I'm Afraid to Die, so I Made a Website
August 18, 2024
I.
There are days when I wake up in the morning and curse the fact that I exist. Despite this, I know deep down that I want to be here. For all the contradictions that come with living as a human being in a post-humanist world, I still derive personal enrichment from simple pleasures and discovering ways to become a better version of myself.
I don't want to die. I don't want to be swept away in the biblical floods, lifted out of my house by a swirling vortex. I don't want an unknown pathogen to wreak havoc on my vital organs. I don't want my skull caved in by a fascist militia because of my alternative lifestyle. I don't want to be struck by an errant bullet because I picked the wrong time to buy groceries. I don't want to be left economically destitute, without another person to rely on as I starve to death under a highway overpass. I don't want to kill myself because there's nothing left to be around for.
The world we inhabit is a terrifying, monstrous plane of existence and by some miracle, I don't want to be apart from it. I am tethered to my experiences, my memories, my thoughts and feelings, my possessions, the people I depend on. I may lose sight of this fact sometimes, but a constant internal state of rebellious, stubborn persistence lives on.
The problem that I come back to time and time again: I don't know what to do about anything. I feel like a fallen leaf from a decaying tree, spiraling downward into an endlessly flowing river, riding the current wherever it takes me. I will eventually get ripped to pieces or snagged on something downstream, it's just a matter of when.
Society has become a distorted mirror image of what it was supposed to be, yet everybody goes on like nothing happened. Traditional avenues on the way to self-actualization have been stripped for their parts, or were merely illusions to begin with. Institutions that people relied on for generations have become hostile toward those who need them today. I've come to the realization that I am seen as nothing more than a node of value to be extracted from and disposed of.
I'm afraid to die, so I made a website. Someday, I will die. Rebellion and stubbornness will only get me so far in the battle against time. I do what I can to put little barriers between myself and this overwhelming force, but I have to be realistic. We all do.
My real-world identity is not explicitly tied to my online persona, and if all goes right, hopefully it will stay that way. The real me is not whatever arbitrary designation I was bequeathed by my English speaking parents, it's not even the physical characteristics I present to the world based primarily on the genetic lottery.
The real me is how I express myself. At present, the internet provides the most direct way of accomplishing this task. If I make you feel something, make you remember the words I say, that could be enough to help you understand the real me. In this way, I could live on forever.
II.
Here is my website. It's not the most in-depth thing ever made. It's got inconsistent, weirdly spaced margins. It's got low resolution animated GIFs and a tiled background I lifted from an old version of Microsoft FrontPage. It's got a subdomain attached to it because I'm too much of a cheapskate to pay another faceless individual a periodical fee in exchange for an intangible object. It's got an old school view counter widget that has ticked up over 1,000 since I first published the site several months ago.
The fact that over one-thousand people looked at my site and didn't tell me it was the most hideous thing they ever saw means the world to me. It should be clear from all this that I'm not a professional web developer. My qualifications mainly consist of a few HTML textbooks that I never bothered to open, stored away in some box in a back closet. I took it upon myself to learn basic web design using a few recommended online resources paired with a truckload of search engine queries, pretty much the only way I can learn a new skill these days.
Joining an online community where others advertise their personal sites was a motivating factor, but I also felt like this was something I should have learned to do 20 years ago. I took a website design class during summer school one year, but never followed up on it in a serious way until recently. If anything, learning to design for the web was an attempt to break free from a creative rut I've been stuck in for longer than I can remember.
My site serves as a place where I can log away information, ideas, projects, random tidbits for anybody to see. I want visitors of the website to get a general idea of who I am as a person and what I care about. It's also a personal hub for me to quickly access things I've held on to, rather than having to recall a website title off-hand or sift through an unorganized list of bookmarks.
I was not very careful in preserving my digital life when I was younger. Anything I have left from my teenage years exists due to serendipity, random chance. I did not yet realize the importance of holding on to digital objects for a future version of myself to reminisce about, and I'm paying the price for it today. This website is a manifestation of that psychosis; I've lost so much over the years to the point that I may now be overcorrecting in what I feel is worth preserving.
I also feel self-conscious about the current state of the site, I can't help but believe that certain visitors will be judgmental of my sloppy coding techniques, wonky presentation or overly personal writing style. At the same time, there is a certain elegance about the simplicity of the design, a factor that others have mentioned as a positive.
That's what makes the indie old-school web immediately appealing: there are no preconceived notions of what your site is supposed to look like. Do you want to use a pre-made template or HTML generator program and tweak it to your liking? Go for it! Do you want to hoof it on your own, learn some basic coding skills and try to make your vision come to life? It's your prerogative.
Designing for the web is like learning to paint, even a finished product that may appear crude and amateurish to some people has value in the eye of another beholder. You can seek out professional training and learn to do it like everyone else, or you can choose to teach yourself through experience and develop your own style, your own voice. Having the tools to express yourself is key to the flourishing of a creative process.
Learning some simple HTML and CSS techniques has revolutionized my creative output. What was originally meant to serve as a simple repository for my projects and achievements has turned into an obsession over learning how to become a better writer, a better communicator. I still have a considerable amount of work cut out if I want to keep improving in these departments, but sometimes one just needs a push in the right direction.
I couldn't have gotten this done without Neocities, an admirable attempt to bring back accessible do-it-yourself web design for the average person in a similar way to how GeoCities functioned around the turn of the millennium. An underrated feature of this service is that it allows me to download my entire site as a .zip file, at least ensuring that as long as I can keep it safe on a hard drive somewhere, my work will live on into the future.
III.
The beautiful thing about websites is that they allow for complete, free expression where the only curation is performed by the webmaster. Sure, I have at least one social media profile I regularly keep up with that serves a similar role, but there's something innately appealing about having total control of the end-user experience in a way that a social media site can't offer.
Social media tends to present a flawed, incomplete view of the human being that it serves. While expressions of joyful moments and fleeting thoughts are encouraged on the social web, an honest-to-god website lets you shake off arbitrary limitations and show the world what makes you the person you are in as many characters as needed.
It's no secret that personal websites have fallen out of vogue over the past twenty years. Much like file sharing and other decentralized tasks involving the computer, Silicon Valley tech companies have successfully whittled away such utility by providing more convenient, less effort-intensive services that can fulfill the same needs for most people.
What these corporate services can't do, however, is provide total autonomy to the user. These firms will sell your data to the highest bidder, use it to train proprietary large language models without your consent, feed you misinformation, censor things they don't like and spy on your habits to more effectively serve you advertisements. In the same way that an AI image generation service can't create an image that lampoons a company logo, a corporate social media app can't give you access to the nuts and bolts of your profile page. At the end of the day, corporations desperately need control of the boundaries people operate within.
The death of the public forum is frequently brought up in discussions about the effects of late capitalism. Indeed, there are very few spaces left outside in the world for people to just exist without the expectation of payment. If you sit down at a table outside a coffee shop, need to go to the restroom while out in public or simply want to meet up with a friend after work, you're most likely going to be pressured to hand over at least a meager amount of imaginary numbers to whichever unsympathetic figure you happen to be a patron of by virtue of existing in a certain space. An act as simple as going to a public park for an afternoon may require you to get in your vehicle that you pay to keep insured and filled with gasoline so you can drive to a parking spot where you need to pay by the minute just to leave it in place.
I cannot get into the head of the person who invented the internet or the countless people who improved it, iterated upon it and maintain it to this day. That said, I look at the web today and still see a place that people can mingle and share ideas, hobbies and creative projects without involving a financial entity—I see a vision for an augmented human experience that wasn't possible before it existed. The problem with this utopian vision is that, in reality, we've been living in a period of corporate digital land grabbing for nearly two decades, one that mirrors the gradual accumulation of real-life monetary wealth in fewer hands.
Some people don't have the wherewithal to learn how to code a website from scratch, organize a local collection of media or set up an external hard drive to back up their personal data, so a free-to-use online service that will do the heavy lifting is naturally appealing. Most people won't want to go out of their way to accomplish something unless they feel compelled to do so. Convenience rules the day, and people who park their butts on $1,000 leather chairs in corporate boardrooms know this all too well.
Corporations don't want you to own your data, they don't want you to own anything. Their goal is to tally as much quarterly profit as can be mustered, extracting wealth from everyday human beings is the most direct way to do so. Their dream is to legally steal things you have owned for years and sell them back to you.
What do you actually own in your life? Take a moment and think about it.
You may think the physical objects that exist in your living space are yours, and they should be. In reality, you could lose them based on the whims of your landlord, the bank you pay a mortgage to, the city government you are subject to, a changing local climate or an armed force that has decided you are part of the out-group. If you can carry an object with you anywhere you go it's yours, right? Not if you have a run in with the law, American police engage in civil asset forfeiture all the time.
Your digital collection of music, books, videos or games could have some type of digital rights management holding it hostage. What is your phone or laptop worth to you if you can't access a network or the means of keeping it in working shape? What good are digital objects if you can no longer access them in the physical world?
In a cosmic sense, even if none of those previously mentioned things were true about the world, there is no way to claim true ownership of anything in this life because we will be gone for good in a relatively short amount of time. Go to your local rummage sale and you'll find heirlooms that once belonged to a recently passed-on neighbor being sold for pennies on the dollar. Head over to the estate auction and bear witness to the rest of them being taken home by whichever asshole has the highest number.
To me, the only thing left that somebody could actually “own” is what is ascribed to them, what is commonly attributed to their life and actions taken within it. You need the help of everyday people to preserve your history, you can't rely on a soulless corporation that churns through several employees a year to care about preserving anything from your life unless it is useful to them.
If you were to design a website on your own terms, host it on the internet using an original domain name or something close to it, there's a chance that someone or something out there will log it, file it away and hold on to it for safekeeping. If you share your site with people who care about you, they might learn something about you they didn't know before, deepening a mutual relationship that no outside body could ever hope to replace. If you put a part of yourself out there, with a little bit of luck, you could live on forever.
IV.
A while back, I stumbled upon an old website that was preserved on The Wayback Machine from around 1996 that functioned as a journal for a husband whose wife was experiencing serious cardiovascular issues. It recounted the painstaking journey through a rapid decline in health, an attempt to save the woman's life with a heart transplant and the tragic, abrupt end of a life cut too short.
I was struck by the matter-of-fact nature of the chronological account as well as the outpouring of support from the nascent social web for a family separated too soon. I could get a sense for the shaky optimism the husband held on to even up until his wife's final moments. The early stages of grief were apparent in the later writings, but still reserved enough to the point that it felt sanitized as an outside observer.
The segments between the mind, fingertips and digital parchment can obscure the true nature of thoughts and emotions, like playing a game of telephone with yourself. It's possible that people in the mid-'90s simply didn't yet conceive of the internet as a place to vent and express their innermost feelings to a bunch of strangers. Or maybe, some people just don't want their vulnerabilities broadcasted to the world. Having not experienced this type of grief yet, I can't say I have much personal insight into the topic.
It was remarkable to witness how a collection of carefully written words printed in Times New Roman against a white backdrop were enough to convey a raw, human experience. In a way, the minimalist presentation style of this webpage helped show more about what these people were experiencing than a distant relative's photo album on Facebook ever could. The deliberate sharing and omitting of details painted a picture of the situation more vibrant than I could have even imagined when I first clicked on the hyperlink, and the experience has stuck with me for several months afterward.
Unfortunately, for one reason or another, I can't find this website anymore. Despite how engrossed I was while reading this story from a year I can't even remember clearly and a place I've never been, I didn't take the time to bookmark the site or even mentally log away the names of the people. I scavenged through my internet history as well as the possible sources I would have stumbled on this site to begin with. It vanished, as fleeting as a picturesque, surreal landscape depicted in a dream.
If I conjured the right combination of words, I could find this website again. Thanks to the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, the information will persist on for future generations to one day come across whether or not the original owners even realized it was possible. Conversely, traditionally reliable search engines that were known for cataloging sites like these now skew their results toward sponsored content and generally more modern, centralized destinations.
For all its faults, the internet has been a wonderful tool for preserving history, even if the current means of accomplishing this are held together by metaphorical duct tape and twine. It was conceived as a superhighway of unfettered information zipping across the globe for the benefit of all who could access it. Somewhere along the way, the priorities behind this technological marvel were funneled into specialized lanes to serve specialized interests.
This is all to say, we can do our best to pour ourselves into a creative project and share it with as many people as we can manage to reach. We can put our best foot forward, try new things, be remembered for our work, our contributions, what makes us unique. We can strive to change the world into a place that works for everybody's interests. But, much like a major league pitcher throwing an off-speed breaking ball toward a fearsome slugger, it's out of our control as soon as it leaves the grasp.
You can go out into the world, trade away several years of your life in an attempt to get ahead, and be struck down by a proverbial roll of the dice before you can even reap the benefits of your labor. You can learn a skill, develop a passion or take interest in something, and never get the chance to reach your full potential. The outcomes of our lived experience can be cruel, banal and devoid of meaning despite our best efforts, and it feels like I've spent every waking moment trying to outrun this fact.
I would never have known about this mysterious woman and her husband's attempt to chronicle her last days as a conscious being, if not for the worldwide web. There have been countless people who went through similar health problems, and many since, but this story stuck out in my mind because I was able to interface with it. In some small way, could this be how she lives on?
V.
Death is NOT the end.
What am I trying to prove by writing this? Do I actually believe any of it?
Life has an explicit start and end point, a lot goes on in the middle but one has to wonder if anything happens afterward. I want to believe that the people, the places, the events around me are real, but I can't prove it.
Even if it's all real, so what? Why do people care about the legacy they leave behind if there's no way for them to bear its fruits? I don't know what else to say about this, I'm not sure it even matters.
I'm not here to tell you how to think, I don't have any evidence to prove I've been successful in changing anybody's mind about anything for as long as I've lived. It's clear now that this has all been a selfish exercise in coming to terms with my own mortality. If you got something out of it, great, but what does that mean to me?
I'm afraid to die. I made a website. I went into all of this thinking that the two were related. Upon further inspection, I'm not so sure anymore.
Earlier, I discussed the motivating factors that pushed me to make a personal website. The truth is, there may have been none greater than the thought that I haven't left anything behind for people to remember me by. If I vanished today, who would notice? Would it change anything about the world?
Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I experienced physical and mental degradation that I'm not sure will ever be fixed. A six-hundred dollar check from the government could never have been enough to soothe the pain, suffering and loss that so many have endured.
Not long afterward, I turned 30 years old. I now exist in Schrödinger's age, a quantum superposition between youth and senectitude. The past few years have been an experience in confronting my mortality in earnest for the first time and figuring out how I'm supposed to feel about it. The thing is, I'm still here, and I'm going to be.
If you're reading this, there's a chance that you know me. I want to say that I love you, at least in a brotherly, familial way. Really, I do. You shouldn't worry about me, and I hope you liked what I had to say. You should know that I think about you from time to time. You've filled my life with meaning, with purpose.
If you don't know me, well, maybe this was more than you ever needed to know. Maybe it was an engrossing read, or maybe you didn't even make it this far and clicked off within seconds. Maybe it was totally irrelevant to your life experience, or maybe it was the most vapid, pretentious thing you've ever seen.
I made a website. I made this blog which is also a website, and you're reading it. We're here, together, in the world, with the same body parts, breathing the same air, under the same sky, right now. We're real to ourselves. We're not dead yet. Maybe, that's enough.
(Originally published on my blog: https://read-only.net/posts/2024-08-18-I'm%20Afraid%20to%20Die,%20So%20I%20Made%20A%20Website.html)