What Facebook can tell you about death and afterlife
By reducing death to a post, FB has done the human race a great service.
Whatever else the pros and cons of social media are, it has certainly put the fact of death in perspective.
In 2013 someone launched an app, which would keep tweeting your programmed tweets long after you were dead. Immortality was guaranteed, at least on social media. I’m not sure if the app is still around or died an early death. It always sounded a bit dodgy — once I’m dead and gone, I have no way of checking if you are doing the job I paid you to do.
Facebook also keeps pages of dead users alive, if the family so wishes. It gives the family of the deceased something to hold on to. At times I’ve gone and drunk scribbled ‘Miss you man’ on a dead friend’s wall in the middle of the night and felt really stupid about it the next morning. It’s morbid. It’s pointless. But it’s there.
Social media is a useful tool for naked self-promotion. Twitter even more so. It has its professional uses. But increasingly people are also using it to express their emotions—ranting, raving and washing dirty linen. One changes one’s status to indicate whether one is feeling happy, angry or sad.
But to use Facebook to express grief over the death of a loved one is a different matter. Grief is a deeply personal thing. As John Berger writes in an essay called The Storyteller: “All weddings are similar but every marriage is different. Death comes to everyone but one mourns alone. That is the truth.” People who have lost a parent or a sibling will hit FB day after day to express their sorrow. The expression of grief and empathy becomes mechanical, automatic. It trivialises one’s grief though that wasn’t anyone’s intention.
Human life is singular and precious. I ask a deeply moral question: Is it then okay to surrender your grief to a cold calculating algorithm, which collects your personal data and sells it to advertisers? Should one not keep one’s human soul permanently walled off from the Facebook wall? Or has the FB wall merged into the human soul?
You want your friends to express empathy but look, how little it takes to satisfy that need: a round yellow icon with a tear freefalling under one eye. Is that the sum of a human life? Aren’t I wasting my grief in the wasteland of Facebook?
I’m forty-two. It’s the age when a generation starts to die one by one. Parents, parents’ friends, friends’ parents. Sometimes, the death is prolonged and comes with a warning. At other times, one hears of someone’s father dropping dead suddenly after the ritual morning walk. On the WhatsApp groups that many of us are a part of, the response is mechanical: RIP, RIP, RIP. Does that even mean anything? Might as well that nothing is said than a cliché. Why not read Kabir instead?: “I’m handcuffed to death./ Throw me the key.”
I came of age in the 1990s, when American alternative rock broke through. Depression was the new cool. Lead vocalists shot themselves in the head and smashed guitars in post-gig frenzy. When one is young, and a healthy life stretches in front of you, self-destruction is trendy, death is sexy. I thought so too in my fearless live-in-the-moment youth.
Then something happened. It robbed me of my will to die. What happened? Facebook happened.
Back in the time when we were not all connected by the World Wide Web, death was imagined (and conducted) in private. A famous writer would write his own obituary and imagine what his friends would say. One didn’t have to be famous. Anyone could do so.
What would one’s friends and family say? How would they react? Of course they will miss you terribly. It’s a comforting thought. As the band Drugstore sings on “The Funeral”: “I’d like to go sideways and facing the sun/Sad looking faces with pain and regret/All my ex lovers will talk through the night/Heartbreaking tales of passion and pride...”
Facebook tells us that none of this will ever happen. To that extent we should thank Facebook. It showed us the writing on the wall, the uncut truth. People will forget about you and move on. In minutes.
By reducing death to a post, FB has done the human race a great service. We need not have any illusions of the afterlife.
These days, if someone dies, we write a quick post: “Gone too soon. RIP.” “Hey, you’ve joined my mom in the gig in the sky. RIP.” Within the hour, one puts up other posts to do with the news of the day, the latest YouTube sensation, like someone’s album of wedding photos.
Life is relentless and no one has the time to look back. The post about grief is buried under an avalanche of posts about the living in a matter of seconds. This is what one’s friends will do. This is what we all do.
And so—I don’t want to effing die. I don’t want people writing RIP on my wall, then go and drop their kid off for tennis lessons.
But, unfortunately, the Reaper will get all of us. I don’t believe this anymore. I will live forever. I’d been looking for an elixir for youth for quite some time, ever since Facebook was launched in fact.
The other day it struck me that it might be right under my nose. My grandmother is hale and hearty at 91. (I won’t say touch wood because I’m not superstitious; besides, my gran has discovered the elixir of life) She lives downstairs from me. Over the decades I’ve closely observed her unchanging eating habits.
You are what you eat, they say. Gran’s breakfast consists of aloo parathas with butter on top. In the evening, she has a death-defying white bread sandwich smeared with extra sweet Kissan mixed fruit jam. This diet of comfort food has rendered her immortal. It’s going to be my formula too. Hopefully, when the world ends in a Trump-Kim-India-Pakistan blowout, I’ll be the last man standing, chomping on a white bread and jam sandwich and writing on humanity’s Facebook wall: RIP you guys.
I’ll follow this up instantly with a post about red roses blooming on Mars and catch the next space shuttle out.