Random thoughts on a Haunted Existance

Its a weird time to be alive.

Maybe everyone feels this no matter their age, lifestage or when they lived, but somehow I feel its weight more. As a middle aged woman who came of age just before the internet became a thing and who is likely to live past the singularity, but probably not by much, I feel the burden of history, and fear of the future. I have probably lived about half my life now, and menopause is approaching. My chances of giving new life are diminishing, and those who I have given life to are starting to reach adulthood.

They say people die twice, once corporeally when their brain is dead and their hearts stop beating, and again, when they are forgotten. Some people never die in this latter sense. Some stay in suspended animation until some diligent researcher uncovers their existence. We, the facebook, instagram, twitter generation can never die, we will just lie dormant, waiting to be resurrected on someone else's whim.

I dislike photographs of myself in general. Some indigenous Americans believe that a photograph steals your soul. I can understand that. There is something quite creepy about being frozen in a moment of time. Perhaps those who feature in photographs more frequently lose this feeling, but for me, a very infrequent photographic subject, they place me in situations - frozen, hanging there without context. Where no-one else seeing the photograph can understand the context.... the significance of the red jumper, where I got the small bruise on my arm, why I chose the pale fusia lipstick that day. The camera may not lie, but neither does it tell the whole story.

Occasionally I read the facebooks of friends and family who are deceased. It scares me that someone may read mine after I am no longer around to comment. Sometimes I narcissistically read my own - wondering what someone who never knew me would make of me, wondering what role I will play when I can be recreated as my facebook persona, and if it would be a better person than the person I actually am. I guess it lies somewhere between the person that I am, the person I wish to be and the person other people expect me to be, all swirling as a triad - sometimes more of me, sometimes more of my hopes and sometimes more what is expected of me.

My children cannot conceive of life without the internet, life back in the olden days when we shared music by bootleg tapes; telephoned the houses of our friends parents and rented videos from a store seems bizarre. For them, instant connection is all, they have a digital life that lives without their bodies ever really being present. One which existed before even they did when I uploaded their scan photos for posterity.

We are now eternal, we cannot die, but one day we will stop changing, stop being able to alter our life course and become someone else's subject. Previously, at least for most of us, that would have been limited to those who cared about us...our family and friends - those with whom we had shared a personal connection. In the future, our digital histories live on publically.

Perhaps it is not death we should fear, but a lack of it.