THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 19, 1995 TAG: 9502160114
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Ford Reid
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
For centuries, people have been trying to figure out how to foresee the future.
If fortune telling is not the oldest profession, it has to be up there in the top five. Highly trained people have been reading everything from tea leaves to animal entrails practically since humans quit crawling around on all fours.
The stars have long been a favorite tool for predicting what is going to happen and some people saw the future in dreams long before Freud suggested that you might see the past in them.
Today, newspapers run horoscopes, seers predict the future in the tabloids and a lot of people apparently spend a lot of money calling psychics on the telephone.
They spend three or four dollars a minute, which by the way is two or three times what a psychiatrist charges, to listen to a stranger on the other end of the line tell them things that they want to hear.
Never mind what P.T. Barnum said about a sucker being born every minute. Somebody must believe in this stuff and the presumption is that everybody wants to see the future.
Not me.
There have been a number of times in my life when if I had been able to see the future, I might not have had the courage to face it. Things have turned out OK, but I'm glad I didn't have to see, and worry about, everything that was coming.
I'd rather take it as it comes, thank you very much. That, for one thing, is what makes life interesting.
Now comes a hundred dollar device in a catalog that won't tell you what is going to happen but does purport to tell you how long it is going to keep on happening.
Called the ``LifeClock'' this thing ticks off, to the tenth of a second no less, just how much time you have left on this Earth.
This is just an estimate, of course, and you could get a little more or a lot less than the 678,900 hours that the advertisement says an average life lasts.
But can you imagine anything more depressing than if this thing was really right?
The company says it is designed to ``motivate you to live life to its fullest.''
That might work for the first few years, although knowing that you have 300,000 hours left to live might allow you to put off some unpleasant things, too.
``Oh, I'll do that when I get down to 273,189 hours.''
But what about when the ol' LifeClock slips to five, then four, then three digits? How are you going to plan, say, the last 1,000 hours of your life?
That ought to motivate you, but to what I do not know.
Probably to sit by this clock and watch the last moments of your life tick away like a NASA count down.
Worry about the future if you must. It's all that I can do to worry about the present. by CNB