What good is an app that simply reminds us we’ll die someday?

phone headstone

All those moments will be lost in time… like tweets in rain.

 

There is a constant tension between our desire to live every day like it’s our last — to maximize our impact on this world and the joy we find in it — and our tendency to do the opposite, by frittering away precious time doing mundane, pointless, unfulfilling things. Well, there’s an app for that.

“Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

…

As I scroll through Instagram or refresh Twitter, WeCroak interrupts with the sobering reminder that it is not just my attention these other apps are consuming, but chunks of my life.”

The simplicity is beautiful, if potentially morbid. And don’t count out the fact that it may have the opposite effect on the more jaded among us, who find the comfort of an inevitable end a source of relief.

 

Would you get anything out of an app like this?

 

How might these reminders affect your daily behavior?

 

What other “tech” with such a clear and simple purpose do you wish existed?
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what would make you want to live with your coworkers?

wework

Now the coworkers you can’t stand and the roommates that drive you nuts can be the SAME PEOPLE.

 

Buzzfeed News has a long piece about a potential new trend that builds on the trendy shared “co-working” spaces so hot with the hopeful startup crowd. Apparently the next step is “co-living”:

Co-living offers up the same short-term leases and the same promises as co-working, except community members (it is always a “community”) get a bed instead of a desk. In both cases, practitioners sacrifice space for proximity to like-minded people and access to perks. WeLive and Common and The Caravanserai and their ilk purport, essentially, to do for the home what WeWork has already done for the office: Sweat the small stuff. Make you feel like a boss. Feed your body and your intellect. “WE TAKE CARE OF ALL THE ‘STUFF’, SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO ANYMORE,” The Caravanserai’s Haid promises on his website; the impossible-to-spell startup says it’s geared toward “professionals who seek a great work life balance and don’t want to waste time piecing it together themselves.”

In typical startup fashion, the promise is not having to do any normal boring human stuff, so you have more time to focus on bringing your brilliant ideas into the world. But also, erasing the line (and that bothersome transition) between work and non-work, since when you’re changing the world, isn’t it all about the work, man?

 

Is erasing the division between work and life by living and working in the same place just another step on a terrible trajectory?

 

Or are the people who love what they do so much that it becomes their whole reason for being actually the ones we should be envious of?

 

What kind of people would you want to work with, or what kind of project would you want to work on, that would make this setup a good thing?
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