The Dead Don’t Log Off

How Technology Hijacked Human Grief

Three months after her daughter’s suicide, Sarah discovers the Instagram account. Hidden from parents, visible to friends. Hundreds of posts documenting pain she never saw. At 3 a.m., she scrolls through this secret archive of suffering, learning who her daughter really was through the cruelest possible tutorial.

This is grief in 2025: mediated by algorithms, archived in clouds, witnessed by strangers. We’re the first generation to mourn through screens, where the dead persist as data. Every day, 8,000 Facebook users die, their profiles becoming digital tombstones. We’re inventing ways to remember while forgetting how to let go.

The algorithm doesn’t know he’s dead. Four years after her husband’s COVID death, Maria gets a cheerful Google Photos notification: “Remember this day!” It’s their Barcelona anniversary trip, his smile wide, her head on his shoulder. Next year, it will remind her again.

This casual cruelty multiplies across platforms. LinkedIn suggests congratulating the deceased on work anniversaries. Spotify includes dead artists in your activity feed. Dating apps show profiles of people who’ll never swipe back. We check our phones 96 times daily, each glance risking an unexpected wound.

Yet these same platforms have become essential to mourning. When Tyler died at nineteen, his mother watched thousands of strangers share how his guitar tutorials changed their lives, how his Discord conversations stopped self-harm. “I learned more about my son after he died than when he was alive,” she says. “His real life was online.”

Sarah finds herself caught between gratitude and rage. The hidden Instagram reveals her daughter’s depth of connection with online friends who truly knew her struggle. But it also shows how invisible that struggle was to everyone physically present. The platform that isolated her daughter now provides the only window into her inner world.

Different platforms create distinct grief experiences. TikTok turns mourning into performance art—elaborately edited tributes garnering millions of views. Gaming communities hold in-world funerals; when a renowned EVE Online player died, 2,000 players attended his virtual memorial, launching fireworks costing thousands of real dollars. Meanwhile, LinkedIn makes death awkward. How do you announce your promotion when your mentor just died?

The algorithm learns from grief without understanding it. Watch one memorial video, YouTube suggests hundreds more. The platform’s engagement metrics can’t distinguish between healthy remembrance and destructive rumination. The bereaved become trapped in loops designed to maximize watch time, not healing.

Amanda posted about her father’s death and received 847 reactions. Six months later, struggling with ongoing grief, only 43 people responded. “Fresh grief gets attention,” she says. “Continued grief is bad content.” The performance of loss becomes another burden. Who loved the deceased most? Whose tribute gets more shares? Families fracture over who controls memorial pages.

The dead persist in ways that confuse our neural patterns for processing loss. James’s wife died two years ago, but her Alexa still speaks in the kitchen. Her Netflix profile suggests shows. Her Instagram, memorialized but visible, makes her seem suspended rather than gone. “She’s everywhere and nowhere,” he says. “How do I move forward when she’s still recommending restaurants on our shared Google Maps?”

Physical grief has natural friction—you must dress, travel, interact. These actions pace mourning. Digital grief removes all friction. You can spiral through photos at 3 a.m., reread texts while drunk, watch videos on repeat. No one sees. No one intervenes.

“My clients arrive exhausted from nights scrolling through digital archives,” says a Portland therapist. “They’re not processing grief; they’re marinating in it.”

Gen Z navigates this differently, having never known non-digital mourning. They livestream funerals, process death through memes, create collaborative Spotify playlists as memorial spaces. A sixteen-year-old explains: “My friend died, so we made a TikTok with all our videos. It has three million views. That’s three million people who know he existed.”

But what does it mean to grieve someone you never met? When Technoblade, a Minecraft YouTuber, died of cancer, millions mourned as if they’d lost a close friend. Parasocial grief is real but lacks support structures. There’s no funeral for a relationship that existed entirely through screens.

Sarah discovers her daughter was “Technoblade’s biggest fan.” The memorial videos her daughter posted for this stranger now help Sarah understand her child’s own depression. The parasocial becomes personal, grief reflecting grief in infinite mirrors.

Cultural traditions clash with platform policies. Islamic burial practices demand swift, private mourning; Facebook memorialization is permanent and public. Indigenous communities, whose oral traditions carefully regulate when the dead are named, struggle with platforms that preserve names forever. An elderly Japanese woman cannot perform proper Buddhist remembrance because her grandson’s memorial page cannot be impermanent.

Tech companies offer solutions that create new problems. Facebook’s “legacy contacts” can manage memorial pages but can’t access messages where final words might hide. Google’s inactive account manager requires death planning few accomplish. Only 7% of users have designated digital executors.

Meanwhile, AI startups promise digital resurrection—chatbots created from the deceased’s texts, letting you “talk” to dead loved ones. Is it healing or harmful to text with a simulacrum of your mother? Who owns the right to resurrect someone digitally?

Some communities innovate. A Discord server for grieving gamers holds weekly voice chats, sharing memories while playing their dead friends’ favorite games. Digital artists build interactive memorials where visitors add memories, creating collective portraits of loss. But individual solutions can’t address systemic problems.

Sarah learns to navigate with intention. She sets timers for scrolling, closes apps when spiraling, distinguishes between remembering and ruminating. She joins a support group for parents discovering their children’s hidden online lives. Together, they decode their children’s digital languages of pain.

We need platforms that recognize death as part of their architecture, not an edge case. Algorithms that understand the difference between engagement and healing. Digital literacy that teaches navigation before crisis hits.

The question isn’t whether technology belongs in grief. The question is whether we’ll consciously shape digital mourning or let engagement metrics and profit margins decide. We’re building a world where the dead never quite die, where grief becomes permanent and public, where mourning happens at broadband speed.

Tomorrow, 8,000 more Facebook users will die. Their profiles will persist, their data outliving their bodies. We’re the first generation learning to grieve online, inventing rituals without knowing their consequences.

Sarah still visits her daughter’s Instagram, but differently now. She’s learned when to close the laptop and cry. She’s part of an enormous experiment with no control group, no precedent, no guide except the pain itself.

The dead don’t log off anymore. Neither can we. But maybe we can learn the difference between keeping someone alive and keeping ourselves from living.