For the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about what we leave behind when we die if we are not artists or authors or architects:
Memories kept by others until they too leave. Some governmental records: birth certificate, death certificate (ironically, since we are dead), certain licenses, maybe a permit or two, and, of course, tax returns. If we had a social media presence, dead pages will hover about the internet. The soundless echos from undead electrons. Our email addresses will probably still work for a while. Spammers not caring if receivers are alive or not alive. 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 having long decayed to dust. Belonging to an industrial past ages ago. Most of what we accumulate today will age out before or 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 will our landfills be exhumed for understanding because our electronic existences have been erased? Those diggers will learn nothing about us beyond some decaying trinkets and rotting mass marketed and mass consumed necessities.
We do not live in an age of artifacts.
This saddens me. I feel born out of time even as I created a blog.
