Tangential: A few years ago a coworker of mine suddenly died in a tragic accident at way too young of an age. Every once and a while when I see his name pop up in a git blame from code written many years ago I'll click into his GitHub profile as it is frozen in time now. For the first year the worst part of this was watching the green contributions squares slowly retreat to the left until the wall was solid grey.
It makes me wonder how long all of our online presences will remain after we're gone. Personal blogs/websites will go down and large companies like GitHub & social media will yield to newer competitors. Archive.org is probably the longest living publicly available archive of these profiles but who knows how long that will exist for either. Like countless other human lives, at some point there will be no evidence left that we were even here at all. "All those [profiles] will be lost in time, like tears in rain."
The terrifying (or maybe really consoling) thing is that it take A LOT to be remembered for a significant amount of time. Just think about it: How many people can you name off the top of your head that lived 100 years ago, or 500 years or a 1000? How long ago lived the oldest family member that you know anything about?
It also seems, that the best way to be remembered is either to write or to win battles. On the other hand, building long lasting monuments (like some contemporary billionaires) seems to be quite inefficient when it comes to remembrance of a person, historically speaking. The only exception I can think of is the Eiffel-Tower, dude made a wise decision naming it after himself.
Even that: You know it's called Eiffel-Tower, but you don't know the guy (unless you investigate the history of the tower). So, at the end of the day: It's just a word with no meaning.
I spent some time trying to chase down an actual source. The most common source given is Irvin D. Yalom but he references the notion to "A Green Tree in Gedde" by Alan Sharpe. I don't see evidence for the various claims that it's a Jewish proverb, has an Egyptian source or a Marcus Aurelius quote. Overall I think the idea of "living on in the memories of others" is pretty persistent and cross-cultural with a number of related phrasings.
Irvin D. Yalom - Staring at the Sun (2011)
> I have let go of the wish, the hope, that I myself, my image, will persist in any tangible form. Certainly there will come a time when the last living person who has ever known me dies. Decades ago, I read in Alan Sharp’s novel A Green Tree in Gedde a description of a country cemetery with two sections: the “remembered dead” and the “truly dead.” The graves of the remembered dead are tended and adorned with flowers, whereas the graves of the truly dead were forgotten; they were flowerless, weed infested, with tombstones askew and eroded.
Alan Sharpe - A Green Tree in Gedde (1965)
But when at last the threads of memory rot and the
rememberers themselves are tombed, then the liberated
dead move in silent flit to the old open field of the truly
buried, and there in sight of the living they relax and at last
rest.
Earliest related phrasing I can see is Shakespeare Sonnet 17, but it's more about living twice rather than dying twice:
Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say “This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.”
So should my papers, yellowed with their age,
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage
And stretchèd meter of an antique song.
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice—in it and in my rhyme.
I am pretty sure Yalom can be ruled out a source : I learned about the saying around that time, and sure his writing couldn't have reached me so quick.
Furthermore, I find Dutch sources dating earlier ( online poems and obituaries ).
The saying as I know it is more succint, it is either :
You are not really dead when your name is still used/referenced ( Pardon my English ), or :
You are only really dead when your name is not used/referenced anymore.
I do agree with your assesment that it is probably cross-cultural ( and much older ), a bit of a canon.
> I am pretty sure Yalom can be ruled out a source : I learned about the saying around that time, and sure his writing couldn't have reached me so quick.
He will have said it multiple times in his career e.g. Love's Executioner (1989) - I (perhaps misleadingly) quoted a later book that let me chase the source. As an existential philosopher/psychologist writing self-help books about death I can imagine he might be the modern populariser because people struggling with death/mortality might reach for his books. They contain many ideas/aphorisms about death intended to help.
Irvin D. Yalom - Love's Executioner (1989)
> You know, there is no one alive now who was grown-up when I was a child. So I, as a child, am dead. Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead—when I exist in no one’s memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that old person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
The tone of this comment reminded me of an old sketch from the British sitcom "Goodness Gracious Me", with the Indian patriarch outrageously claiming everything was invented in India (”Superman? INDIAN!”): https://youtu.be/4GC_Q2YKNR0?si=vzA-zAGcde6HZyzv
More seriously, it's a theme as old as mankind. For example, Ugo Foscolo in "Dei sepolcri" (1806):
Yeah, we had a colleague pass unusually young due to cancer. It was very sad. I saw his name in git blame or various JIRA tickets etc. for years. I'd always take the time to think about him and our time working together. It absolutely affected how I see work and how I value my time (especially since I later had a couple long-time friends die unusually young, too).
I would love to train a LLM on everything I've written and everything I believe and give it agency to continue after my death. How long might I live on then.
The tricky part being the agency. How to continue and persist itself. Survive the demise of servers and hosting providers.
People have been duped by scam artists and opportunists for thousands of years to "talk" to people beyond the grave through seances, Ouija boards, supposed ghost possessions, etc.
I want it to be done as performance art, on the up and up, without the hustle or superstition.
Ok yes, I was interpreting it from the POV of someone who doesn't know the person, whereas the people who memorialised it probably did know the person.
but then it is a public memorial so it shouldn't really be intended as a personalised memorial?
If a statue to a famous person is unveiled, I would expect that it would celebrate the things they are famous for, not their personal life.
There's so much social media skepticism that burns what happens online, that sweepingly categorizes all the effort as bad or pointless or negative.
And yeah, so much is whatever.
But man, we each carry a little light. And these records, these pasts, they - to me - mean something. Code commits or comments; they are some kind of testament
I forget what it was but yesterday I think there was a nice submission where the author was saying even lack of evidence or failing is evidence. They were saying that just because theirnefforts didn't pan out as expected, doesn't mean they aren't informative pieces. Letting time in, letting us figure out long terms what values & lessons there are... I think that respectful & aweful ability to regard each other without moving to ill judgement is enormous.
When people are gone it just becomes so obvious how much the world loses from that active actor trailing off.
I joined a company in 2001 and left in 2010. A tool and library I wrote for debugging 3d geometry is still in active use.
In 2010 at a new company, I wrote another tool for visualizing a complicated tree structure. It has thousands of daily active users in the company.
My two biggest legacies are tools to help developers visualize their data. I'm pretty proud of that. Even if I don't get to maintain either piece of software, I'm glad to know they helped and continue to help.
Same situation, although the colleague in question had left the place I worked a few months before he died in an accident. I still see his name in the git blame lines most weeks and think of him.
I have never wanted kids, but I made a very small contribution to Django core, and after it was merged in, I realized that this is the most likely way that I could be remembered as a footnote in history, even if Django is retired from popular use.
A lot of people seek some kind of immortality through reproduction, but this is good enough for me!
I question why leaving behind a legacy is important.
Personally, if I leave nothing in my wake (as far as practicality allows) when I die I will be very happy. Leaving behind a legacy only inconveniences whoever it is who has to pick up the reins and clean up after me.
Because we are afraid of death, of the annihilation of our everything it brings. So leaving a legacy alleviates that a bit - we die but we are not dead-dead as long those memories are alive. For some it will be an immortality project, for others a silly endeavour, but I say as long it makes one happy (less scared) let them all have it.
Leaving a legacy (a good one anyway) kind of validates that you did something that outlived you in your time on earth.
To be sure we should try to take care of the loose ends if we can before we die — not knowing when that is means we should probably keep a tight ship as regularly as we can - especially more so as we get older. This thought crosses my mind fairly regularly when I look across the garage, in the storage room at all the crap I've accumulated. (Nevertheless, if the kids just want to toss everything, have an estate sale that's cool.)
>> I question why leaving behind a legacy is important.
Just leave things better than when you found them. Not for you, and not for those who follow, but for the thing itself. I suppose in this framing people are things too - help them to be better versions of themselves if you can. Other than that, have fun and enjoy the ride.
I struggle with this sometimes. There is a part of me that cares greatly about "legacy" and would really like to accomplish something significant in my lifetime... something that will be remembered, something that will matter.
But.
I am reminded that, over sufficiently long time scales, no one is remembered. There is no such thing as "legacy", really. As somebody pointed out once: how many people are remembered now from even, say, the last 2500 years? Alexander the Great, and, uh... maybe a handful more. But will even Alexander the Great, or Napoleon, or Genghis Khan, or Albert Einstein, or Ramanujan, or Marie Curie, or $INSERT_CELEBRITY_HERE be remembered in another 2000 years? 10,000? 100,000? 2 million? 10 million? It seems likely (assuming the human race even persists that long) that we're all forgotten in the end.
So I dunno. I still go back and forth in my own mind about whether or not "legacy" is even worth caring about or not.
Everything is temporary, a legacy makes it slightly less. Brings an element of continuity to our existence as people learn or are inspired by the impressions other people leave behind.
Sad. But nice that the dad was able to access a logged in session on the blog to make a post I guess. I ponder how so many of our digital lives (and thus lives in general) would be locked forever should something untimely happen as no one would have access to anything unless we left some sort of giant password log book or mechanism in place.
If you are an Apple user, make sure you set up a Legacy Contact for your iCloud account. You can also optionally choose to allow access to your computer with your iCloud credentials, which will give your next of kin access to it.
My wife and I used to keep all kinds of note about how to handle various accounts and communications if we died. Over time, we realized that what matters is our friends and family, not our online presence. My only note that is left is "Cancel my credit card - everything will get sorted out and deleted once bills aren't paid."
I'm not trying to diminish the importance of our online lives while we live. It is a big part of our lives. But after we are gone... different story.
To me, my online presence within certain communities is as much me as I am me with my friends and family in person and I care deeply about them. It's disturbing and worrying when someone that you talk to regularly suddenly stops coming online, and I generally spend most of my online time with people I care about.
Accounts like my shitposting twitter account and HN accounts - who cares. But I don't want to be another lost soul last seen online years ago after suddenly disappearing. I have too many people like that who I still think about.
I put a lot of though in this some time ago. So i made a python script, running on my server, that if something doesnt happen for at least 2 weeks automatic mails will go out to friends and family, each with some access to stuff they might be interested about and a final message.
I know this is a bit paranoic but its the best i can do. Also most of my passwords are on a kpdb file so with the master credentials someone could get all the access to everything (that would go to my VERY close family for example)
> if something doesnt happen for at least 2 weeks automatic mails will go out to friends and family, each with some access to stuff they might be interested about and a final message.
So that means if your server got hacked today, the hacker would have access to everything? Put differently, what I'm asking is: How exactly are you managing your credentials?
Depends on the technical proficiency of whomever is going to inherit your accounts. I am familiar with folks where asking them to navigate a password manager would be not without challenges.
I have relatively technically incompetent family members, but my will instructs them to talk to any of 3 different technically competent friends that I trust (ideally more than 1 of them, all together in person with my estate providing funds for it) to guide them through shit like crypto private keys, password managers and encrypted archives that I could never imagine my very normal sister or mother dealing with. I check in with my friends every year to make sure that they're OK with the arrangement still, and the reason it's 3 is in case I'm involved in some kind of accident with 1 or more of them.
If by some freak accident all 4 of us die at once (at a bachelor party or something), I trust my heirs' competency to find someone who can guide them through it. I specify more than 1 because while I trust all the technical advisers, shit like gambling addiction can happen that I don't know about.
In return, I'm written in to help with similar circumstances for them.
The hard part is setting this up, but now it's just an annual email.
Indeed, it’s an interesting topic and always makes me a bit uneasy to think about it. Especially as a technical person where there’s credentials, keys, wallets all over the place.
I wish more companies would think about that and solve this in some way. 1Password could for example print out some instructions and have a support number to call listed directly there for someone who finds this document.
If you were worried about someone getting the password from your will before your death, you could use Shamir's secret sharing algorithm to spread a password among friends and relatives with instructions to not use it until after your death, so that some number of them have to agree to unlock it together.
BitWarden (and possibly other password managers) has a mechanism where you can specify people that can take over and view your credentials in the event of your untimely demise. Probably isn’t an immediate process or anything, but gives me a lot of peace of mind.
It's always heartbreaking to know parents had to deliver the news of a Childs passing. I hope they find peace and healing someday. Much love Jonathan (Zandar) Mott, you made the internet and the world better than you found it.
A bit off-topic - Reminds me of when I first stumbled upon Shamus Young's blog [1]. Someone on HN linked to it, and due to me being a gamer I was immediately hooked. For the next couple of days I read every article which sounded intriguing and was really happy to finally find a blog which interests me.
But during all of this browsing I never visited the front-page. When I did, I saw the announcement about his death. Turns out he died a month before I found his blog. So far that has been the most tragic death of a person I don't know personally, just because it was so abrupt and eerie.
I remember reading his blog article by article for hours as a kid. I had always wanted to do procgen and other game dev stuff, but never felt like it was accessible enough to approach until I found his step by step series detailing how he built his games and experiments. And all of the thoughts about what makes a game fun or what makes a game a game, the idea that games could be made better by taking a critical look at their stories and their systems and the way those interact, left a deep mark on me and the way I think about experiencing and making games too.
I haven't read his blog in years but to find out he's gone is crushing.
I often wonder how my online friends would find out if I died. In some guilds usually people will go missing for 2 years and then somehow someone hears from their family that they passed away and shares it with the community.
I guess I should compile a list of email addresses that my sister should have access to.
Something similar happened when an buddy of mine died. I think it was his mom who posted on his LiveJournal... hard to remember, that was a long time ago (considering what platform the post was on, haha) ... It was jarring to see what I thought was a post from him, which was uhhh.. well... not. Even more jarring as I read on. Sad stuff. I'm glad there was even such a way to hear about it though. There's no way his family would have gone through and emailed all his contacts or anything.
I took the time to read it. I had never heard of him, and likely would not have shared many of his viewpoints, but my sympathy goes out to his family and loved ones.
If you’re not already aware, I encourage you to read about the bills that governors in Florida and Texas have been creating and passing. I think it challenges anybody (willing to accept that challenge) to choose between identifying as a made-up label and identifying as a human being. The “what” may not be particularly concerning, but the “how” and the “why” probably should raise some eyebrows.
I just find online events of this sort -- the announcement of a death, the nice words that typically follow -- a reminder of how awful we can be to each other while we still draw breath. Like you have to die before anyone can stop being awful to you.
Many years ago, I was part of an online community and some guy died who had been mistreated and banned and they were like "We shall reinstate his account and do this other thing to memorialize him" and I just felt like "Wow, this guy was supposedly your friend. You couldn't have been nicer to him while he was still alive?"
In that case, he committed suicide. I couldn't help but feel like he could have still been alive if they had been nice while he still drew breath and it just infuriated me.
It's an interesting "tech" moment when something like this happens. It's worth pondering the nature of mortality and how the technology we delve into relates to that. Like another commenter said, how will my online acquaintances learn about it if I were to suddenly die unexpectedly? Would it be years? Would a family member manage to make a post or two on various stuff my computers are still signed into? Maybe it's worth planning ahead for, even. Who knows. Definitely an interesting (and sad) thing to see IMO and certainly conjures some thoughts...
It's trivial to pull heart strings by posting this stuff.
But we've had over two decades of people dying on blogs and social media and it's exploded now in some sort of weird graph with age and usage increasing online.
Being so common at this stage it's a fair question, was this person one of our own?
Or what in particular about this situation is interesting?
I mean, not everyone is going to find it interesting (and I already explained something in particular that's interesting about it -- the intersection of tech and mortality).
it's fine to be interested in politics and it's fine to sell tickets. It's fine to buy tickets. But if you bought tickets, what's wrong with telling comedians to stick to jokes?
You are free to stop buying tickets (to this free blog?) Ex-fans can be confused about social debts that don't exists and presumably stem from past transactions.
A 48 year old who lived with his parents and died in his sleep without his father expressing extreme shock and trauma? I'm guessing his weight was not really the issue.
Hard to really express shock and trauma over a blog post. "Over the weekend" also means there was at least 3 days between his passing and this post. Not enough time to full grieve for a child but enough that the worst parts of the grieving will pass.
It's an odd angle to tackle. How are you supposed to express sorrow in a blog post?
Respectfully, I don't like to pry into the why's and how's of the deceased, especially on the internet. If the family didn't feel comfortable giving out that information, I will respect that decision.
I'm under a loose pseudonym so I can empathize wanting to keep some sense of privacy on the public web.
It makes me wonder how long all of our online presences will remain after we're gone. Personal blogs/websites will go down and large companies like GitHub & social media will yield to newer competitors. Archive.org is probably the longest living publicly available archive of these profiles but who knows how long that will exist for either. Like countless other human lives, at some point there will be no evidence left that we were even here at all. "All those [profiles] will be lost in time, like tears in rain."