Vicarious Immortality 2.0, thanks to the internet.

Randomed by Rituraj / at 7:18 PM / /

Most of us fear death. The reasons vary from fear of pain, fear of unfinished business or just plain instinctive need for self-preservation. While many of us merely wish to survive without any hassles and die peacefully when the time comes, there is an increasingly large number of humans who want to leave some kind of mark before dying. Some way by which they can be remembered by the world. Or some way to keep affecting the world in their absence.

The traditional way of doing this is rather painstaking and requires lot of effort. The most widely used and perhaps requiring immense amount of investment (time & money) is children. People believe in transferring knowledge through offsprings who then go on ahead to do the same. What we know today is essentially the result of the contributions of numerous generations. In a way we all have already achieved vicarious immortality. However, most of it is limited to offsprings. Other modes through which some have achieved immortality is through books, art etc. Although they are easy to destroy and hard to expose to a larger population with small amount of effort. But now there is a new means at our disposal to achieve immortality within minutes - The Internet.

Any content I create on the internet is almost indestructible and easily accessible to a huge number of people. One can easily achieve vicarious immortality with the help of a few blog posts. I mean, who knows when someone will read some of my blog posts or use an open source software that I contributed to. It can continue to affect the world for many years after my death.

Although this does put me under pressure. When I have such an awesome tool at my disposal it will be an utter waste for me to waste even a second or an idea by not working toward creating something that could help me achieve VI2.0. I am constantly haunted by the possibility of ignoring some idea that I can easily propagate into the future due to a small oversight.

For some people the internet also means that a record of their lives in the form of facebook, twitter and blog posts will continue to exist for future generations to peek into and learn. To be able to share one's life so easily with others now and in the future brings an innate sense of peace and company.