How to Die Digitally

There is the person who lives the day, and there is the person the day becomes online.

One gets tired, changes his mind, misunderstands something, has an ordinary conversation, spends an afternoon on work that goes nowhere. The other has a biography. A photograph chosen from several. A description of what he does, written to make someone understand quickly why he matters.

They share a name. They do not have quite the same life.

I wonder what would happen if I stopped maintaining mine.

Living now includes choosing what reaches this second person. The achievement, perhaps, with less of the confusion that preceded it. The opinion after we have found a sharper way to phrase it. Even vulnerability can arrive carefully edited, intimate enough to feel honest, contained enough to remain presentable.

There are reasons to do it. Work. Recognition. Friendship. An audience for something we care about. Sometimes simply the reassurance that somebody noticed.

Real work is shared there. Real friendships happen there. And I choose how to appear away from the screen too. But a profile can keep introducing me after I have left the conversation. It can repeat a sentence long after I have changed my mind.

Other people can begin editing that person as well. A screenshot travels without the conversation around it. An old statement reaches an audience it was never written for. Before saying anything, a person can begin preparing for the least generous reading it might receive. The public version becomes safer, more controlled, harder to recognize as someone still learning how to think.

Yet fear is only one reason to wonder about leaving. Approval can keep a person occupied too. Even a well-liked version of you needs time to maintain.

I imagine removing the accounts, the biographies, the pages through which a stranger can assemble an explanation of me. I imagine the more complete disappearance that deletion alone may not accomplish. No searchable public version waiting to speak on my behalf.

Would I feel relief? Would I miss the archive? Would I still want to know whether anyone had noticed I was gone?

Seneca’s How to Die keeps the ending in view while there is still a life to change. I keep looking at a version of myself I could let die. He has my name, my photograph, a biography that knows what to say before I do. I wonder what it would feel like to outlive him.

I could miss what I had removed. I could discover that some of it had mattered more than I admitted, or that I had spent years maintaining something I no longer wanted.

Before deciding whether to remove this version of myself, can I understand what I believe would die with it?

My work would still have happened. What I learned would still be mine. But I would have removed some of the ways other people recognize those things, and perhaps some of the ways I reassure myself that they count.

How much of the life I want requires being known? How much requires being close to particular people? And when did I begin treating those as the same need?

I have not disappeared. I am trying to imagine the first ordinary morning afterward. Still here, with a day to live, and less of it already promised to the person I have taught the internet to expect.