Use the 3D printed Mindfulness Clock of Doom to track the remaining time you have left on Earth. Or until the next Star Wars film, your call

Let’s take a step back from the Nintendo and Pokemon 3D printing projects for a moment. Let’s talk about something heavy, like the fragility of life.

The Mindfulness Clock of DOOM is a new project from Adafruit that encourages you to consider your own mortality. “To make one aware of the passage of time,” runs the project description, “and how precious each minute is.”

How do you measure out the remainder of your life, exactly? Apparently there several online calculators like The Death Clock to help you gauge your life expectancy, give or take a few years.

Once you’ve got the date, just plug it into the code for the clock, and then it starts counting down to zero.

Alternatively, if contemplating the inevitable end is too morbid, you can pick another event entirely. The folks at Adafruit have some helpful suggestions, including the return of Halley’s comet on 28 July 2061, or the predicted date for the technological singularity (whatever that is) in 2045.

“As you look at the clock,” the makers explain, “remember that you are never getting those minutes back. Stop watching internet cat videos and make the most of them!”

Mindfulness Clock of DOOM is an Art Piece

If you hadn’t guessed from the tongue-in-cheek descriptions, the Mindfulness Clock of DOOM is very much intended to be a work of art, and in no way a serious method to anticipate the end of your life.

Any such calculation is unreliable because it’s loosely based on statistical probabilities; the reality of your own circumstances will vary dramatically, and there’s every chance you’ll outlive your own clock (just so long as you cut back on the booze and fags).

But as always with Adafruit, the diligence to their craft is not a joke. Check out their instructions for a step-by-step guide to building your own clock, including STL files for 3D printing, and soldering the circuitry for the display, and customizing the code.

There’s also another interesting effect with the Mindfulness Clock of DOOM, a optical illusion called “chronostasis”. When you glance at the clock, the decimal point seems to be momentarily stuck before it resumes blinking. According to Wikipedia:

“Chronostasis is a type of temporal illusion in which the first impression following the introduction of a new event or task demand to the brain appears to be extended in time. This effect can extend apparent durations by up to 500 ms and is consistent with the idea that the visual system models events prior to perception.”

Basically, our mental perception can sometimes process things a little slower than the assimilation of visual data, when photons of light are absorbed by the retina of the eye. So when we move our eyes quickly, like when glancing at a clock, the mind has to fill in the gaps. So now you know!

All images copyright Adafruit