Wandering along an empty main road, I walked along the divider. No cars, no noise, cool breeze drifting along. The sun hung like an oil painting, almost lazily. The atmosphere was that of a set without any actors. A lonely man sat restlessly against a tree. The wind rustled a few leaves into his lap. He was content.

Standing in the middle of a street, even with no cars in sight, is a slightly uncomfortable endeavour. The years of conditioning that this is not a place to pause leave you with a slight twitch in the stomach, nothing painful, but just enough to remind you that something is not right. But like all urges, it eventually subsides.

A lone cyclist is visible in the distance, glancing at his surroundings. Two people with nowhere to go experience a strange attraction. We chatted for a while, about the obvious lack of happening, the joy of solitary exploration, and the verisimilitude of it all. Parting ways with a glancing smile, we continued on our journey to nowhere.

It was the day after someone died.

Not just any someone, a particular somebody with a long beard and orange clothes. A lot of other people with orange clothes were not happy with his deadness, and so they started shouting at things. Nothing specific, just a general shouting.
This disturbed everybody so much that they refused to leave their homes; even those who didn't really care about the affairs of men in orange clothes.

What was puzzling about the entire situation was how violently the people in orange clothes reacted to deadness. There was nothing violent about the death of the one with the beard, or anything controversial at all. But even this completely natural occurance created a frenzy, and the effects were palpable.

Which really begs the question:
Have humans really learned to deal with death?

Of all the aspects of the human condition, death is one of the few, that is undoubtedly universal.
Of the roughly 70 billion humans that have ever existed, only 7 billion are alive today. All the humans of the past have inevitably undergone the process of deadening, from one process or another. There are few things of which we as a collective species are more sure of.
And yet, we don't really act like it.

Very little of our behaviour takes this fact into account. We joyously consume unhealthy food, deliberately inhale poisonous smoke, and lead a sendantary existence mindlessly consuming what the establishment throws our way. Most know that it is detrimental, and most could even be prompted to agree. Most would also say that they don't wish to die. They would probably even do other things to try to extend their living time, and still not make the connection.

Even though it is abundantly clear that we don't factor in our eventual death into everyday decisions, it is not as transparent why.
Beings like that may have some sort of evolutionary advantage, and might lead to greater survival, but it's not too much of a stretch for the imagination to think that this wouldn't be a pleasurable existance. (Or would it?)

But that is more of idle speculation.
What is observable and testable, and therefore more interesting, is how death is thought about, right now.
For those not living under a cultural rock our society has dramatically changed the way in which it connects with the wider world. The advent of social media has, in less than a full generation's time, altered the dominant medium of communication between people, and in doing so, necessitated the formation of new norms for certain behaviours.
A lot of this was visible in the early days of the internet, when bullying and abuse was far more rampant. I think it was mainly because the usual norms for treatment of other people that we are conditioned with growing up didn't effectively transpose into the new medium, where the participants were far more physically detached. The inhuman treatment was prompted by the suble notion that we weren't really interacting with humans.
This has, of course, changed and fortunately improved over time (barring a few cess pools like YouTube comments and certain other forum threads), possibly due to the technology being more accepted into common life. As we grew up with the technology, it integrated with our physical lives more coherently than ever before. All aspects of our physical lives effectively made the transitive step to binary, at least in part.

But what about death?

This revolutionary change has not been in place long enough to witness the death of its adopters, but that point is not too far away. However, the few anomalous deaths of non-natural causes give us a glimpse of what it might be like.

One of the first companies to deal with this on a large scale was Facebook. Logically, it would have been among the first, since its product was the most personal of the group. Their current protocol allows users to have a Memorial page for deceased users, where at certain times friends can post comments, condolences and other messages. xkcd also has an interesting What If article about when the number of dead people on Facebook will eclipse the number of living.

But another, arguably more important question may be, what should happen to all their data? Not just their Facebook posts, but their email, their cloud storage, their webpages, or other miscellaneous social media accounts.
We have entered an era where we store a tremendous amount of information about and around ourselves, but what should happen to that information when we cease to biologically exist?

Should it just be stored for posterity, practically infinitely until practically unfeasable or accidentally erased?
Should any data not accessed for say 10 times the human lifespan be automatically deleted?
Will extension of the human lifespan rush into the world with a solution before this problem even arises?

Whatever happens, it's almost guranteed to be interesting. And that is a world I'd like to live in.