Death

Do one concrete thing whose value depends partly on people existing after you are gone. You can plant a tree, improve a public trail or shared space, add useful information to Wikipedia, print and label family photographs, record a family story, repair something, create a time capsule, or otherwise construct a benefit for future people you may never meet

The project should require at least two hours of actual work and should produce something that could remain useful or meaningful after your death. Then, immediately afterward, spend one hour acting under Scheffer’s “doomsday” assumption. Imagine that humanity will survive your natural lifetime but disappear thirty days after your death. Return to what you made and consider how the meaning or value would change if doomsday were inevitable. 

Finally, physically undo, remove, or withhold one small part of the project that would matter only to distant future users, closing off a value today for part of the future. 

Choose a former version of yourself who no longer exists in quite the same way. For example, it can be the child who lived in your childhood home, your high school self, a friend to a person you no longer talk to, the athlete, musician, believer, or under/overachiever you were as a kid, etc. Choose an object that represents that person. It should be something you can safely bury or burn. 

Next, write a short, loving eulogy that explains who this person was, what they cared about, what you admired about them, their flaws and triumphs, and what survives from their legacy. 

Then hold a small funeral. Wear funeral clothes, invite one or two willing mourners or do it alone, read the eulogy aloud, and dispose of or retire the object ceremonially. The ritual should be sincere even if it also feels a little ridiculous.

Afterward, reflect on Parfit's claim that personal identity may consist in overlapping chains of psychological continuity rather than the persistence of single self. Why do people only hold funerals for biological death? Did the ritual produce a sense of loss that merely thinking about your former self would not? Was this person literally you, merely connected to you, or both? If identity is a matter of degree, should death also be understood as a matter of degree?

Visit a cemetery you've never been to and visit the grave of a person who a) died before 40 b) died 40-90 and c) died after 90. Take a picture of each grave and then write a paragraph about each person, based on everything you can learn about them only from their grave and the surrounding graves. 

Evidence: Pictures of the graves 

Choose someone in your family or someone who went to UR, who died before you were born. Learn enough about them to keep them alive in memory for one more generation. Make some kind of memorial to the person, such as a website. However you memorialize them, also write a paragraph about who the person was, what they were like, and something that was funny, cool, or impressive about them. In your reflection, reflect on the ways that the inevitiblity of death makes the things we do in life more/less meaningful.