Memento Mori

I was inspired to build Memento Mori after many years of reading and following Ryan Holiday’s writing on Stoic philosophy, especially his emphasis on memento mori. It’s a concept I always wanted to practice in my own life, but I hadn’t yet figured out what that looked like in a concrete, daily sense. I was also inspired by Bryan Johnson’s “Don’t Die” initiative and his willingness to share, very transparently, what people can do to extend their life expectancy. This app is essentially those two worlds distilled into one place. The problem I wanted to solve is that most people already know certain habits are good or bad for them, and they repeat those habits daily or weekly. But there wasn’t a clear way to accurately visualize what those choices might mean over time. The second problem is that we generally don’t think about death enough. We take life for granted. We take today for granted. We assume there will always be a tomorrow, even though one day there won’t be. The idea behind memento mori isn’t reckless living or “YOLOing” through life, but living with greater intention and integrity, knowing time is finite. I built the entire app myself. I first came up with the idea last year and spent about a month creating a Figma prototype I was happy with, but at the time I didn’t know enough iOS development to bring it to life, so I shelved it. At the beginning of this year, I started learning development more seriously with the help of AI tools and built four other apps along the way. Those projects gave me the skills and confidence to finally return to this one. Development was done in manageable chunks, and the design evolved significantly as people tested it. The gap between the original prototype and the shipped app is quite stark. This is my most complex project to date, and I’m really happy with how it turned out.