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Comment by sabmalik | Hacker News Reader

I am not great with words, please accept my apologies.

When I say "big deal", I meant it more like talking about homosexuality is now less of a "big deal" then it was back in the day. I am not saying that the loss itself is not a big deal, just talking about it shouldn't be.

Maybe, if we live in a society where it's easy to talk about death then maybe the grieving process would become easier too. Right now, people tend to act weird around people who has just lost someone (I have experienced that first hand), the people who are suffering the loss feel like they have to "stay strong" and not show their emotions to others because they don't want to be a burden. It's a vicious cycle which we can break by just talking about it.

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I agree that it should be easier to talk about death. And tech really isn't the issue there -- unless the tech is keeping us in a cocoon.

Back when the U.S. Civil War happened, photography was still new. Some folks thought that the new tech would finally wake people up to the horrors of war.

Didn't work out like that. People already knew the horrors of war and dying. You could run a picture of ten thousand people dead on a battlefield and while people felt the severe pain of that loss -- it was not horrifying to them. They lived with it everyday. (In fact, some early uses of photography was taking pictures of the recently dead. So you could remember them.)

I don't know. I may feel completely different about all of this when it comes my turn. I am really glad that the voices of people about to be silenced forever can be heard. In fact I think it's such a special thing that it really shouldn't appear next to an ad for Spacely's Space Sprockets.

We should have open and honest dialogues about death, yes. That doesn't mean that we should think of death in the same way as we might think of buying a newspaper. There's a categorically different thing going on here, regardless of any extraneous baggage that anybody might carry into the discussion.

What you described above, the "productization" of someone's death, is part of a bigger problem, where people are isolated from each other by technology and by a dehumanizing (and uncoincidentally technophilic) culture that turns people into appointments or tasks or problems to be solved or opportunities to make money or anything and everything more convenient and less difficult than, well, people. I could go on and on naming examples, but I think HN itself does a well enough job by self-selecting perfect examples to the front page every day. You're 51, I'm only 31, so you obviously have a lot more life experience than me (almost twice as much). But I think the fact that I'm already weary and wary of pretty much everyone and everything around me, including everyone and everything at HN, probably says something about modern suburban American culture.

Not to derail the conversation but this whole discussion on "productization" reminded me of the plot line of a Black Mirror episode. When I originally watched it I found it mostly absurd but now in the context of this thread it makes a whole lot of sense.

Here is the episode I am referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back_(Black_Mirror)

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