On the flip side, I’d argue, there’s this underlying, undeniable curiosity about how much time we have left.\u00a0Think back to those slumber party\u00a0‘would you rather’ debates: would you want to know when you’re going to die or would you want\u00a0to remain blissfully unaware?<\/p>\n
Toronto developer Travis Weninger, who’s built five other apps, including one for discreetly tracking intimate encounters<\/a>, began working on Memento Mori<\/a> in January 2025. He says development took about three months and involved up to\u00a015,000 lines of code across many files.<\/p>\n The name for the app comes from the Latin phrase,\u00a0“remember you will die,\u201d which sounds deeply philosophical or mildly threatening, depending on your perspective.<\/p>\n “The point is to help people live with intention,” he tells blogTO. “I always hear things like ‘this will make you live longer,’ or ‘this is bad for you,’ and I just wanted to create something that could make that concrete and personal to [the user].”<\/p>\n He says the app is grounded in scientific and medical data drawn from organizations such as the World Health Organization, Health Canada, and the National Institutes of Health. He also notes that a healthcare worker in his family reviewed the app and responded positively.<\/p>\n I will admit I am skeptical, albeit a tad bit curious about this app. So I bit the bullet and paid the one-time $2.99 fee to download it.<\/p>\n I was first prompted to upload certain info, such as my birth date, location, weight, relationship status, heart rate, etc. Then came the part where I had to confess my vices.<\/p>\n I’m approaching 38, and I don’t drink alcohol anymore, but my sugar cravings are so aggressive they’d make Veruca Salt look tame. Add in a\u00a0fondness for, say, a certain type of “greenery,”\u00a0plus the occasional stress cigarette, and, well, you get the idea. (Some things will remain off the record, though, please, my mother could be reading this!)<\/p>\n As much as I enjoy my fair share of sin, I do make a solid effort to stay reasonably healthy by going on long walks, munching on carrots, and doing Pilates.<\/p>\n Having said all that, the Memento Mori app estimates that my less-than-stellar habits (including eating too much sugar and spending way too much time in front of a computer screen) are shaving about 11.2 years off my life.<\/p>\n “For some people, if they have bad habits, being able to visualize the impact can be really powerful, like, ‘oh, I didn’t realize this was affecting my lifespan that much.’\u00a0And maybe that helps them get something out of it.”<\/p>\n Next, the app flips the script and asks about your virtues: how often you drink water, exercise, whether you meditate, read, do puzzles,\u00a0take\u00a0vitamins, all of it. My healthier tendencies (strength training, staying social, drinking the daily recommended amount of water and more)\u00a0added three years back to my life.<\/p>\n Memento Mori landed on a predicted lifespan of 75.5 years. Truthfully, it was much higher than I was expecting.\u00a0<\/p>\n Perhaps this is the kind of reflection the app is designed to provoke.<\/p>\n “I don’t think I want to live forever,”\u00a0Weninger muses. “There are people in the tech community trying to do that, but my question is: for what?”<\/p>\n With Memento Mori, Weninger tried to answer that by letting users add custom countdowns after setting up the app, so instead of just staring at an existential timer, you can plug in things that actually matter, like Christmas with your parents or those vacations you’ve been looking forward to for years. In that sense, he says, it’s less about focusing on death and more about living life to the fullest.<\/p>\n For me personally \u2014 and maybe for you, too, reader \u2014 seeing my “fate”\u00a0laid out on screen like this is equal parts fascinating and unnerving. Whether you take it seriously or not, Weninger’s app does succeed in making you think a little more carefully about how you’re spending your time.<\/p>\n As Weninger puts it, the app can’t predict if you’ll get smoked by a bus tomorrow, so the real value isn’t in the actual number that pops up on screen but in what you decide to do with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What if your phone could tell you how much time you’ve got left to live? Sure, that sounds…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":613984,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194291],"tags":[1637,49,48,174205,221791,130491,3302],"class_list":{"0":"post-613983","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-toronto","8":"tag-app","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-lifespan","12":"tag-memento","13":"tag-mori","14":"tag-toronto"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=613983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/613984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=613983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=613983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=613983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"memento](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1776283233-IMG_1072.jpg\"\/)
The goal here isn’t shock value, Weninger says.<\/p>\n![\"memento](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1776283404-IMG_1073.jpg\"\/)
So where does that leave me?<\/p>\n![\"memento](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1776283425-IMG_1074.jpg\"\/)
In other words, I’ve got roughly 37 more years to go, which is the same amount of time I’ve been alive. Do I go full Billy Madison and treat my second act like a total do-over? Lowkey, I do have a few life moments that need rewriting.\u00a0<\/p>\n