Kester’s piece was inspired by a Guardian video on “grief tech”, which attempts to create custom language models of people so that they continue to communicate from beyond the grave, as Kester puts it, “…the hope that some bros in Silicon Valley are holding out that they can ‘solve’ the problem of grief and loss.” He then observes: “…in order to do this, grief must be presented as a problem. But is it?”
No, obviously, which Kester posits. However, he reasons as to why left me wanting:
- “grief is symbolic of a wider understanding of the temporal and temporary nature of life”
- “death is a good thing because it is about a humility around our own existence”
- to understand ourselves as “sites of energy that can be reused in other forms by others – a leaning into the belief in the good of ‘the other’”
- accepting death is a “fantastic liberation, of understanding time as precious”
- death is “so often the source of blessed progress”
Kester then provides a lengthy quote from his book Getting High, which describes his personal reframing of resurrection.
One of the subjects of the Guardian video, the man providing the custom language models of dead loved ones, indeed framed grief as a problem–an emotional one. He tells the journalist that he is not as strong as the journalist is, that he doesn’t want to experience the emotions of grief, that he wants to stay in his bubble.
Kester frames grief as necessary for some greater human ends. So does Nick Cave, in a way: “…there is joy and there is happiness in a way you could never believe possible on the other side of grief.” I think Nick Cave would also be horrified at grief tech. But Nick first observed:
This [grief] is not particular to me. This is ordinary stuff on some level, that we, that everyone goes through eventually.
Grief just…is. It is part of the universal human experience. It should be freed from our attempts to give it some ego-centric meaning, and in many ways the violent nature of its emotional valence prevents those attempts.
Loss and the experience of grief doesn’t help us reach some new level of transcendence, it just makes us human. The sad thing about tech bros trying to solve grief isn’t that they’re grifters or too emotionally weak–no one is emotionally strong enough to simply move through grief–it is that they are denying themselves one of the most fundamental experiences of life.