites. For example, here’s what mine looks based on my browsing habits:
It looks exactly like what I’d expect it to look like (if you asked me to make a shortcut page from memory). My browsing life is email, work email, Slack, workplace dashboards, and a healthy (OK not so healthy) dose of Reddit. Every time I open a blank tab the fundamental question the page asks me is “Do you want to search for something, work, catch up on email, or… avoid all that by looking at Reddit?”
Enter Death Clock, a simple Chrome extension that replaces the default page with a giant clock that counts—based on projected life expectancy for your date of birth—down to zero.
The use of days instead of years and the granularity of counting all the way down to the seconds is a nice touch. Tell somebody they have 40 years to live and they might not think particularly hard about how any given moment is spent… but format it in terms of days with the seconds slowly ticking by and suddenly it seems a bit more tangible.
Assuming Death Clock doesn’t stress you out to the point of existential crisis, you just might find it’s a clever little nudge to make you consistently evaluate whether what you’re doing on the web is what you really want to be doing with your time.
