By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff
Facebook is a monument to the dead and dying. There are an estimated 30 million accounts for deceased users, and an analysis by University of Oxford researchers suggests that the dead will outnumber the living on the social media platform by 2070. These “ghost accounts” are a new phenomenon in the sense that they are some of the first digital memorials, whether intentional or not, but they are also a modern response to an ancient longing.
Since the dawn of humanity, people have been obsessed with memory. That may be an anachronistic view, reading modern society’s ideals and neuroses back on the Neolithic Age. In a perfect, unbiased world — which does not, and can never, exist — people would look back on ancient history and say that there’s no possible way to know what they were thinking when they painted on their cave walls.
But humans are emotional and biased, and likely always have been, so it’s only natural to guess at what they felt.
There are 2,000 handprints painted on the rock at Cueva de las Manos, which probably represent more than 800 artists. Logically, we don’t know if religion, culture, boredom or the simple desire to create led to these paintings, but we do know that they feel like voices crying out across millennia.
“I lived. Don’t forget that I lived,” they seem to say, but only the echo remains. Who they were beyond that handprint is lost to time.
Hop across the ocean and skip forward a few thousand years, and humanity was still driven to mark its presence. There are hundreds of instances of graffiti around Pompeii, left by the Romans who visited, worked and lived within the city. Today, it’s common to see something like “Ted was here” carved into a park bench, and it was the same back then — just in Latin.
“We two dear men, friends forever, were here. If you want to know our names, they are Gaius and Aulus,” is scrawled into the stone of a thermopolium, a Roman fast-food joint.
Maybe these ordinary folk thought about preserving their memory in stone, or maybe that desire went unspoken, propelling them forward without the presence of mind to wonder why. Regardless, there is a kinship — a shared experience — between the Roman soldier and the teenager posting selfies. They put a part of themselves into the world in the hopes of being noticed and remembered. It could be said that both acts are inherently egotistical and, moreover, that social media has created an insatiable need for recognition and validation in every aspect of life that would be entirely foreign to a Roman. Still, is social media any more vain than commissioning a bust or headstone or writing a personal essay in a local newspaper?
To be human is to be forgotten, and to fight against that inevitability until the last breath — and beyond. Facebook pages, blogs and TikToks are just another example of the ancient tradition of clinging to immortality and failing.
The ironic truth is that no matter how much we try to immortalize the outline of who we are, in the end, it’s only the unnoticed substance that remains. Every social media post will eventually be buried under the onslaught of new content, our faces and brunches forgotten, and eventually — unless we’re very lucky — even our best graffiti and finger paintings will erode.
What remains are the parts of ourselves we gave to others without thinking. Maybe your daughter laughs like you, and you laugh like your father, and he laughs like your grandmother, and on and on back so many generations that we’ve lost count. Perhaps you taught your friend how to bake, and she taught her nephew, and so 100 years from now, a person you will never know bakes because you taught them, in a way. That is the only achievable immortality.
Don’t be ashamed, and don’t judge. Write your name in wet cement or post a vacation pic on Instagram; there’s no harm in wanting a life after death. Just remember that long after you’re gone, though your digital legacy may still be floating around the cloud, you will only truly live on through the people you loved.
