Time of Death

I’ve recently been thinking about this thing i saw, i can't remember if i saw it on Tik Tok or Twitter, but either way, someone had posed the question: What if when we were born we had a counter over our heads counting down to our death? For some reason that question really stuck with me and it makes me think how differently I'd live my life if we all had a timer above our head. Even though we technically already have a timer on our life, I feel if we could physically see it and see the time running out it would cause people to look at their actions differently. 

For instance, if you were born with a short timer and you were nervous to do something because of “embarrassment” or fear of who knows what, would you just go and do it because you might not get the opportunity again? Or would you just do it because in the long run the memory will be something you cherish above any embarrassment you might have had? Will it be a memory you can look back on and be proud you did? We all wanna be grown and tell our kids insane things we did as teens or young adults, but what if you look back and you did nothing because you were too scared?

As an anxious over thinker, I often think (of course) about all the things I could have done or participated in or enjoyed if I hadn't overthought it or been afraid of embarrassment, what even is embarrassment?! You really only live once so why are we all afraid of just doing stuff? What if our timer runs out and we can’t look back and be proud of how we lived our life? I know this all sounds like a midlife crisis, but i am completely fine, just sitting here dumping out all my thoughts at once. What do they call that? Stream of consciousness? 

Or, what if people took their short counter and did bad things, like rob stores, or murder. They would just think, well im checking out next week anyways. But what if their death was a consequence of their wrong doings, like the reason they died was because they were put on death row or something for murders, so they could have lived much longer if they hadn’t done what they did. It’s like the whole situation with Anakin and Padme in Star Wars (or Oedipus), you just can’t escape your faith, or in this case your life counter. Would the world just fall apart because people were afraid of their timer running out and do reckless things? Who knows, I just like to think of all the different ways people would take the life counter.