If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead

Statistically speaking, that is. But more on that later.

Before we really get started, a warning: This is going to get heavy, so if you're prone to anxiety or existential dread, maybe now's the time to turn back.

Death has really been on my mind lately. Some days it's all I can think about, but that's kind of hard to avoid when you've lost as many family members recently as you can count on your right hand. Within about a year, I lost two grandparents to just time, two uncles prematurely to cancer, and a third uncle in a freak accident decades before his time should have come. That's not even the scary part. The scary part is looking at the fingers on my left hand that I know I'm about to count with. Likewise, of course, is the realization that at some point I'm the one that will be counted.

Life is a hundred mile per hour ride; death is the concrete wall we can see in our way. We can't steer away and can't slow down; the collision is unavoidable. Regardless of what you believe is on the other side of the wall, once we hit it, that's the end of our story here. Every single thing we spend our lives learning about about becomes irrelevant in an instant. There will no longer be any way to interact with anything on Earth. That thought terrifies me. Everyone I care about, or have even met, will be out of my reach. Everything that I enjoy having, watching or doing will disappear. I'll just be gone. Forever.

I can't even tell how far away the wall is, not that I want to know the exact distance. Just knowing that I can't avoid it is frightening enough, thank you very much. I have some number of years left, and let's just leave it at that. Please forgive the momentary tangent, but why years? Well, we measure time in years because it's a conveniently sized number for our lifetimes. We say things like, "I'm thirty six years old" or "I've been working here for nine years" because it's easy to conceptualize life sized chunks. Even though it may be more precise, it's wholly impractical to tell you that I'm thirteen thousand days old.

And this leads into why I'm already dead if you're reading this. Earth doesn't measure time in years because that would be like us measuring in seconds. Imagine telling your interviewer that you've been at your previous job for two hundred, eighty four million seconds. A second comes and goes in your life as fast as a human comes and goes on Earth's scale. If I share this post to all of my friends and family, I may get fifty people to read it in my lifetime. The Internet is likely to be around for at least a thousand years after I'm gone; hundreds of people will stumble on this post by accident in that time. Odds are, you're one of the latter category. What is the far future like? I wonder what new invention shaped your way of life like the internet shaped mine.

That's the thing that bothers me most about death. Yeah, it boils down to an extreme case of FOMO (that is, the "fear of missing out," for those of you reading this long after that meme has died). Way too much stuff is going to happen after I die that I don't want to miss. There's a whole heap of the obvious, like upcoming championships, elections, iPhones and anime series. I also want to know how my kids' lives turn out, and their kids if they have them, and so on. Beyond that, the countries as we know them now are going to change, it's just questions of when and how. Given enough time, humans will eventually branch out to other planets, maybe other solar systems. Among other calamities, we'll need to find ways to survive our galaxy colliding with Andromeda.

All those events, from the next Olympic Games to the dying gasps of our galaxy, will take trillions of years to unfold. That's time on a scale that I can't even begin to comprehend, time even the Earth couldn't count on its scale. The only way I can perceive time passing is to experience it. When I die, that experience stops, but everything else goes on. Whenever my end comes, from my perspective, that incalculable span of eons will all happen at once.

The last light in the universe extinguishes in the very same moment that I close my eyes for the last time.