I will die.
I write for you, whoever you are. We might be living, together, now, but as time passes, that becomes increasingly unlikely.
This writing is for those of you who outlive me and those of you who inherit the earth after my generation’s passing. This is a dead man’s vision.
In the beginning of the 21st century, we anticipated big changes. Our population would be getting older in the aggregate, and the rate of population growth was forecast to change. We sometimes called it the demographic transition. We mostly spoke about it in terms of our social security. Few anticipated the second-order effects.
The demographic transition will have an interesting effect: the student body will shrink in relation to the total population. In history, we’ve had nice margins in this critical endeavor of education. There have been more learners than teachers due to population growth.
People die. If we know anything of value, we can “pass the baton” to the next generation before our deaths. We have been on “easy mode” this whole time.
The transmission of worthwhile knowledge from generation to generation is going to fundamentally change, as it has before. There will be an urgency never before felt.
The world has known libraries, and libraries are cool. In addition to being cool, they are “…antidotes to fanaticism, temples of pluralism, where books that contradict one another sit peacefully side by side.” Libraries are full of ghosts who had “…faith that coming generations [would] make use of the contents of those libraries.”
I, while dying, chose to communicate to you, and providence arranged this encounter. And, while living, I learned from the living and the dead. While living, we can learn and teach, but in death, we may only teach.
I’ve been careful to avoid quasi-spiritual language. I know not how you’ll understand it, but we’d made tangible something that we could’ve ignored otherwise.
In the 21st century, we began to notice it gradually. Eventually, our social networks were full of profiles for the deceased. What began as a platform for the living, would in time, become mostly digital time-capsules. For many, this experience, gradual as it was for us, was peculiar. It was all a bit peculiar then, but we’d collectively decided to take up archival work and had some fun doing it. And at no point was a switch flipped per se, but after signing up for “username2378401” and seeing “bob” was last active 43 years and 7 months ago, it really started to sink in. For others, it didn’t really sink in until they saw their own posts turn into a time-capsule in its own right. “Two years ago today…” became “Forty eight years ago today…” and our own memories gradually felt less and less our own. Sometimes, they weren’t even memories anymore. We’d forgotten, and we began to encounter ghosts of our own past while still living. And we understood. And we wept.