Why Will You Die Twice?

Your great-great-grandfather existed. He had a name and a face. You don't know what it was. In a hundred years somebody will say exactly the same thing about you. But this isn't about the fact that you'll die — that part you already know. It's about something that happens much later, and that almost nobody thinks about. SOURCES: Cristian Candia, César Hidalgo et al., Nature Human Behaviour (2019) — "The universal decay of collective memory and attention"; biographies persist in spoken memory for roughly 20-30 years, music for barely 6 Jan Assmann — the distinction between communicative memory (3-4 generations, 80-100 years) and cultural memory The concept of the "second death" — the moment no living person remembers the deceased Demographic estimates of how many humans have ever lived (around 100 billion) #death #memory #mortality #time #psychology #existential #darkpsychology