Hansa Bergwall is a co-founder of the WeCroak App. He is also the host of the WeCroak Podcast and ghostwrites for death in the Ask Death Advice Column Newsletter. When he isn’t reminding people about death, he likes to bake, play Dungeons and Dragons, or research obscure spiritual, philosophical, or yogic topics. He occasionally teaches yoga and meditation. Hansa has been an entrepreneur since 2013 when he launched a boutique PR agency and has been thinking about what really makes a healthy lifestyle and true wellness ever since.

How did you get the idea for WeCroak?

I get really into different things from time to time. And one of them from over the years is practical philosophy and meditation. One of the things that I kept running into was death meditation. Perhaps my circle just wasn’t large enough, but nobody I knew at the time was doing it in the United States. The more I read the more I kept running into it. Then I read the fifth century Buddhist scholar from India, Buddhaghosa, who said that of the 40 or so different kinds of meditation, only two are always beneficial: one is the cultivation of kindness, and the other is the recollection of death. So I thought wow, this isn’t some tangential, esoteric, weird thing on the fridge. This is supposed to be absolutely center to one’s practice. That was when I really started to try it, to dig into it, and I loved it. I really noticed the effect, like a lot of people do, of a little bit of mortality contemplation as part of my practice. Then I started doing more research. Eventually I happened upon the Bhutanese folk saying that to be a happy person, you have to you have to contemplate mortality five times a day. Its simplicity really appealed to me: take a deep breath, think about it five times today. It seemed like a really natural way to interweave it with life. And also, it seemed programmable, something that I could have my phone, which is always in my pocket, remind me to do because like a lot of people, I get busy, I’m running around, I have a full-time job. I wanted my phone to just remind me to do this practice throughout the day.

I had a developer rent my extra room on Airbnb and I pitched him the idea. I just needed the right moment to sell someone on it, and it worked. So that’s how the app came about – it was very much an independent project from a couple of passionate people.

What was the initial reception?

We were covered all around the world in the media. I’d say the most common first reaction was, oh the young people are going crazy, look at what they’re doing. Why would you have your phone remind you of death? That sounds morbid, it sounds depressing. All those kinds of things. Yet at the same time, a lot of people just got it. Principally three groups: 1) people who were already meditators might have heard of it, 2) stoics who have read Marcus Aurelius who has at least 100 different references to think about death a lot, and 3) someone who’s gone through a recent or a big experience of grief. But since 2017, the world has changed a lot. Not everyone wants it on their phone, but no one ever tells me I’m crazy anymore after the last couple years that we’ve had, which is really interesting.

What was your main goal behind the app?

One of the goals of the app was just to get people to talk more about the preciousness and shortness of life. The past few years have definitely been a time when a lot of people have done the soul searching that mortality contemplation says is possible and for example, changed careers, moved, quit jobs, etc. And this is unique from just meditation generally. Let’s say you’re working a 60 or 70 hour a week job, and it’s something you don’t really care about. To get through it, you’re taking a meditation course that helps you stay calm or helps you sleep, great, but then you might spend an extra couple of years of your limited life in a job that you should really leave had you really thought about your values. Death meditation is unique in its ability to create urgency to make the changes you need to make right now, while you still have time. And what have we seen over the last couple of years with COVID-19 is a lot of people doing exactly that. And that has been really beautiful. Obviously, the death and the pain have been awful. But watching people do the work that they say is possible when death is more on their minds and make big changes in life and be happy with them is amazing. There are a lot of people who are in a totally new trajectory because of the soul searching they did in the shadow of death.

One of the goals of the app was just to get people to talk more about the preciousness and shortness of life.

What would you say to people who say that thinking about death just makes them feel sad and/or death anxiety?

Death is sad – if you’ve gone through grief, you know that it has that side 100%. But if you sort of lean into that, what can open up is a greater flowering of your feeling for the people you really care about. If you lean into it that and realize wow, I really do feel sad, I really care about something, there can be some really interesting transformations. I guess what I want to underline here is that there’s a difference between reacting to death around you and doing a death contemplation. There’s something different about taking a deep breath, sitting with it, and leaning into it as a contemplative tool.

Meditation can take years to master. Can someone who with zero experience with meditation still benefit from this?

One of the reasons I love making these ideas into an app is that it’s one of the quickest meditations to get a result from. For other types, you might have to sit for half an hour on your breath to really reach a meditative state. But most people, and I say this having talked to thousands now, can benefit from this. They can take one or two deep breaths and just think, I’m definitely going to die, I don’t know when, it could be today, it could be tomorrow, there are a million things that could do it from COVID to a meteor from space. Considering that, am I happy with how I spent the last hour, or do I want to make a change right now? Did I do the things I really care about, take a walk with someone in my family or call a friend and catch up, or did I wile away in distraction? You can pretty quickly come to a place where you feel like you know who you are more, and what you care about more. It doesn’t take very long to come to a meditative state of some calm, some sense of perspective, some sense of rootedness when you’re thinking about death. That sort of clarifying urgency, knowing what you care about, there is not a lot that we can reliably bring that awareness. Death meditation is the most reliable one that I know of.