While many people set goals to live healthier lifestyles and exercise regularly, sometimes busy schedules cause them to shift their focus more toward a mentality of “eat, breathe and stay alive.”
Life Ticker, created by Vanguard, is a personalized database that allows you to examine your life via social media, broadcasting this information in a way that prompts reflection and reevaluation.
The website begins by linking directly to your Facebook account. From there, the website sorts out the information it believes to be most important to you and displays these images in a grid. The next step asks you to select images that play a positive or negative role in your life. You are then asked to write a simple word or phrase about the image and press an up or down arrow, identifying if you need more or less of this item in your life.
The last part displays these phrases in a stock exchange-style format, with green up arrows displaying what you need more of and red down arrows showcasing the things you need less of.
As these phrases scroll through in a single, horizontal line, Life Ticker asks you to “take a moment to reflect.” While it doesn’t quite specify what to reflect on, the sight of all those red down arrows will instantly cause a spike in your anxiety.
Those red arrows actually symbolize what is most common in your life right now, such as poor eating habits or attempts to please others. The green arrows showcase the things that are desirable but you rarely have time for.
Life Ticker is more a way to show you what you’re doing wrong in life. The upside to Life Ticker is that it prompts a reevaluation of what’s important.
Physically identifying things that conjure up positive emotions plays into a desire for more of those associations. But until Life Ticker is able to create a scheduling counterpart that can fit all of these things into one day, or a way to tack on more hours to each day, there’s hardly a way for anyone to dedicate enough time to the activities they want more of.
Everyone can agree they would like more relaxation or time spent reading a good book, but life too often gets in the way.