I've recently had cause to have death on my mind. I've concluded I have a problem with it. Several problems, actually. Allow me to explain…
Firstly, there's just too much of it around these days. I'm not referring to ephemeral news loops or an over-populated planet. Death increasingly hangs around us, prodding us to remember so-and-so, even if we've already tried to let them go. Those who deal with death offer ways for the grieving to see their departed ones, celebrate their existence, for as long as we pay. Even on all-pervasive social advertising platforms, we aren't ever prompted to let them go and it's an onerous effort to delete anyone, either functionally or psychologically. In fact, massaging the user count metric upwards, dead or alive, is a corporate KPI. The dust-collecting posts of our dearly departed will continue to play on our guilty 'if onlys' and 'I wish I hads' for years, decades afterwards. Wringing out more of our grief has become a scheduled in-memoriam event for uncaring code.
This problem will grow demographically worse and mutate into a wider issue as we get older. As the middle-aged mostly mummies become too saggy to selfie and then too senile to swipe, our so-yesteryear humble-brag bubbles will turn into dusty digital mausoleums, our ghosts wandering about, longing for likes and loves as post-mortem affirmation of our fragile, wine and sun-soaked existences. Eventually, the tech overlords will pull their plugs, to wails of sad-fished anguish from our still breathing, still ad-prodded relatives. Deletion of unproductive assets, according to the Terms & Conditions we all auto-blindly click, isn't digital genocide. Outdated backups and downloaded gigadumps be damned. An incomprehensible zipped JSON file is no substitute for a headstone. I doubt 'sensible business decisions' will ever be fully aligned with ethical ones, but the Mausoleum Massacres will be a no-brainer. The dead might soon retain money – our cold, dead hands still legally clutching our cold, hibernating crypto-wallets - but we still can't spend it to feed the money making machines of ill-adventured capitalists. At least, not yet.
My second problem is more personal. I'm not a big fan of death. It seems too permanent. When you spend half your life thinking about the future - and most of the rest asleep, dreaming about it - it seems unfair that my speck of consciousness can be (should be?) snuffed out so easily. I want to see what's needed to humble humanity. I want to laugh bitterly when the Singularity isn't a single event, but an economically mispropagated monster. I want to despair if a self-created dystopia implodes our species. I want to rejoice if a utopia explodes us outwards to the stars. I want... never gets, as we were berated as children.
I don't doubt I will depart my dismayed mortal coil. My ego and wealth are insufficient to truly reach for the stars and my surviving relatives have point blank-refused to cough up for my storage flask's electricity bill. This slice of reality only demonstrates that eternal love and 'until death do us part' are but two sides of the same co-habitation conundrum coin. As one who might survive into the 22nd century told me: "Who wants their great-great-grandad sat in a corner - or, worse, jacked into the metaverse - banging on about how much better it was when he was first alive?" Fair point, I admitted, whilst hiding my bitterness at the blind injustices perpetrated by ticking telomere clocks, misfolded proteins and promiscuous viruses. He does, after all, share half my DNA. Currently.
Should we care about any of this? We'll be gone, recycled back into stardust, like millions before us. Our legacies - in the main - will be minor, mute, and mostly facile. Time marches on. Memories fade. But our urge to stay alive, to strive, to breed another generation of hope, no matter how hard it gets, is matched by our innate, seemingly illogical urge to care for and remember our dead. I believe such acts help us to continue propagating human culture (even if it no longer differentiates us as a species). It forms a communal focus for friends and family, from near and far. There will be gravestones on at least one other sun-orbiting body by the end of the century, even if they promised life on them by the end of the last. Such optimism we still have in spades, even if we sometimes have to unwillingly use them to dig a hole for others. Life might well be eternal, but not for those who live it. That's just the way it is, no matter how much we try to anthropomorphise this unfeeling universe.
I hope I've given you food for thought. I hope I haven't depressed you. Now, you must please excuse me. For I have death on my mind and a hole to dig.