Great news: There is finally an app that will remind you you’re going to die, which is apparently helpful for people whose own brains were not already uncomfortably on top of this particular morbid task.
As The Atlantic’s Bianca Bosker reports, a new app called WeCroak will helpfully let you know five times a day—in the form of push notification quotes from poets, philosophers, and other thinkers—that sooner or later you will be dead. According to WeCroak’s description in the App Store, the app is inspired by “a Bhutanese folk saying that to be happy one must contemplate death five times daily.” WeCroak’s constant insistence that every breath you take is one gasp closer to your last is meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing, or meditation,” and not, say, a panic attack.
The interface of the app consists of plain white text on a simple black background spelling out fun phrases like “The grave has no sunny corners,” and “Many have died; you also will die. The drum of death is being beaten.” Users must open WeCroak once a week to confirm they want to continue receiving these messages, and, much like your own exit from this existence, WeCroak notifications can happen at any time during the day. Helpfully, however, WeCroak will only send notifications from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., because certainly no one would want to be awake thinking about their own inevitable demise in the middle of the goddamn night, assuming this is something they don’t already regularly do.
According to The Atlantic, WeCroak was created by Ian Thomas, a 27-year-old freelance app developer, and Hansa Bergwall, a 35-year-old publicist—who are apparently the sort of people who need to be told over and over they are going to die, because they are not already reminded of this horrid fact every time they do things like hear a weird noise in an elevator, eat something slightly past the expiration date, or open Twitter.
If WeCroak sounds like something that might help you practice mindfulness, instead of sending you into a spiral of existential dread, you can pick it up for $0.99 in the App Store. There’s no version for Android just yet, but Android users can rest assured they’ll be dead soon enough, too.