Once or twice each year, while deleting old voice mail messages, I take a moment to listen to one I’ll never get rid of: a Christmas greeting from an uncle who died just months later. Hearing his voice brightens my day, though it can also set me on a melancholic path. If not for my first bout of Covid-19, I would have been spending Christmas with him that year. Instead, I put off my trip; we never saw each other again, and never will.
We now depend so much on technology that it has made our favorite devices and platforms, and the traces we leave on them, an unavoidable part of how we experience death. There was a time when the archive of an ordinary person’s living years — the ephemera we would keep to remember them by — might have included just a few postcards and letters. Then came photographs and home videos. Then email exchanges and phone messages. Eventually social media platforms would make some of those traces public ones, trails of posts on zombie accounts that go on living long after their maker has ceased logging in. But even these had their own halo of privacy: Most would hold little significance to anyone who didn’t know the departed and feel moved to retrace their digital footprints.
A few months ago, though, it occurred to me that something had shifted. Whatever idle time I spent on TikTok or Instagram, I realized, was being haunted by an unsettling new meme format. A representative post might feature something like a video of a young man diving from a cliff, jumping on a trampoline or lifting weights, or maybe a still photograph of a young woman sunbathing on a beach, or two children playing. If music had been added, it would be either very somber or very upbeat, emphasizing the joy of the moment or the painful aftermath that was about to be revealed. The explication of that pain always took the form of a blunt bit of text sitting atop the image:
“She doesn’t know it yet but this will be her last video with her little sister.”
“Laughing because I thought he was incredibly uncoordinated in this move, not because he was 2 months away from a terminal diagnosis.”
“He doesn’t know it yet, but he will become completely paralyzed in less than 3 hours. This will be his last morning stretch.”
There is no way to share grief without seeking someone’s attention.
My initial reaction was probably not what the posters of such memes had in mind. At first, the videos struck me as trite, even morbid — desperate dispatches from a generation incapable of tamping down its urge to post through every last one of life’s twists and turns. This less-than-charitable reading probably had a lot to do with the clash, in these videos, between the medium and the message — the gulf between the visual language of TikTok memes, which are so often trivial or silly, and the kind of life-altering tragedies they were being used to capture.
But I quickly came to understand the posts another way. Since at least June 2007, when the first iPhone went on sale, we have been traveling steadily toward the moment when our ability to document everything, and our incentives for doing so, would collide with our most profound human experiences and completely reshape how we cope with them. The basic mechanics of this may have been best described by the comedian Norm Macdonald, whose May 2015 appearance on “The Late Show With David Letterman” included a joke about how his great-grandfather had been photographed just once. “Every guy had one picture back then,” he told the crowd. “In the future, of course, it’ll be different. Fifty years from now, people will be going, like: ‘You want to see 100,000 pictures of my great-grandfather? I got ’em right here! Plus everything he did every day of his life.’”
That was 10 years ago, when the churn of the internet was much slower. Since then, smartphone cameras have become only more ubiquitous, as have platforms for sharing the images they capture. More and more of us experience the world in part by documenting its effect on us — not just the special moments we once memorialized by lugging out Polaroid cameras and VHS camcorders but also the most mundane and routine aspects of our everyday lives.
And when tragedy strikes — when some taken-for-granted element of our existence is ripped away from us — it is the memory of what was once mundane that takes on special resonance. Something as simple as a voice mail message reminds us of how good we had it. An unmailed letter or a pair of shoes left sitting by the door takes on a magical quality precisely because it should be ordinary, because it would still be ordinary if its owner were still there. Imbuing images with this kind of magic seems to be similarly consoling to those TikTok and Instagram users who comment on tragedy memes. Videos about a loved one lost to drunken driving invite sympathy from viewers who went through something similar; posts about paralysis invite words of kindness and encouragement. For better or worse, this is now a space where people give voice to their feelings of loss.
It’s very likely that each of us will, in time, become the sole possessor of images like these — not just memories, but hard documentary evidence of the ordinary moment just before some irrevocable reversal of fortune. Accordingly, each of us will need to decide whether to become a keeper of this unfathomable document or a curator of it, as so many on social media have chosen. Both choices seem natural enough. The possibility that any of these tragedy memes are motivated by clout-chasing or engagement-seeking feels moot, given how ordinary clout-chasing and engagement-seeking have become. Besides, there is no way to share grief without seeking someone’s attention. Invariably, people will flip through the chronological photo libraries on their phones and feel a need to communicate the starkness of the before and the after: One morning a smiling young person is making silly videos, and by the next frame in the grid, everything is unimaginably different.
There is still something off-putting, to me, about the way these images aestheticize grief, penning it into the rigid format of a meme — but this has less to do with the users than with the platforms themselves. Uncomfortable expressions of emotion, including many considered gauche, morbid or insensitive, have been associated with loss for as long as tragedy has been a social experience. What has not been a factor, until recently, is the influence of algorithms and data that sort through human expression to incentivize its most seamlessly engaging forms, coaxing users to refine everything from the music in the background of their posts to the precise words on the screen, training us how to frame our most profound losses in such a way that they will attract, and make misty, as many eyes as they are able.
Like most social media trends, this one will likely pass soon enough. Eventually the incentives that drive so many to post so often may shift, diminishing the lure of meme formats like this one. But even in the absence of the platforms and the algorithms, we will still be left to decide how much evidence of our own existence we can tolerate and how much we can bear having shared. One day, we will each have to live with the archives that we are making for ourselves — monuments dedicated to the spectacularly mundane lives we have lived, however consoling or discomforting they may prove in the end.
Joshua Hunt is a GQ correspondent and a regular contributor to the magazine. He last wrote about how Americans turn accused killers into folk heroes. He lives in Tokyo.
Source photographs for illustration above: Janina Steinmetz/Getty Images; Mike Powell/Getty Images; Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images; Joan Corominas/Focus Pixel, via Getty Images; Alina Rudya/Bell Collective, via Getty Images.
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