April 19, 2024 Read Time:
Jasmine Bina, co-founder of a strategy think-tank, Concept Bureau, riffed on LinkedIn the other day about “grieftech.”
She wrote,
It would be really great for a brand in this category to lead with a new thesis or belief of what death and grief are *supposed to mean to us today*. That could change everything.
We're asking ourselves, but don't have an answer for that yet.
The right answer could platform the whole space. I think that's what's still missing.
I hope that Bye Bye I Love You (whose publication date is Feb. 11, 2025) will provide some orientation to an answer to Jasmine's prompt, along these lines:
1. The care of the dead is critical for the well-being of the community of the living. To understand how to care for the dead, you have to be able to answer the question, who are the dead to you?
2. The secret to living is knowing how to be with the dead. Sometimes this is interpreted individually: you have to know your, have a relationship with your, own death. That's true, but you also have to think historically and evolutionarily. Our cities are built atop the past, our highways run over graves. You have to be with all the dead, not just those of your tribes and families. *All* of the dead.
3. A cultural history of last words shows that we have abandoned ritualistic, culturally prescribed last words to our detriment. The beliefs and practices that have sprung up to mark the passage of a unique individual and their relationships are, in the long run, detrimental. Montaigne led the way; every anthology of "famous last words" has followed. It's better to acknowledge that when people die they become members of a collective--which they have always been, as we the living are (but have forgotten). One way to do that is through ritual last words.
4. That history also explains why the shift occurred -- which is mirrored in first words, by the way. In short, people became anxious about their identity in time, and about the connection between the private experience of time and the public timeline. To get right about grief and death, you have to get right about time.
5. We need to balance the "as if" world making with the "as is" clarity of materialism -- but you can only do this if you know where the "as is" ends and the "as if" begins.
The last ten years of my life have been devoted to hashing this out. One of the book’s strengths is that it’s linguistically oriented, which means you can put language, as an object, in front of you for inspection. And that you can hash out what really is there, what the facts are, which is the “as is,” and see how they are transformed culturally, how they are made to do world-making sorts of things, the “as if.”
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