Midlife Notes on Meaning and the Mediapocalypse

What Does Legacy Mean in a Crumbling Civil Society?

I remember the first (and still only) time I learned that someone from my high school graduating class had died, about twelve years ago. After graduating with me in 1999, this guy—let’s call him “Eddie,” though that wasn’t his name—joined the army and served several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan before being medically discharged with diabetes. He then succumbed to a heart attack resulting from diabetic complications.

Eddie was only 31. Hell, he was about a year younger than me, since, with my summer birthday, I was one of the older kids in our class of about 90 graduates—small enough that we all knew each other, even if we weren’t all friends.

I didn’t know Eddie well. In school, he was popular, and I was a nerd. But we were in the one-semester required senior econ course together. Eddie decided to run against me for president of our Junior Achievement business, just because he figured I shouldn’t run unopposed. I wasn’t offended; that seemed like a perfectly respectable principle to me. In his campaign speech, Eddie told everyone he was a slacker and that they should probably vote for me. I became the president. We made and sold frozen pizzas under the brand “Goomba di Pizza.” I can’t help smiling at that silly name now, looking back.

Anyway, that’s what I remember about Eddie. He was a bit of a wild card and a class clown that you couldn’t help finding charming, somebody likely to make you laugh. I heard he’d become a bartender before he died, and I bet he was a damn good one.

The first time someone you know from childhood suddenly and unexpectedly dies, it’s a shock to the system, a stark reminder of the fragility of human life and your own mortality. I experience a fainter echo of that same shock every time I hear about someone dying unusually young. It’s the sort of thing that makes you stop and take stock.

The level of effort and media literacy required of readers to sort through the postmodern media mess in order to consume reliable reporting and commentary is a real problem.

And as the kind of person sociologists and social psychologists refer to as “high scrupulous,” I have always been morbidly self-reflective anyway. I am also in my early 40s, and closer to my mid-40s than I’d like to be. In addition, as far back as 19 years ago I told a then new friend that my “hobby” was “having existential crises.” So it’s not like it takes a whole lot of prompting to get me to take stock.

Still, moments like that one are shocking. They remind you that any of us could go at any time. And you start asking questions like, if I did go now, will anything I’ve done outlive me? Did I, overall, at least make some small positive impact? Will people smile when they remember me? I’m currently wrestling with how to deal with these questions, particularly in an age of declining civil society institutions and increased atomization like the one we’re living through now.

Photo by Elvis Bekmanis, via Unsplash.