Five times a day, my watch informs me I am going to die.
This isn’t the beginning of a thriller—no stalking by some sinister, sentient AI. It’s an experiment with WeCroak, the app purportedly “inspired by a Bhutanese folk saying: to be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times a day.” Dutifully, WeCroak delivers a pithy, consistent message at random intervals throughout the day: Don’t forget, you’re going to die. I feel the nagging vibration on my left wrist, the same sensory stimulus that might otherwise indicate an incoming email or an upcoming appointment or maybe a cheerful prod from the activity tracker, letting my sedentary body know that it is Time to stand! Instead, it is an appointment reminder of another kind, timekeeping for the fateful day my Apple Watch grasps after somatic data to track and quantify—heart rate, pulse ox, REM sleep—and comes up null.
As informatics researcher Tim Gorichanaz points out in his assessment of “spiritual wellness” apps, WeCroak (at least in its basic version) “has almost no functionality” (113). You can choose to open the notification and receive an unsatisfying death-related quotation (though apparently a $1.99/month subscription will earn you, among other perks, “harder hitting, subscriber only WeCroak quotes”). Or else you can swipe up to dismiss it, get on with your life.
Invariably, I swipe. If I’m honest, I rarely stand at the appointed times either.
Since its launch in 2017, the WeCroak app has been mused over in outlets including The Atlantic and The New York Times, where authors characterize its quince-daily notification as “grisly” and “chilling,” though aptly suited to its purpose: an attitude shift borne out by psychological studies invoking terror management theory in explorations of “present-orientation” and “mortality salience manipulations.”
Typical of my relationship with technology, I was slower on the uptake; I learned about WeCroak’s existence by way of a 2020 Vox article titled “Why Millennials are the ‘Death Positive’ Generation,” which offers a nod to this “digital-age memento mori” as a product of my skinny-jean-clad cohort, with our green burials and digital afterlife curation and gleefully goth YouTubing morticians. I was discomfited by the app’s premise, by which I do not mean the death reminders—as someone with both a history of cancer and generalized anxiety, I’m certain I already think about my own mortality with as much frequency as men purportedly think about the Roman empire—but the supposed operationalization of the “Bhutanese folk saying.” Like Arthur Brooks spouting newfound Buddhist wisdom on corpse-contemplation in a New York Times op-ed, or the BBC correspondent purporting to discover “Bhutan’s dark secret to happiness,” it smacked of the appropriating colonialist gaze, repackaging a distinct philosophy as digitized, monetizable “mindfulness.” But as I have been teaching my course “How We Die” (which I previously wrote about here), I told my students I’d install it for the duration of the semester as an experiment in “mortality salience.” Either I’ll have achieved total peace by finals week, I said, tapping blithely at the frog icon, or I’ll have been driven entirely out of my mind.
Disappointingly, the experiment has yielded neither extreme. I regret to report that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a happy person by anyone’s estimation. I will concede that this may be user error. By design, Gorichanaz writes, WeCroak’s (lofty) “goals can be achieved without ever opening the app” (112); its afunctionality is a feature, not a bug—a gentle nudge toward contemplation. We’re supposed to stop scrolling a moment and hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near, or whatever. WeCroak only offers the invitation; we are supposed to take on the intellectual and emotional labor of engaging with the truth its telling us—a mantle I admittedly did not assume each time I flicked the reminders of my impending death away like so many political campaign texts, like the daily case reports that petered out of my inbox after early doomscrolling days of covid.
Yet the feeling of receiving WeCroak notifications was not unfamiliar, I realized. I already have an app installed on my phone that offers near-constant intimations of death; it is called The Weather Channel. Every time I open to the fourteen-day forecast, I am served autoplaying news of floods, fires, unseasonable heat. After all, this is what it is to live in the Anthropocene, to live amid memento mori for the planet.
In his own brief contribution to the WeCroak discourse, psychologist Andrea Gaggioli also raises this point about the proximity of catastrophe—although, he continues, “Paradoxically, the growing and ubiquitous exposure to images of death appearing in the media may risk neutralizing their psychological impact, turning people into increasingly passive and detached spectators of everyday life.” Ultimately, then, Gaggioli affirms the possible value of an app that encourages “actively thinking” about matters of life and death as a prospective avenue to “spiritual well-being” (276). Whatever that is.
I am writing this from the projected path of totality of the solar eclipse that will occur in a matter of hours, that will have happened by the time this is published. I am deeply uncomfortable with those will and will haves; future and future perfect tenses trouble me, because here is the thing about the future: I can never quite bring myself to believe in it. But it strikes me that a motive force behind the eclipse-fervor is a certain relationship to futurity and certainty. For many, what seems gripping about the 2024 eclipse is less the event itself than its attendant scarcity logic, the once-in-a-lifetime-ness of it—and with it, an anticipatory grief. The knowledge of what you will never see again. The sky fills with stars at 3:14 in the afternoon. This will be the last time. But darkness falls every night; this, too, is a kind of totality. This, too, could be the last time. Look at the sky.
Don’t forget, you’re going to die.
Works Cited
Gaggioli, Andrea. “Memento Mori: Digital Edition.” Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, vol. 21, no. 4, 2018, p. 276.
Gorichanaz, Tim. “Smartphone Apps for Spiritual Wellness.” Open Information Science, vol. 6, no. 1, 2022, pp. 106-115.
