So Sad, Part II

Jason Kottke: Death in the celebrity age

Fifty years ago, to be famous you had to be a politician, a movie star, a sports star, a general/admiral, a writer, a musician, a TV star, or rich. These days, we have many more popular sports, more sports teams, more movies are being made, there are 2-3 orders of magnitude more TV channels and programs, more music, more musical genres, more books are being written, and there’s more rich people. Plus, these days people routinely become famous for appearing in advertising, designing things, being good cooks, yammering away on the internet, etc. etc…

Chances are in 15-20 years, someone famous whose work you enjoyed or whom you admired or who had a huge influence on who you are as a person will die each day…and probably even more than one a day. And that’s just you…many other famous people will have died that day who mean something to other people. Will we all just be in a constant state of mourning? Will the NY Times national obituary section swell to 30 pages a day?

Mr. Kottke wrote this nearly four years ago to the day, and I think we’re already reaching the saturation point that was supposed to be decades off. It’s really apparent on Twitter, where sadness is constantly churning out more results since you started searching, if you can bear to refresh to see them. Creators and doers of the future will have to work extra-hard to somehow stay happy enough to keep creating and doing, amongst all these tears and this depression and all of this death. Dealing with constant ephemeral expiration notices will be a key challenge in our evolution as a species in the 21st Century. For now, the market value of a condolence is right around that of a penny-stock, and that has a inevitable, negative and numbing effect in regards to the deaths of people you actually know.

In case you haven’t heard, actress Farrah Fawcett and Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald (the cancer doctor who operated on herself in Antarctica) died today. So sad.

UPDATE: Michael Jackson too.