4 ms·

I feel really weird about this. It's too late for the person to receive any benefit. They won't know or care. If it's not accurate and you're making stuff up,

I feel really weird about this. It's too late for the person to receive any benefit. They won't know or care. If it's not accurate and you're making stuff up, this feels like a creative writing exercise to make the eulogizers feel good. Like getting a dopamine kick off of someone's macabre death. I don't think I'd like if I knew people would do this to me. Whatever the case, death sucks. Loneliness sucks. We have a lot of problems to solve.

PreInternet01 3y ago
No, I'm not making stuff up, and yes, it's weird. But: if you die, and nobody is around to eulogize you, would you rather be completely forgotten, or have a total stranger think about what happened to you and make a short-and-ultimately-meaningless speech accordingly? For me, it's the latter, but then, I'm biased :)
- krisoft 3y ago
  > if you die, and nobody is around to eulogize you, would you rather be completely forgotten If i die and there is nobody around to eulogize me then I am already forgotten. > or have a total stranger think about what happened to you and make a short-and-ultimately-meaningless speech accordingly I would prefer that not to happen. It feels fake. Of course your time is your time, you spend it as you see it best fit, but haven’t you thought about reaching out to someone old and lonely before they die? That would feel to me much more likely to be meaningfull.
  - lukas099 3y ago
    Is it fake? They put real time and effort into showing up for you.
- noneparticular 3y ago
  Differing perspectives I suppose. It's comforting to me to think that no one would be bothered if tomorrow I dropped dead. I'd actually be somewhat happy if they could just leave my corpse to rot somewhere in a field, or at least be disposed of in a landfill. No funeral, just compacted in the back of a garbage truck and then tossed as refuse. Somewhat a little harsh, but at least I'd rather people worry about the living then fretting about my remains. By the point, I would be beyond caring.
polygamous_bat 3y ago
> It's too late for the person to receive any benefit. They won't know or care. Funerals are rarely for the dead, despite what we tell ourselves they are mostly for the living. The benefit of the program, as I see it, is the reassurance that even if they lost everything tomorrow they will at least have a kind stranger show up to their funeral. I admit it’s not a lot to offer, but I find it to be a small consolation.
- cnasc 3y ago
  Your second point seems to contradict the first
  - 0xEF 3y ago
    Not really but sorta? I don't know that I'd call it contradiction so much as working with limited information. When we are alive, we want to be acknowledged, at the very least. We might think about making arrangements for our stuff after we are gone, or trying to reconnect with someone to say goodbye before it's too late, etc. Knowing that we will die tends to inform some of our behavior when we're alive. Now, we die, and that's that. Maybe we experience something after, maybe we don't. We don't know. There's lots of good guesses out there, some more coherent than others, but even if we lean toward oblivion, we cannot conceive of it, of non-existence. So, we don't focus on that part. It's not a useful thing to examine and results in crisis for some. Instead, we focus on life, because that is knowable to a degree. Funerals are as much for the living as they are for the dead who were previously alive. We die knowing, or hoping maybe, that we will get acknowledgement that yes, we existed, after we pass, even if we do not directly experience it.
    - card_zero 3y ago
      It's valid to want things (for) after you're dead and no longer exist. It's an awkward concept, probably because you have to draw a line somewhere or else we'd be faced with extrapolating the wishes of millennia of dead people into the future, and crippled by trying to be respectful to what it seems they would have wanted but what they shouldn't really have any say over. They shouldn't have any say over stuff they're not involved in and don't understand (because they're dead). But being involved in stuff and understanding stuff doesn't have to cease exactly when you die and cease to function, it can be extrapolated beyond that a bit, based on what the person said back when they existed. Hence, last wills. Which largely get ignored and revised, and mostly only serve to distribute property, but a dead person's last wishes still do get respected, a bit, sometimes, and should be, because people are basically a bunch of ideas and their last wishes after death are ideas too.
wolverine876 3y ago
> It's too late for the person to receive any benefit. They won't know or care. Every human culture ever, afaik, has burial and death rituals. I don't suppose they are useless.

PreInternet01 3y ago

No, I'm not making stuff up, and yes, it's weird. But: if you die, and nobody is around to eulogize you, would you rather be completely forgotten, or have a total stranger think about what happened to you and make a short-and-ultimately-meaningless speech accordingly? For me, it's the latter, but then, I'm biased :)

krisoft 3y ago
> if you die, and nobody is around to eulogize you, would you rather be completely forgotten If i die and there is nobody around to eulogize me then I am already forgotten. > or have a total stranger think about what happened to you and make a short-and-ultimately-meaningless speech accordingly I would prefer that not to happen. It feels fake. Of course your time is your time, you spend it as you see it best fit, but haven’t you thought about reaching out to someone old and lonely before they die? That would feel to me much more likely to be meaningfull.
- lukas099 3y ago
  Is it fake? They put real time and effort into showing up for you.
noneparticular 3y ago
Differing perspectives I suppose. It's comforting to me to think that no one would be bothered if tomorrow I dropped dead. I'd actually be somewhat happy if they could just leave my corpse to rot somewhere in a field, or at least be disposed of in a landfill. No funeral, just compacted in the back of a garbage truck and then tossed as refuse. Somewhat a little harsh, but at least I'd rather people worry about the living then fretting about my remains. By the point, I would be beyond caring.

polygamous_bat 3y ago

> It's too late for the person to receive any benefit. They won't know or care. Funerals are rarely for the dead, despite what we tell ourselves they are mostly for the living. The benefit of the program, as I see it, is the reassurance that even if they lost everything tomorrow they will at least have a kind stranger show up to their funeral. I admit it’s not a lot to offer, but I find it to be a small consolation.

cnasc 3y ago
Your second point seems to contradict the first
- 0xEF 3y ago
  Not really but sorta? I don't know that I'd call it contradiction so much as working with limited information. When we are alive, we want to be acknowledged, at the very least. We might think about making arrangements for our stuff after we are gone, or trying to reconnect with someone to say goodbye before it's too late, etc. Knowing that we will die tends to inform some of our behavior when we're alive. Now, we die, and that's that. Maybe we experience something after, maybe we don't. We don't know. There's lots of good guesses out there, some more coherent than others, but even if we lean toward oblivion, we cannot conceive of it, of non-existence. So, we don't focus on that part. It's not a useful thing to examine and results in crisis for some. Instead, we focus on life, because that is knowable to a degree. Funerals are as much for the living as they are for the dead who were previously alive. We die knowing, or hoping maybe, that we will get acknowledgement that yes, we existed, after we pass, even if we do not directly experience it.
  - card_zero 3y ago
    It's valid to want things (for) after you're dead and no longer exist. It's an awkward concept, probably because you have to draw a line somewhere or else we'd be faced with extrapolating the wishes of millennia of dead people into the future, and crippled by trying to be respectful to what it seems they would have wanted but what they shouldn't really have any say over. They shouldn't have any say over stuff they're not involved in and don't understand (because they're dead). But being involved in stuff and understanding stuff doesn't have to cease exactly when you die and cease to function, it can be extrapolated beyond that a bit, based on what the person said back when they existed. Hence, last wills. Which largely get ignored and revised, and mostly only serve to distribute property, but a dead person's last wishes still do get respected, a bit, sometimes, and should be, because people are basically a bunch of ideas and their last wishes after death are ideas too.

wolverine876 3y ago

> It's too late for the person to receive any benefit. They won't know or care. Every human culture ever, afaik, has burial and death rituals. I don't suppose they are useless.