(An Android version is not yet available.) The app has since been downloaded 84 times. Six weeks later, on July 26, WeCroak debuted on Apple’s App Store. “And it occurred to me, This is so easy: I could just get my phone to remind me.” Thomas was intrigued by the idea and began building a prototype that very night. “I would get to the end of the day and realize I’d forgotten the entire day to think about death,” Bergwall told me. He’d come across it the previous year while researching Himalayan ashrams, and had attempted to put it into practice. Last spring, Thomas, who is based in California, rented a room in Bergwall’s Brooklyn apartment while taking an artificial-intelligence class, and one evening, Bergwall brought up the Bhutanese maxim. In fact, WeCroak is the very real passion project of Ian Thomas, a 27-year-old freelance app developer, and Hansa Bergwall, a 35-year-old publicist, who met through Airbnb. I installed it mostly to see whether it was a joke. It was a pitch for WeCroak, which was inspired by a “famous Bhutanese folk saying” averring that “to be a truly happy person, one must contemplate death five times daily.” “Because we are either unable or unwilling to live a rural life in the picturesque Himalayas where time for contemplation may happen more easily,” the email explained, the app’s creators had developed the next best thing: a 99-cent app that would “foster happiness” and “cultivate mindfulness” by pestering users with reminders about death. On a beautiful morning this past summer, I woke up to an email-subject line: “Death Makes You Happy”-that I initially mistook for Silicon Valley satire. WeCroak’s message is always the same: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.” There are apps to improve your breathing apps that track the time you spend on other apps and apps to teach you to be mindful while running, eating, giving birth, browsing the web, or, per the Buddhify app, “waiting around.” I decided to test whether technology could be both malady and cure. Headspace, a rival app that provides meditation sessions led by a former Buddhist monk, has been downloaded more than 18 million times. “You can become a master of this powerful device rather than a slave to it,” says Michael Acton Smith, a co-founder of Calm, an app that offers guided meditation and soothing soundtracks and has surpassed 14 million downloads. Amid growing concerns over our phone fixation, Silicon Valley has, in typical fashion, proposed technology as the solution there are now more than 1,000 mindfulness apps designed to help us disconnect. According to a study by a research firm called Dscout, Americans check their phone an average of 76 times a day for a cumulative two and a half hours-and while many would like to cut back, simple willpower isn’t always enough. I welcomed these grisly reminders into my life in the hope that WeCroak, along with half a dozen other mindfulness apps, could help transform my iPhone from a stressful distraction into a source of clarity and peace. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.” They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |