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Can Being Reminded of My Death Improve My Life?

Can Being Reminded of My Death Improve My Life?

Lately I’ve been feeling like life is passing me by, so I downloaded an app that reminds me five times a day that I’m going to die. I thought it would help me accept my mortality and focus on what really matters, but it just makes me anxious. Is there something wrong with me? Is being anxious the point? Do you think these apps can be helpful? 

—Pinged to Death


Dear Pinged to Death,

I don’t think there is something wrong with you. Or rather, you seem to be suffering from a problem that is endemic to the whole of humankind, a species with an almost limitless ability to live in denial of the one inevitability. Even explicit reminders of our demise—be it the death of a loved one or a phone notification—fail to inspire a fear and trembling worthy of the abyss and instead suffuse our lives with a vague disquiet, an ambient dread. “Death,” as W. H. Auden put it, “is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.” That is, incidentally, one of the quotes featured by WeCroak, the app I presume you are using, which accompanies its death reminders with nuggets of literary wisdom from Kierkegaard, Pablo Neruda, Margaret Atwood, and others.

We live in an age of slo-mo crises, those that unfold at a tempo that makes them easy to ignore. Social security dwindles year after year. The glaciers are melting faster, but still at glacial speeds. The seas are warming at a rate that could boil alive the proverbial toad. Death lurks behind all of them. Occasionally, the direness of our predicament is made real through a natural disaster or a UN climate report, but the alarm bells fade with the rhythms of the news cycle. The Doomsday Clock—arguably the most deliberate attempt to keep our focus on these threats—is currently perched at 100 seconds to midnight, putting us at roughly a minute and a half, in the timescale of existential risk, from our final demise.

Death-reminder apps are essentially a Doomsday Clock for the individual. In fact, some of them contain actual clocks so that you can watch, in real time, your remaining hours slip away. The Death Clock, a website that’s been active since 1998, predicts the day of your death, though its estimations are based on somewhat crude data points—your age, BMI, whether you smoke. Several years ago, the horror film Countdown imagined an app that was able to intuit, down to the second, the time of a person’s death, with the user agreement serving as a deal with the devil. (The film’s tagline: “Death? There’s an App for That.”) The movie inspired a real-life app built on the same premise—minus, obviously, the supernatural knowledge, but it freaked out enough people to get temporarily booted from the App Store.

WeCroak is not quite so morbid. Its inspirational quotes about mortality are meant to remind users to pause and take stock of what they’re doing, a sort of companion to the many mindfulness apps. Its cofounder came up with the idea while in the throes of a Candy Crush addiction, and many users have remarked that the app, which tends to interrupt those hours whiled away on Twitter or TikTok, has forced them to confront how much of their lives is wasted on social media. The product, in other words, belongs to that ever-expanding category of technology that is designed to remedy problems that technology has created. If digital platforms remain our most reliable distraction from the crude facts of our mortality—so the logic goes—perhaps we can channel the same tools to break through those psychological buffers and deliver us to a more enlightened comfort with our impending demise.

WeCroak, as you may already know, is partly inspired by a Bhutanese folk saying that claims that happiness can be achieved by contemplating death five times daily. Bhutan has often been ranked as one of the world’s happiest countries, and WeCroak seems to be trading on a casual exoticism that is not uncommon in mindfulness culture, presenting Eastern traditions as the antidotes that will finally free us from the trance of modernity. The fact that it has only increased your anxiety, however, is not at all surprising to me. It’s not so easy to simply will yourself to confront a truth that you’ve been acculturated to ignore. (If anything, the notion that we can reverse the entire current of Western mortality denial with a free app is more a symptom of our technological hubris than its tonic.) The Bhutanese practice of contemplating death has grown out of a larger cultural context that does not shirk from mortality, as evidenced by the country’s elaborate funeral rites and the tradition of observing a 49-day mourning period. Bhutan’s dominant religion, Buddhism, teaches that transcendence hinges not on escapism but on accepting the brute facts of existence—namely, the fact that life itself is suffering.

Natural History, Not Technology, Will Dictate Our Destiny

Natural History, Not Technology, Will Dictate Our Destiny

We do this in our homes, hospitals, backyards, farm fields, and even, in some cases, forests when we use antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, and any other “-cide.” And the effects are always predictable.

Recently, Michael Baym and colleagues at Harvard University constructed a giant Petri plate, or a “megaplate,” divided into a series of columns. Then, Baym added agar, which is both food and habitat for microbes. The outside column on each side of the megaplate contained agar and nothing more. Moving inward, each subsequent column was laced with antibiotics at ever-higher concentrations. Baym then released bacteria at both ends of the megaplate to test whether they would evolve resistance to the antibiotics.

The bacteria had no genes that conferred resistance to the antibiotics; they entered the megaplate as defenseless as sheep. And if the agar was the pasture for these bacterial “sheep,” the antibiotics were the wolves. The experiment mimicked the way we use antibiotics to control disease-causing bacteria in our bodies. It mimicked the way we use herbicides to control weeds in our lawn. It mimicked each of the ways we try to hold back nature each time it flows into our lives.

The law of natural selection would predict that so long as genetic variation could emerge, via mutation, the bacteria should eventually be able to evolve resistance to the antibiotics. But it might take years or longer. It might take so long that the bacteria would run out of food before they evolved the ability to spread into the columns with antibiotics, the columns filled with wolves.

It didn’t take years. It took 10 or 12 days.

Baym repeated the experiment again and again. It played out the same each time. The bacteria filled the first column and then briefly slowed, before one and then many lineages evolved resistance to the next highest concentration of antibiotics. This continued until a few of the lineages evolved resistance to the highest concentration of antibiotics and poured into the final column, like water over a levee.

Seen sped up, Baym’s experiment is horrifying. It is also beautiful. Its horror lies in the speed with which bacteria can go from being defenseless to indestructible relative to our power. Its beauty lies in the predictability of the experimental results, given an understanding of the law of natural selection. This predictability allows two things: It allows us to know when resistance might be expected to evolve, whether among bacteria, bedbugs, or some other group of organisms; it also allows us to manage the river of life so as to make the evolution of resistance less likely. An understanding of the law of natural selection is key to human health and well-being and, frankly, to the survival of our species.

There are other biological laws of nature with similar consequences. The species-area law governs how many species live on a particular island or habitat as a function of its size. This law allows us to predict where and when species will go extinct, but also where and when they will evolve anew. The law of corridors governs which species will move in the future as climate changes, and how. The law of escape describes the ways in which species thrive when they escape their pests and parasites. Escape accounts for some of the successes of humans relative to other species and for how we have been able to achieve such extraordinary abundance relative to other species. The law frames some of the challenges that we will face in the coming years when our possibilities of escape (from pests, parasites, and the like) are fewer. The law of the niche governs where species, including humans, can live and where we are likely to be able to successfully live in the future as climate changes.

This Is the Year of the Shadow Pandemic

This Is the Year of the Shadow Pandemic

In 2022 we will still be feeling the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. A great many of us have been counting numbers directly tied to the virus—how many people have been vaccinated, infected, or hospitalized, how many are on ventilators or have died. But we have tended to ignore the indirect effects of the virus—and of the measures taken to prevent infections—on our most vulnerable citizens: children, adolescents, and women. We must now turn our attention to this “shadow pandemic” if we are to have any hope of returning the world to normality.

While women, children, and adolescents are no more likely than others to get ill or die from coronavirus, they have disproportionately experienced interruptions to many of the services they rely on, due to lockdowns and the diversion of crucial resources.

Fewer than two in ten Covid-19 health-related activities considered gender in any explicit way, according to the latest “Global Health 50/50 Report,” published in 2021. But without acknowledging the possible impact of crises on different genders and ages, we can make very wrong choices. This is because decisionmakers, still most often men, tend to forget about the vulnerable.

The closing of schools during the pandemic, for example, has caused an educational gap for many children and adolescents. Governments are working to keep education as open as possible, but many have taken less notice of the fact that, for millions of children, the school lunch was their only meal of the day. Many countries haven’t even begun to plan for or even think about how they might reach those hungry children when schools continue to be closed.

In 2022 we will also see the lingering effects of a shadow pandemic in non-Covid global health care. While hospital systems continue to focus on Covid-19 vaccination and treatment, routine immunization for many diseases (most forgotten already in the Western world) and necessary access to maternal health care services have been pushed aside. As a consequence of the pandemic, for example, 39 per cent of 124 countries surveyed reported a drop in coverage of family planning services and 38 per cent reported drops in the coverage of antenatal and postnatal maternal-health services.

Even before the pandemic, our world was not on track to achieve several Sustainable Development Goals (set up in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly and intended to be achieved by the year 2030) regarding women and children. Lockdowns and the reallocation of resources in 2020 and 2021 have worsened this situation. And combined with other crises affecting much of the world—ongoing conflict, climate change, economic slowdowns—they will lead to many more people, including women and children, suffering from ill health, undernourishment, and hunger.

As Covid-19 infection rates decrease, thanks to the successful rollout and uptake of vaccines, we will in 2022 turn our attention much more to this shadow pandemic and its impacts. It will not be frowned upon to be able to talk loudly and openly about the side effects of some of the policy measures we introduced to deal with the virus. We will see that we have no choice but to allocate local and global resources, such as nutritious food and continuous health care services, to those in the greatest need. And we will all have to work to prevent further damage to these vulnerable groups and repair the damage done so far.


Get more expert predictions for the year ahead. The WIRED World in 2022 features intelligence and need-to-know insights sourced from the smartest minds in the WIRED network. Available now on newsstands, as a digital download, or you can order your copy online.


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CES 2022 Liveblog: The Gadgets Keep Coming at Tech’s Big Show

CES 2022 Liveblog: The Gadgets Keep Coming at Tech’s Big Show

Keep in mind that the total output is 100 watts—if you plug in multiple devices, that power will be shared across those devices, but that should be plenty to recharge most laptops, smartphones, and tablets at fast-charging speeds. It has a plug that folds up, costs $79, and goes on sale in March.

If you want to upgrade your webcam experience, Anker has you covered with its AnkerWork B600 Video Bar. It can sit over the top of your monitor or TV, and it (importantly) has a cover to physically block the camera when it’s not in use. It’s not just a webcam though—there’s a built-in microphone, speaker, and even a video light to illuminate your face during those late-night Zoom calls. (There’s a slider on the webcam you can use to adjust the light’s settings, but you can also use an app to tweak color temperature and brightness.)

Anker claims its VoiceRadar tech can make your voice come through clear even in noisy environments, and the 2K resolution and 30 frames-per-second image quality should make you look good too. You can adjust the field of view manually, or let Anker’s artificially intelligent algorithms figure out when to zoom in or out on you and keep you in the frame. The camera costs $220 and launches on January 25. —Julian Chokkattu

TP-Link Brings Tapo Line to the US

TPLink Tapo C220 security camera
Photograph: TP-Link

In addition to the new routers TP-Link showed off this week, the company also announced that it’s bringing its Tapo smart home products to the US. The Tapo line will include four security cameras, including the 2K C220 Pan and Tilt Camera with a lens that can be physically hidden behind a shutter when you want privacy—that’s a feature I love in any smart home camera. There will also be a floodlight camera and two other outdoor cams, one wired and one battery-powered.

Thankfully, Tapo products will have two-way authentication at launch, and products under the Kasa brand (also owned by TP-Link) will be getting that too, according to the company. The Tapo line also includes other smart products like plugs, lighting options, sensors, and a smart hub. —Medea Giordano

Tracking the Metaverse at CES

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Lenovo Upgrades ThinkPads With Better Webcams, New Chips

2022 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Laptops

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 lineup.

Photograph: Lenovo

Lenovo has updated its ThinkPad X1 line. Three models—the Carbon, Yoga, and Nano—all get new 12th-generation Intel chips, as well as RAM and storage upgrades. I’m especially excited to see that there are upgraded Full HD webcams as well. As much as I like ThinkPads, previous models’ webcams were seriously lacking in today’s world. Hopefully these new cameras, which have much bigger sensors, will be a big step up. The Yoga and Carbon will also be available with OLED displays, 4K for the Yoga and 2.8K for the Carbon. The Nano, which was my favorite laptop I tested last year, does not get OLED unfortunately. —Scott Gilbertson

Panasonic’s 7-in-1 Oven Ferments and Stews

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Panasonic HomeChef 7-in-1 Compact Oven

There’s a neverending list of countertop appliances that promise convenient cooking. Panasonic debuted its newest contender today, and it’s a microwave. The HomeChef 7-in-1 Compact Oven can seemingly do it all, from steaming to convection baking to sanitizing. It can also ferment and stew, as well as air fry, meaning this gadget could theoretically replace a few kitchen counter campers. The machine features 18 pre-set meal options, and just a single four-button control system. It’s tricky to find an appliance that allows for both baking bread and making soup, and even trickier to find one that performs both tasks proficiently. We’ll see if it can come April, when it comes out for a MSRP of $500. —Louryn Strampe

Panasonic Partners with Steam for Compact VR Glasses

Panasonic MeganeX VR Glasses

Panasonic MeganeX.

Photograph: Panasonic

VR is definitely in its awkward teenage phase. Over the past few months we’ve seen manufacturers tease shrunken versions of VR headsets (Project Cambria), wellness-focused goggles, and even a 12K standalone box for your face. They’re trying everything to make VR happen. Panasonic is the latest to join the VR crowd, with an ultra-light weight set of Micro LED VR glasses. Called the MeganeX, the headset weighs just 8.8 ounces and each eye has a Micro LED display with a resolution higher than that of the Oculus Quest 2 headset. 

The Holmes Verdict and the Legal Loophole for ‘Disruption’

The Holmes Verdict and the Legal Loophole for ‘Disruption’

Convicting a corporate officer like Holmes of a crime against the public is filled with hurdles, particularly the need to prove intent, says Jacob T. Elberg, an associate professor of law at Seton Hall who used to prosecute health care fraud at the United States Justice Department. “Central to our criminal justice system has been knowledge and intent and not just results,” he says, and this burden frequently creates a challenge for prosecutors attempting to hold corporate executives accountable.

It made sense that prosecutors would focus on financial fraud in the Holmes case, Elberg said, rather than on the misled patients, because “there were clear-cut, black-and-white lies, which is what the system currently requires.” That’s a troubling feature for those who saw this trial as a chance to finally hold a founder accountable for abusing the public’s trust.

When the verdict came down, Alex Gibney, director of the Elizabeth Holmes documentary The Inventor, says he was stunned and disheartened by the message it sent. “In making the film, the bright red line was the immorality of it all,” he tells me over the phone. “They were putting patients at risk,” he says. “I wouldn’t have been interested in telling this story if it was just about hosing high-net-worth individuals—she crossed a moral boundary.”

The trial ultimately didn’t follow a similar narrative arc. Perhaps it’s naive to think a courtroom is about morality, or even social responsibility. Certainly, there are scores of lawyers—whether attorneys general and district attorneys or class-action specialists—thinking creatively about how to enlist the law to punish opioid manufacturers, fossil fuel companies, tobacco companies, and gun makers for the social harms they’ve caused. But these individuals tend to use civil law, which does not carry the same requirements of intent as criminal law does.

With tech companies, the task of holding them criminally accountable for the social damage they bring about is even harder. To start, these companies are often popular with the public and challenge accusations of harm by looking far into the distance, at the happy place they are leading us to. They also benefit from being seen as passive—they aren’t digging wells, they tell us, they are only letting anti-vax people spew. The source of their misdeeds may be a mysterious algorithm that seemingly operates itself. It’s a convenient, technologically enabled detachment from the decisions being made on their platforms. This might explain the feeling of helplessness many of us have when it comes to the growing power of technology companies—there seem to be victims all around us, but no crimes or criminals ever linked to the suffering.

To change this orientation—to protect the public as scrupulously as we protect investors—requires a rethinking of how we expect corporations and their officers to behave. We would need to expand the capacity of federal agencies like the Food and Drug Administration to do the kind of deep investigating that can expose the bad intent of corporate officials. Additionally, we could shift the standard from criminal intent in these cases to something easier to prove, like negligence, which Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed in 2019 as part of her Corporate Executive Accountability Act.

The purpose of these changes wouldn’t necessarily be to fill the prisons with more corporate executives, like Holmes, but rather to put them on notice: When you consider how to treat the public, act with the same respect for the law as you would when asking for a big check from investors.


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CES 2022 Liveblog: The Latest News From Tech’s Big Show

CES 2022 Liveblog: The Latest News From Tech’s Big Show

Late last year, Tile CEO CJ Prober accused Apple of becoming a runaway monopoly with the release of AirTags, saying that Apple had restricted Tile’s access to Apple’s Find My app. This year, rival company Chipolo announced a wallet finder that works exclusively with Apple’s Find My app. The slim, dark Card Spot is designed to slide in your wallet against your bank cards. In addition to Lost Mode, it also has a new “Notify When Left Behind” feature in iOS 15.

Tile isn’t taking this news lying down. This year, it announced that Lenovo’s new Thinkpad X1 line will be findable via Tile, which follows 2020’s announcement that HP would be introducing new PC devices that also incorporated Tile’s thing-locating technology. That begs the question: What do you need more, your wallet or your phone? And do you need to find your stuff in this reality, or an augmented one? Only time will tell.—Adrienne So

Withings Plans a Full Body Scan

Withings Body Scanner with smartphone displaying app

Withings Body Scan.

Photograph: Withings

When I first tested the Amazon Halo, a fitness tracker which uses digital full-body scans to determine your body fat percentage, the concept seemed alarmingly invasive. However, we may all be viewing ourselves in much greater detail sooner than you think. Withings makes some of our favorite stylish and easy-to-use health equipment. At CES 2022, it unveiled the Body Scan, a piece of attractive, tempered glass that monitors biomarkers like your heart rate, vascular health, and (ahem) “segmental body composition.”

Woman standing on Withings Body Scanner with smartphone app displayed next to her

Using the Withings Body Scan.

Photograph: Withings

Body Scan is a glass platform containing four weight sensors and 14 ITO electrodes, and a handle with four stainless steel electrodes. The battery lasts for a year per charge and displays your stats on a high-resolution 3.2-inch LCD color screen. In addition to precise, granular fat/water analysis of all your favorite limbs, the Body Scan also measures your sweat gland function to see if your nerves are working properly, as well as heart health. If you want one soon, it may take awhile. 

Withings stands out among health companies for applying for clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, instead of just selling equipment covered in disclaimers. If you’re going to get a full body scan, it might as well be from a company that you can trust that makes equipment that looks good. —Adrienne So

Teeny Tiny OLEDs

OLED (“organic light emitting diode”) display technology allows perfect black levels; because each pixel in the display acts as its own backlight, those pixels emit no light at all whenever they show a black tone. That’s why an increasing number of high-end TVs and mobile phones sport these advanced displays each year. One thing I’ve been waiting for are tiny, super low-power OLED screens for wearables and other devices. Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Organic Electronics, Electron Beam, and Plasma Technology FEP have successfully made them.

These teeny tiny new OLED displays could usher in a whole new look for consumer electronics in the future, with more interactive buttons, instructions, and various other features that lack the backlight glow associated with current screens that size. As I write this I’m staring at an audio mixer that has traditional LED-backlit display, knowing how much sharper this technology could make it look when the lights go off. Here’s hoping for commercial applications soon. —Parker Hall

A Backpack You Can’t Lose

Targus Find My Backpack shown with location tracking tag and hand holding smartphone

Targus Cypress Hero Backpack with “Find My.”

Photograph: Targus

Apple’s “Find My iPhone” feature has been around for a while, helping owners locate misplaced or stolen phones using GPS to show their location. Targus is bringing the tech to its newest Cypress Hero Backpack. You can now use the Find My app to pinpoint the backpack’s exact location—and if you lose your iPhone, you can also press a button inside the backpack to ping it.