Nyah. I'm 51 years old and buried my parents. Death is real and probably closer than I imagine.
Perhaps it's the productization of death?
I received this news as a retweet in my Twitter feed. Next to it was a bit.ly link about Configuration Management tools, the announcement of a speaker at a conference, and a famous quote from Einstein.
Right now on HN it's #4. Next to it is a blog post about tools and frameworks and a post about a PostgreSQL extension. The response to Pieter's tweet is lengthy and very kind. It would be a privilege to hear those thoughts in my own life before I leave. But the thoughts will still keep coming, probably long after he's gone.
I met a nice lady three years ago. She was a "social media consultant" in the local area, which basically consisted of teaching small business owners how to navigate the web. We met for lunch several times when I was in town.
Soon, though, she learned she had stage 4 lung cancer. I had lunch with her one more time. I'll never forget how weary she looked.
She held on for almost a year, then she passed.
For many weeks after that, however, Facebook was full of her many friends offering their condolences. Facebook would remind me that she liked certain things as a way to sell me on things. Every so often people would think of her and post on her wall. These posts appeared in my feed.
Last week I finally had to unfriend her. She was dead. But it didn't stop the computerized social network that Facebook to stop trying to monetize as much of her presence as they could. Even if somebody had set her account to deceased, Facebook will always own some part of her existence.
It feels like turning a tender, emotional, precious thing into a bucket of bits. I find that repugnant.
I am in 2 minds about this. Part of me agrees with you but the other part of me doesn't.
Personally, I feel death (and afterlife) has played an important role in popularising (selling?) religion.It is still a difficult subject to talk about, in some cultures even joking about your own death is a big no-no. Maybe this is the best way to break this barrier and understand that death is "normal" and it's okay to talk about it along with other normal things. Maybe this "productization" will get us all to a point where we are all okay talking about it openly and frankly, without making a big deal about it?
I agree with what I think you're saying, but the right words can be very tricky here.
Maybe this "productization" will get us all to a point where we are all okay talking about it openly and frankly, without making a big deal about it?
What's a "big deal"? For my friend, I knew her and she seemed like a nice person. I did not know her that well, though. The first couple of times somebody posted how sad they were on her wall, I was moved. The second couple of times, sad to say, not so much. By the time we got to 20 or 30, I was both annoyed -- and angry at myself for being annoyed.
How about her husband? He got to watch her die, bury her, and then watch all this come in, day-after-day. Two months later he was dead.
Social networks take everything and genericize it. What was a big deal to me was probably a huge deal to him. Assuming those little bits were somehow part of who she was, you can't just assume that they were the same kind of "big deal" to everyone involved. To me, to the husband, to the still living kid. [ed: and it's not right to try to force it into the same kind of deal for everybody. That's dehumanizing.]
I'm a transhumanist and I think the singularity is coming and I'm okay with that. But as we evolve, we have to stop and take a freaking look at what we're doing. Software may be eating the world, but the world is not all the same stuff. The differences matter.
I am not great with words, please accept my apologies.
When I say "big deal", I meant it more like talking about homosexuality is now less of a "big deal" then it was back in the day. I am not saying that the loss itself is not a big deal, just talking about it shouldn't be.
Maybe, if we live in a society where it's easy to talk about death then maybe the grieving process would become easier too. Right now, people tend to act weird around people who has just lost someone (I have experienced that first hand), the people who are suffering the loss feel like they have to "stay strong" and not show their emotions to others because they don't want to be a burden. It's a vicious cycle which we can break by just talking about it.
I agree that it should be easier to talk about death. And tech really isn't the issue there -- unless the tech is keeping us in a cocoon.
Back when the U.S. Civil War happened, photography was still new. Some folks thought that the new tech would finally wake people up to the horrors of war.
Didn't work out like that. People already knew the horrors of war and dying. You could run a picture of ten thousand people dead on a battlefield and while people felt the severe pain of that loss -- it was not horrifying to them. They lived with it everyday. (In fact, some early uses of photography was taking pictures of the recently dead. So you could remember them.)
I don't know. I may feel completely different about all of this when it comes my turn. I am really glad that the voices of people about to be silenced forever can be heard. In fact I think it's such a special thing that it really shouldn't appear next to an ad for Spacely's Space Sprockets.
We should have open and honest dialogues about death, yes. That doesn't mean that we should think of death in the same way as we might think of buying a newspaper. There's a categorically different thing going on here, regardless of any extraneous baggage that anybody might carry into the discussion.
What you described above, the "productization" of someone's death, is part of a bigger problem, where people are isolated from each other by technology and by a dehumanizing (and uncoincidentally technophilic) culture that turns people into appointments or tasks or problems to be solved or opportunities to make money or anything and everything more convenient and less difficult than, well, people. I could go on and on naming examples, but I think HN itself does a well enough job by self-selecting perfect examples to the front page every day. You're 51, I'm only 31, so you obviously have a lot more life experience than me (almost twice as much). But I think the fact that I'm already weary and wary of pretty much everyone and everything around me, including everyone and everything at HN, probably says something about modern suburban American culture.
Not to derail the conversation but this whole discussion on "productization" reminded me of the plot line of a Black Mirror episode. When I originally watched it I found it mostly absurd but now in the context of this thread it makes a whole lot of sense.
I'm seeing a bit of Niel Postman's Technopoly criticism of media. We get these little news snippets, originally by wire to select locations, now anybody via Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, or HN. I see Pieter's notice sandwiched between police complaints / cameras, and the Nobel prize in physics. One out of two ain't bad.
Information, writing, and media have the ability to convey information totally unrelated to our present reality from anywhere on the planet, and a few points beyond. But leave us with having to contextualise all of it.
It's quite jarring. Not the first time I've received a death notice by (nominally) social media. Still carries a shock.
As for the "after he's gone" -- that's what death is, so far as I've realised. Life for the deceased stops, for the rest of us, it goes on. We have experiences, and conversations, and reminiscences, in which the dead are only memories.
This use of 'just' is curious. It suggests that some degree of a person's consciousness inheres in their Facebook account. Is this intentional? If so, will you explain how you arrive at that conclusion?
What unsettles me is cancer. I did my PhD in cancer research, lost relatives to it and discovered how bad it is. I would do anything to prevent getting it, but I know there's no way. May his family and friends find peace.
Can you elaborate what makes cancer any more frightening than any other things that may get us? Is it the threat of pain? As long as we are mortal our journey is a finite one anyway.
I guess it's more frightening because we're more likely to develop cancer than most other diseases, it occurs for the most part purely randomly and chances are high that it leads to a slow and painful death. Cancers evolve to resist drugs and radiation, and due to the nature of evolution, you are unable to tell if and when it happens. As I wrote under another article, cancer is a fundamental dread of all higher multicellular life. Is that comforting? Maybe on a bigger perspective. What makes it bad for humans is that they know what's happening.
My father died of liver cancer. A piece of me died in those weeks of his misery, and pain right up to his horrid death.
My father was not a kind man. He was petty, selfish person, but I still would have done anything for him.
Looking back, he was under medicated while in Palliative Care. He was at home, but that shouldn't be an issue? No one in the family could figure out why he wasen't given more medication. He saw a Hospice Doctor once, I believe, and a couple of nurses dropped by.
Getting him pain meds, and benzodiazepines was a battle. It's such a stressful situation, and getting meds should be difficult?
He never seemed to have enough. I look back, and don't know what the problem was with the lack of strong medication. Maybe the doctors didn't want too much around? I don't know?
They should alleviated his pain better though.
I understand no cures, but alleviate the misery with drugs. We do have drugs?
There were times, I felt like, if I knew where to buy it; I would have bought him heroin.
I accept death. We can make patients comfortable when they are dying with medication? Maybe we were the the family that wasen't vocal enough? I don't know, but in my dads death; Hospice did a terrible job.
Hospice has a lot of money. I was surprised, because I heard they were a good organization.
(I didn't want to read this post. I had a feeling it was Peiter. I don't know the man, but truely admire his courage.)
There might be some screwy regulations that if you drug a person too much - no matter how terminally ill they are or how in pain - you are doing a criminal offense. Also, there is this strange worship of suffering in some circles - how just bearing ones load is somehow more noble than being blissfully stoned.
Not a medical professional, though.
I think parts of me died for both of my parents death. All the strength.
My mother spent her last month as psychiatric patient at an alcoholics ward, and only after she had died autopsy discovered she had pancreatic cancer. She was mostly incoherent, frightened and delusional. They said she screamed through the nights. Despite her history I cannot even after years stop wondering was that really the correct place to tend to her-and why did her mental condition lapse so thoroughly before the end. Death and lack of dignity sucks.
If you have lost relatives to cancer, it means it runs in the family. That, I suppose, makes it worse than any other disease, i.e., the threat becomes more real.
I think the genetic component of cancer depends very much on the kind of cancer one has. Lots of other conditions have a strong genetic component - poor cardiovascular health, depression, schizophrenia, alzheimer's, strong disposition towards substance abuse, etc. I would not call it "worse" than for example the genetic likelihood of 80% of developing alzheimers at an early age (which luckily I don't personally have).
Perhaps this is a very personal view - but as I've lost relatives to all sorts of maladies including cancer I find it really hard to see cancer as the absolutely worst bogeyman in the room. That's not to say it's not bad.
In my mind, death is a travesty. As someone who thinks about death (my own) when I'm incredibly stressed and upset, I know I can't carry out the act. But it's distressing and horrific, and it fucks with my mind. There is no other word violent or crude enough to describe it, so that's a very deliberate choice of phrasing I make.
