4 ms·

That's a shame that you think that. Our digital footprints are the maps of our lives. I will happily give every password I own to a website that scrapes all the

• magic_beans 9y ago
  "I love re-reading notebooks from elementary school not for the content, but for the little scribblings I did in the margins." But when you're dead, there's no guarantee your descendants or next of kin will have any interest whatsoever in the minutia of your digital life.
  • zimpenfish 9y ago
    > there's no guarantee your descendants or next of kin will have any interest whatsoever in the minutia of your digital life. Easy to fix - leave a note telling them you have huge wealth hidden away and the only way to find is it to solve the puzzles sprinkled throughout the minutia of your digital life.
    • EADGBE 9y ago
      The worst kind of betrayal is the kind you inflict after your own death.
• fsloth 9y ago
  'I think my loved ones would value opening up an app and saying "What was jbob doing on this day 2 years ago..."' Having in recent years lost more than one close relatives - no, I don't really need. I wouldn't do this even if I could. If you want to be there for your loved ones be there today. Instead of coming up with a novel data vault scheme come up with a way to delight them tomorrow, when you are alive. I love nerding about but if one is dealing with serious things like relationships, I would focus on pre-death interactions rather than post death mausoleums.
  • Mantipath 9y ago
    In life it's easy to be uninterested in your Dad's thousand-hour audio archive of him presiding over the Civic Plumbing Council of Akron, Ohio. Listening to that while he's alive would be a waste of your irreplaceable shared time on Earth, right? It's just his job. While your Dad is alive you should go talk to him on subjects he cares about. After he dies, though, if there happens to be an archive of your father joking around with, remonstrating, and otherwise being himself with the people who made up half of the social context for his waking life, year after year, that might be valuable to you. It only has value in the right emotional context, of course, perhaps when you reach the age he was when the recordings were made. You can measure your daily self against the daily self your father created and inhabited. An existential crisis might create a desire for that comparison, or perhaps you'll find yourself missing him and realize that family records don't show who he was in the world at large. If your father is careless with that information you don't have that opportunity. If you are careless with your equivalent of that information your heirs won't have that opportunity.
    • pasabagi 9y ago
      As somebody who spent wholly too much time on the dead, honestly, it's not worth it. Poring through old things gives you a thin kind of happiness, but prolongs your grief. When people die, information is inevitably lost - an awful lot of it. The real loss is that what they leave behind, including your memories, are very shallow in comparison to who they were. Trying to make up for essential shallowness by just collecting more data is like trying to quench your thirst by drinking spit. When I die, I hope I am forgotten - because honestly, grief is shit, and the dead neither appreciate it, nor wanted it before they died. People can't be measured, and their lasting forms aren't them in any case - they are just text, video, photographs.
      • fsloth 9y ago
        "When I die, I hope I am forgotten" On the other hand, now, that's bleak. I would view that human relationships are like strings that connect human beings. Grief of loss is the process of cutting those strings - one-by-one - and it hurts like hell. Because, if the relationship was an important one - I think it's supposed to. And after the grief has done it's job the living move on. After the grief has done it's job, memories become bitter sweet. There are always complications, of course, and for example unresolved issues make it difficult to let go. We begin to die the day we are born. It's only a matter of time, really. All of us are mortally ill of a condition called life. Every precious relationship must end in time. There is a zen-story about this. A wise man was asked what was happiness? He answered, a man is born, a son is born, a grandson is born. Man dies, son dies, grandson dies. It sounds horrible the first time you hear it, but then you realize it nailed it completely - any other order would be worse, and having no children would be even sadder.