Memento Mori: Remember to die

Memento Mori is a privacy-first iOS app that helps you reflect on mortality through the lens of evidence-based longevity research and Stoic philosophy. Instead of treating life expectancy as an abstract number, Memento Mori shows how your everyday choices meaningfully affect the time you have left.

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.

@traviswhat Congrats on your launch! This is such an interesting concept!

Small launch tip: as you start onboarding users, it might be worth revisiting your Terms & Privacy to make sure they fully reflect how the product actually works. It’s one of those boring things that saves headaches later.

Best of luck!

Memento Mori is great, I put the widget on my homescreen and I actually find myself reflecting on it momentarily throughout the day. the app is also designed well and I like the fact that the data is private.

@traviswhat Congrats on your launch! This is such an interesting concept!

Best of luck!