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I’m not really afraid of death. After all, it’s inevitable and I probably won’t see it coming a la Tony Soprano. I’m not saying someone will take a hit out on me in a diner while Journey plays on the jukebox, but I’ll probably run a red light while texting or fall off a cliff trying to take a selfie. But death happens to all of us, so to worry about dying every day of my life would be plain stupid.
What I am worried about, though? My Facebook account should I kick the bucket early. See, I just learned today that you can assign someone to be your “legacy contact,” which is defined by Facebook as:
A legacy contact is someone you choose to look after your account if it’s memorialized. Once your account is memorialized, your legacy contact will have the option to do things like:
— Write a pinned post for your profile (ex: to share a final message on your behalf or provide information about a memorial service)
— Respond to new friend requests (ex: old friends or family members who weren’t yet on Facebook)
— Update your profile picture and cover photo
Not to sound cocky, but my legacy contact is going to have some huge shoes to fill. This is no small request to make of someone. When I began going through the motions of assigning a legacy contact, I became incredibly conflicted with who I should roll with.
My first reaction? My best friend. Like, it only makes sense, right? I talk to him in confidence all the time, so it seems natural that he’d take the reins for me and memorialize the fuck out of my account. But then it dawned on me that this could quite possibly be the worst person of all-time to put in charge of this. What if he starts poking my high school flings? What if he retroactively posts cryptic statuses to creep everyone out? What if he changes my profile picture to the photo of me passed out on his steps on 4th of July 2010? Yeah, he’s my best friend, but that’s because we cause mayhem together. It was time to consider others.
Naturally, I took my girlfriend into consideration. After all, she puts up with me through thick and thin and being in charge of my account could be a money way for her to mourn over your boy, right? Wrong. I don’t know what kind of Facebook messages I was posting back in 2007. I’m way too lazy to go back and untag myself in photos of me drinking underage with scantily-clad dressed chicks on Halloween. And what if she changes my cover photo to an inspirational quote over my senior photo from high school? Everyone will remember me as a total fucking dork.
But, oh yeah, my parents. Heaven forbid I pass before them, but what if? I’m sure they’d be glad to know that out of everyone I’ve met in my life, I chose them. My creators. The ones that were there from the beginning. But shit. That won’t work either. I don’t want daily status updates from them typed IN ALL CAPS TALKING ABOUT HOW MUCH I WOULD HAVE LIKED THAT EPISODE OF MODERN FAMILY. Like, I don’t want to put my mom on blast here, but she sometimes takes photos of what she’s watching on television and posts them to her page. I can’t just be putting my online life in those hands.
Okay, okay, my sister. This is a good one, I think. We’re blood, you know? And we’re a year-and-a-half apart, so she “gets” how social media works. She doesn’t want her brother to be remembered in a negative light, so it would be in her best interest to crush the role of a legacy contact. Well, that’s until she sees the groups I’m in and everything I like. There’s a reason my high school friends and I made our group incredibly private — it’s filth. There’s also a private group solely dedicated to my buddy’s Vegas bachelor party, and I know she doesn’t want to see the type of shit we hyped in there.
Dammit. I’m kind of a piece of shit. I should probably just delete my account altogether before it’s too late. .
Image via Shutterstock
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Will
Will (Twitter / Instagram) is the host of The Sunday Scaries Podcast.
@willdefries
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Give it to Shibby. What could go wrong?
I debated finishing this with me saying it was going to him.
Don’t you die on me, Will.
You better not die on us.
This has the potential to be a business. Pay some company $500 and you talk with an hour or two with your future legacy caretaker at the company taker, tell them what you want, how it should be run, they take out a file on you, etc… $500 gets you 25 years of service.
That sounds like a giant scam. Let’s schedule something for the new year for some brain-storming.
So how did the party with the villain from Lord Of The Flies go?
That’s a column waiting to happen.