As a man in my mid-30s in the year 2015, I spend the bulk of my life diligently and repeatedly carrying out one simple task – ignoring the prospect of my inevitable death. It’s quite easy, partly because I don’t appear to be imminently approaching my demise, but mainly because I’ve successfully barricaded myself inside an impenetrable fort of shiny distractions.
If I notice a story about a freak accident that resulted in a tragic loss of life, I bury my head in Netflix for a bit. When I realise that I'm incrementally growing closer to the average age of people mentioned in obituaries, I stab a bunch of strangers on Assassin's Creed video game until the tightness in my chest goes away. And if I'm struck by a sudden awareness that the human body is a fragile, error-strewn thing, and that I could easily be taken out by a plane or a car or a virus or an exploding oven or the accidental consumption of raw camel's milk without so much as a second's notice? Well, I hammer out a load of unfunny fart jokes on Twitter. There, there. Everything's okay. Everything's okay.
But now, upsettingly, these distractions are turning against us. In what might eventually become a good idea, but currently seems like the worst one yet, social media has started to remind us of our own mortality. Facebook has introduced a feature that lets you choose who will take control of your account once you're dead.
It’s all done so breezily. Right there in the security settings, you’ll find a bar that allows you to nominate a “legacy contact”. “A legacy contact is someone who you choose to manage your account after you pass away,” chirps Facebook. “They’ll be able to do things like pin a post on your Timeline, respond to new friend requests and update your profile picture.”
Now, there’s a clear logic to this move. Friends of mine with family members who died unexpectedly have mentioned the struggle of knowing what to do about their Facebook pages, which can become anything from loving memorials to upsetting reminders of the people they’ve lost. In this respect, being able to hand over the whole thing to a friend or relative should help to ease some of the pain and confusion that death invariably stirs up.
That said, actually nominating a legacy contact is harder than it looks, not least because of its brutal implication. The simple fact that it exists at all is a stark reminder that life is finite. Which is such a bummer. Facebook isn’t the place to go to learn that you’re going to die.
It's like Instagram interrupting your feed of rainbows and dinners to tell you that you will perish in a state of impoverished misery unless you immediately start paying 30 per cent of your monthly earnings into a private pension fund.
So, who to nominate? I’d feel weird giving the responsibility to my wife or my son , because they’d already be exhausted by all the harrowing obligations that death entails. My mum? She has been on Facebook for three years and still hasn’t worked out how to upload a photo of herself, so that’s a no, too. My brother? Given the opportunity to update my profile picture – even in the immediate aftermath of my tragic death – he’d almost certainly dig out a photo in which I’m simultaneously chewing and blinking. I refuse to be Milibanded , even in death, so he’s out.
To its credit, Facebook saw this conundrum coming, which is why it has introduced a box for you to tick if you want your account to be deleted permanently following your death. This is, objectively, the best idea of all, because – as the excruciating social media archive app Timehop demonstrates on a daily basis – you will grow to become abjectly mortified by everything you did in your 20s. Do you want your lasting gift to the world to be a blurry photo of you wearing a horrible nylon shirt and drinking an elaborate cocktail in an obnoxiously ironic way? No, of course you don’t.
But, at the same time, this is a hard button to click. It means erasing yourself. It means telling the world that, ultimately, you think you’re insignificant. Of course, if you really thought that, you wouldn’t be on social media in the first place, since social media is basically a vehicle for you to remind people again and again and again that you exist.
Perhaps the best bet would be to put the keys to my Facebook page up for auction. Whoever bids the most, and promises to pay upfront for the privilege, will gain full control of it in perpetuity. Any huge corporations who want to spread their message of multinational capitalism to 480 grieving users, do get in touch. The late Stuart Heritage, in association with GlaxoSmithKline. It has a nice ring, doesn’t it?
(Guardian syndication)