I didn’t read the article. The headline convinced me there was no point.

There’s an app for everything, and apparently you can download one to your phone that will tell you how much longer you are going to live. What you do with that information is up to you.

Predicting such a future has been a mainstay of speculative fiction for decades. The first published story from one of my favorite authors, Robert Heinlein, was about a man who could predict anyone’s date of death. That was from 1939.

I’m not gonna bother downloading the app. It’s bogus anyway.

I’m sure it will want me to input details about age, physical and mental condition and lifestyle. From that it will give me a date. And in the process collect a lot of personal data that will be used to sell ne something. I don’t need that.

I can do the same calculations without an app. Common sense tells me that if i exercise regularly and maintain healthy eating habits, I have about another 15 years left.

Which isn’t very long when you think about it. I try not to think about it.

It is possible I could last another 30 years, though that seems unlikely given family history. Medical advances being what they are, you never know – in general we are living longer than previous generations.

It is also possible that I could get hit by a bus this afternoon and that would be the end. No app can predict that sort of thing.

When it comes down to it, only God knows when we will die. I’m okay with that.

I do wish thiugh that there was some sort of app that would tell me when my friends are going to die. It would be nice to have one last conversation before they go.

In a long life you meet a lot of people and make a lot of friends. In the pre-internet days it was tough to stay close when people moved away. Even now, we don’t always maintain the connections as well as we would have liked. Sometimes that has been my fault. Sometimes it has just been the fullness of life.

In recent years I have lost some good friends without the opportunity to say goodbye, or to tell them how much their friendship has meant to me. Maybe I don’t need an app. Maybe I should just make more time for people.

Maybe all of us should.