With Just a Hundred Pounds of Clay
When grandkids say, ‘look what I can do, grampa!’ — that’s learning! More rarely, but sometimes, grampas say, ‘look what I did, kids!’ — and that’s learning too.
For me, it’s part of learning Unity, the popular game engine, by applying it to my favorite on-going project — Appreciating Mortality. I’ve been working on it for a while and do not look forward to wrapping it up any time soon. Nevertheless, I am 76 and I have realistically in the range of 100, maybe 200 months to go, at best, under unknown levels of functionality. So when I take on a multi-month project, I do it knowing it’s a noticeable bite out of the life pie.
So far it’s been an excellent investment in my cognitive-emotional investment portfolio.
I think a lot about different media, what they’re good at, what they’re not so good at. I am not an accredited Thanatologist, but I have taken forays into Death Education using live, on-location seminars; the written word; video; online courses — and now VR (virtual reality), which leaves other media and other ways of being together in the dust when it comes to openness and vulnerability.
Design for Dying
God slapped our world together in six days and rested on the seventh according to one popular account.
I just finished building eight worlds in eight weeks and I didn’t rest enough. I crashed a bit toward the end. But I did it, with a little help from my friends.
I built each world to lead myself and anyone else, I think, deeper and more intimately into the idea of personal extinction. The first world in the sequence, for example, is about ‘Other People Dying,’ and doesn’t directly touch challenging ideas like, ‘personal extinction.’
I am an accredited learning designer but you don’t need a Ph.D. to know that people need to put their toes in the water gradually at first. They want some show-and-tell and they also want to do some stuff. Then they need to step back and think about it, what to keep as their own.
Learning props can be selected and sequenced in any medium. In VR, the worlds are the prop, everthing that exists does so for the sake of the experience. What people bring to the worlds isn’t knowable but what they take out of the experience might be at least influenceable.
Helping people get used to the idea of mortality is what I see myself doing. Mortality is just an idea and that’s all we can get used to. I’ve been at it for a while and I don’t keep working at it so when I’m actually dying and mortality is more than an idea I’ll maintain my cool and go out happily listening to Miles Davis’ long version of ‘Autumn Leaves.,’ (not that I’d mind that scenario). I do it because ever since I started I’ve never felt more alive.
What does that mean, ‘felt more alive?’ I’m pretty sure it means something different, or the subjective experience is something different, according to where someone is in the lifespan; which, of course, we never know but tend to make unquestioned assumptions about.
At my point in the lifespan, semi-old, feeling more alive means feeling more connected to life, every part of it, from nature to other people to my own inner self. Going with the life-as-a-stream metaphor, I feel immersed, underwater even, not on the banks worrying or waiting for the right moment.
A Short Course in Mortality
I built eight worlds for eight topics. Not the eight topics. Just eight topics I know I can use as a framework to touch on just about anything that might need to come up.
Another advantage of VR is the way people can feel freer to bring up what they’re feeling, less bound by what-not-to-talk-about than in their everyday life situations. I’ve been hosting events about death and loss for almost twenty years, five in VR, and I have some idea of how to help people and groups of people work with the energy and feelings that come up. That’s why I think of the worlds as one big prop, there to support something that goes on within and among the people in them.
I’m a little surprised that I am less clear on how to actually run this course now in 2025 than I was on building the worlds to run it in. It’s not for everyone, but I’d like it to be for anyone. Not just someone who is old-old and approaching the end, but someone who is young and sees most of their life span as out there ahead of them.
One idea I have is to keep calling it ‘education,’ even though death is one of the most evocative and triggering topics imaginable — be clear that I am guiding small groups of people through a kind of learning — and have coaching-counseling-therapeutic resources immediately available as an additional layer. It would feel irresponsible not to have this layer in place.
I think running this course, Design for Dying, in 2025 means developing a small cadre first, a project I already have a good head start on. The metaverse has community leaders and co-hosts. I know some of them. I will try to assemble a hand-picked team for exploring death worlds.
Tom Nickel writes about new media technologies and other topics he has little if any standing to write about. His work has not appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, The New Republic, or the New England Journal of Medicine.
Tom holds a Black Belt in Learning and is a founding Board Member of the African VR Campus & Centre and a long-time supporter of the Khmer Magic Music Bus.
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