For the past few weeks I was thinking about what we leave behind when we die if we are not artists or authors or architects. Memories inside others until they too leave. Some governmental records: birth certificate, death certificate, certain licenses, maybe a permit or two, of course, tax returns. If we had a social media presence, dead pages will hover about the internet like the soundless echos from ghosts. Our email addresses will probably still work for a while. Spammers not caring if receivers are alive or not. But as more of who we are becomes the matter of what we post, less does the evidence of our physical presences matter. We live within an age when learning something about someone requires no more than an internet search or a friending.
But what of 100 years from now? 150? 200? …? What will be our cave drawings, our pottery, our iron tools? Heirlooms and antiques and letters, quaint notions belonging to an industrial past. Most of what we accumulate ages out before, or will shortly after, we die. It is about today not our heirs. Our things, our trinkets, will mostly be recycled or carted to a landfill where they will rot or not with everyone else’s disposed aspects. Centuries from now if landfills are exhumed for understanding, because our electronic existences have been erased, those diggers will learn nothing about us beyond some decaying trinkets and rotting common necessities.
We do not live in an age of artifacts.
