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“ARE YOU DEAD?”
It can be tough to deal with family members constantly asking about your life. Although the questions usually are well-meaning, singles living alone can get tired of a meddling family.
In China, they now have a solution to the problem. A trio of software developers has launched a new app to keep family members in the loop about your well-being.
The app is called “Are You Dead?”
At its heart is a very simple application that periodically requires users to click a button to confirm that they are, in fact, alive and well.
Should the user fail to do so, the app will send out emergency messages to selected contacts. They can then check up on the user and call for help, if necessary.
You might imagine that most users of “Are You Dead?” would be senior citizens. Yet, China’s young people have embraced the app to put their friends’ and families’ minds at ease.
The app’s morbid name has raised some eyebrows and caught the attention of Chinese government censors who are now demanding a friendlier title.
The app could not be simpler. Every two days, it will ask you a required question: “Are you dead?”
To avoid being labeled dead by the app, you must press the big green button on the screen. If you do, you can continue your life in peace for two more days.
If you do not tap the button, the app will assume that you may, indeed, be dead. In that case, it will send a message to your chosen emergency contacts, urging them to check on your well-being.
The app charges eight yuan (roughly, NTD$35 or USD$1.15) for every click.
It is easy to think that “Are You Dead?” was designed particularly with older folks in mind. Indeed, it is similar of the alert buttons that care-home residents wear on their wrists.
However, according to the app’s three developers, its target audience is young people. And that seems to be right — “Are You Dead?” was the most downloaded paid app in all of China.
According to Ian Lu, one of the app’s developers, it provides a solution to a real need.
In search of education and work, millions of young Chinese have moved to large cities many kilometers away from their homes.
However, this life-style disrupts centuries of established Chinese tradition. In the past, families in China were very close-knit, with relatives living, at most, in the next village.
Today, families are finding it hard to deal with the change. Parents and grandparents want to keep in constant touch with their kids, who, in turn, can find their endless questioning frustrating.
“Are You Dead?” solves this problem, sort of. Parents can automatically check the app and know that their kids continue to live, while the kids do not have to answer the phone every few hours.
Chinese social media is full of horror stories of single youths who got sick and died in their tiny apartments, with nobody realizing they were dead until much later.
So, to many young adults, “Are You Dead?” is a way to avoid such a sad end.
Wilson Hou, 38, uses the app as a comfort for his wife and child. He must travel 100 km to Beijing for work, staying in a small, rented apartment during the work week.
“I worry that, if something happened to me, I could die alone in the place I rent, and no one would know. That is why I downloaded the app, and I set my mom as my emergency contact,” he said, hoping to spare his wife from the shock of an emergency message.
Hou also said that he downloaded the app as soon as it was released, because he was concerned that it would get deleted from China’s app stores.
And, indeed, in mid-January, “Are You Dead?” did disappear.
The cause is probably the app’s name. Death is a taboo subject in Chinese society.
Many Chinese believe that discussing death as a concept is pushing your luck. This belief goes so far that many buildings in China do not have a fourth floor because the Chinese word for “four” sounds like the word for “death.” This superstition is similar to some buildings in the Western world not having a 13th floor.
Now, the developers are looking for a new name to get the app back on the marketplace.
Maybe they should call it something friendly like, “Not Yet, But Thanks for Worrying.”
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