Can Being Reminded Of My Death Improve My Life?

Recently I have I felt like life was passing, so I downloaded an app that reminds me five times a day that I’m dying. I thought it would help me accept my death and focus on what really matters, but it just worries me. What happened to me? Being worried is the point? Do you think these apps could be useful?

—Pinged to Death

Dear Pinged to Death,

I don’t think there is anything wrong with you. Or rather, you seem to be dealing with a problem endemic to all of humanity, a species whose ability to live is almost limitless in denial of inevitability. Even stark reminders of our own death—be it the death of a loved one or a phone notification—cannot arouse the fear and trepidation worthy of the abyss. instead, our lives are filled with vague anxieties and fears all around. “Death,” as WH Auden put it, “is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.” It is, incidentally, one of the quotes given by WeCroak, the app I’m guessing you’re using, that comes with its death reminder with literary connotations from Kierkegaard, Pablo Neruda, Margaret Atwood and others.

We live in an age of slo-mo crises, crises that happen at a pace that’s easy for us to ignore. Social Security declines year after year. Glaciers are melting faster, but still at glacial speeds. Sea water is warming at a rate that could keep the proverbial toad alive. Death lurks behind all of them. Sometimes, the horrors of our predicament become reality through a natural disaster or a United Nations climate report, but the alarm bells fade to the rhythm of the news cycle. ie. The Doomsday Clock — arguably the most deliberate attempt to keep our focus on these threats — is currently running from 100 seconds to midnight, putting us in about a minute and a half, in the time of existential danger, since our last doomsday.

Death Reminder App is basically Doomsday Clock for individuals. In fact, some of them contain actual clocks so you can see in real time how your remaining hours will elapse. Death Clock, a website that’s been active since 1998, predicts the day you die, although its estimate is based on somewhat raw data points – your age, BMI, whether you smoke or not . A few years ago, the horror movie Countdown imagined an application that could penetrate, to the second, the moment of a person’s death, with a user agreement that is considered a deal with the devil. (The movie’s tagline: “Death? There’s an app for that.”) The film inspires a real-life application built on the same premise—obviously minus knowledge. supernatural, but it spooked enough people to temporarily launch it from the App Store.

WeCroak isn’t too sick. Its inspirational quotes about mortality aim to remind users to pause and take note of what they are doing, a sort of companion to many mindfulness apps. Its co-founder came up with the idea while Candy Crush addiction, and many users commented that the app has a tendency to interrupt the hours that pass on Twitter or TikTok, forcing them to come to terms with how their lives are wasted on the social network. In other words, products are of an ever-expanding category of technology designed to overcome the problems that technology has created. If digital platforms remain our most reliable distraction from the raw truths of our mortality – logic goes – perhaps we can combine similar tools to transcends those psychological buffers and brings us to a more enlightened comfort with impending death.

WeCroak, as you may already know, was partly inspired by a Bhutanese folk saying that states that happiness can be achieved by contemplating death five times per day. Bhutan is often ranked as one of the happiest countries in the world, and WeCroak seems to be doing business with the weird normalism that is not uncommon in the mindful culture, which sees Eastern traditions as an antidote. will finally free us from the hypnosis of modernity. However, the fact that it only adds to your anxiety is not surprising to me. It’s not so easy to confront yourself with a truth that you’ve been admittedly cultured to ignore. (If anything, the notion that we can reverse the entire current Western trend of denying mortality with a free app is a symptom of our technological arrogance.) more than its tonic.) does not shirk death, as evidenced by the country’s elaborate funeral rites and tradition of adhering to a 49-day mourning period. Bhutan’s dominant religion, Buddhism, teaches that transcendence does not depend on escapism but on accepting the cruel truths of existence — namely the fact that life itself is anguished.