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> However industrial societies are very efficient so I don't know what you mean by "can’t pivot fast enough to handling".

I wonder how social norms could change if faced with a very large number of such cases. Perhaps people will relax social norms around mourning. Like, eventually becoming acceptable to have unclaimed bodies bagged and left in the curb to be collected by the same truck that collects municipal solid waste, to be landfilled.

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Slightly less of a change, but something like this has happened before when the existing funeral system was overwhelmed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Necropolis_Railway

When predicting changes in attitudes, it's always safer to assume changes will happen to behaviors that started recently than behaviors that started long ago. In the case of mourning, we've done it since before we could write, and many animals do it too, so it is unlikely we'd stop.

> In the case of mourning, we've done it since before we could write, and many animals do it too, so it is unlikely we'd stop.

We and other animals tend to mourn those that we personally knew and were dear to us. This situation is a bit different, as it involves a surging share of dying people that were left with no close people to mourn them, or even simply notice their absence.

“Bring out your dead!”

BANG

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