More than once over the past year I've toyed around with the idea of starting my own Discord server, mostly for the purposes of attempting to have a large number of my disparate online friends, acquaintances, and colleagues all together in one place for a change. I've gotten as far as setting up said server, but never taken the plunge of actually making it public or even sharing it with others privately. The server icon now squats on my Discord sidebar, leering at me.
Just now I had the idea of starting to use it as though it WERE populated by all of my closest friends; posting links, images, jokes, writing little updates about my life. I then had the further idea of using it as something even more intimate than that - a sort of diary, where in addition to the usual Discord stuff I'd include my darker, unhappier thoughts, less palatable fantasies, more embarrassing likes and dislikes, petty grudges, etc. Finally I had the idea that I would keep this up for the rest of my natural life, and then, at my funeral, everyone in attendance would be invited to the server and thus invited to ingest the whole of my being as a private person after my ass was safely dead.
I recognize that in addition to being somewhat morbid, and more than a little sad, this idea is simply not feasible from either technical or utilitarian standpoints. I'm currently a little more than a month out from turning 35, which means I could have 50 years or more of life left to live, and the idea that Discord might still exist as a service 50 years from now is nothing short of comedic. And when you get down to it, Discord would be a pretty miserable lens through which to explore a lifetime's worth of internality - uploaded images break after 6 months (or less!), scrolling is awkward, and there's simply not really a good way to organize categories of information beyond the very broadest of strokes.
Nevertheless, the notion of spending one's entire adult life essentially constructing one's own mausoleum still feels compelling, in a way. I'm reminded of a B-plot from long-running, pretty-okay Canadian situation comedy Corner Gas, in which Oscar Leroy (Brent Butt's character's aged, cantankerous father) decides he's going to build his own coffin. He throws himself into the project, comparing different woods and paints and construction methods, and when it's finished, he decides to take it for a spin, laying himself down, crossing his hands upon his chest, and falling asleep. Lying there, he dreams of all the other characters from the show looking down on him at his funeral, simultaneously complimenting the workmanship of the coffin while contrasting its make against Oscar's many flaws as a person. Starting awake, Oscar rises, looking shaken. The end of the episode sees him converting the coffin into a bookcase.
I guess what I'm asking is: what if it was a coffin AND a bookcase, and when you were dead everyone you knew could leaf through all of your favorite books and comment on what excellent taste you had? Much to ponder