WeCroak

After having had it a few weeks, I love this app. I absolutely love it. I’ve suggested it to several people who don’t understand why I would, but this death-thinking 5x a day is a good thing for me. However, the last several days it got stuck on a single quote. I stopped getting notifications and every time I opened it, it had the same quote. I restarted my phone. Still the same. I just uninstalled and reinstalled it. While I haven’t gotten a notification yet, when I opened the app, there was a new quote. Hoping that problem is fixed now.

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The other reviewers are right. At least 1/3 of the quotes I’ve seen don’t make sense. Another significant fraction of quotes relate to death, but don’t inspire me to contemplate my own death or life. For example my current quote : “It concerns the death of Anna Katharina Ehmer, a 26 year old woman with severe mental disabilities who lived in an institution for people with mental disorders, and who allegedly never spoken a single word during her life. Yet, she was reported to have sung dying songs for a half hour before she died.” Maybe this quote was badly translated from another language to English and it was probably taken out of context, but all I contemplated was how badly written this was and how creepy it sounded. This app provides mostly distracting quotes and nothing at all useful for regular mindfulness or anything at all like that. It inspires the opposite of contemplation of death because of the distracting quotes. This app needs to croak, but the idea was solid.

I like the idea of an app that reminds me of my death with relevant quotes. I think the app could be better, though: Should show quote in notification preview. Should show source, not just author, of quotes. Feels like it lacks strong editorialship of quotes. What does this quote have to do with death (other that in some sense everything human has to do with death)? “Ironically, we have traded one constancy for another. We have lost the constancy of the stars but gained the constancy of energy. The first is a physical object, the second a concept. Scientists cannot prove without a doubt that the total energy in a closed system is constant. But any violation of that principle would destroy the foundations of physics and suggest an unlawful universe. The idea of a lawful universe is itself an Absolute.” Why would you select this quote from Lightman instead? “The material of the doomed stars and the material of my doomed body are actually the same material. Literally the same atoms… It is astonishing but true that if I could attach a small tag to each of the atoms of my body and travel with them backward in time, I would find that those atoms originated in particular stars in the sky. Those exact atoms.”

Great app! It's not addictive with too many bells and whistles. It's simple and it sends reminders to contemplate death. The reminders are quotes from a wide range of sources including: a medical manual, Buddhists, authors, entertainers (even RuPaul, who I didn't realize is so wise). It's definitely worth the money! I got the reminder once while contemplating whether to talk to a person at a networking event. My worrying mind was working it's magic until I got the reminder, which put the situation in perspective: is it a big deal if that person rejects me? One day I'm going to be dead. It motivated me to strike up a conversation, which is huge if you know me.

Overall I really like the simplicity of this app in the concept (no ads, no social media, no requests for reviews), but there are definitely improvements that need to be made. Primarily, not all of the quotes are that great and it seems like there isn’t the best filtering process in place. For example, one of my recent quotes was from David Hogg (from the Parkland shooting): “Don’t lie to us. Don’t make any more false promises, because when you do, children die.” Outside of the fact that the word “die” is used, that quote has absolutely nothing to do with contemplating death. It’s a political statement, that means nothing without context. The only thing I can reason to how something like this pops up is that they are scouring the web for quotes, and using buzzword searches to find quotes about death. It’s $1 though, and the simple notification that “Remember you’re going to die” that you get five times a day, accomplishes the goal of the app. So overall, good not great. Suggestion for the app creators: A save feature that you can use to save your favorite quotes that pop up and revisit them. That would be amazing!