The Simple and Obvious Answer to All Our Problems
Much has been written about the decline of America in recent years. Between political and ideological polarization, our crumbling infrastructure, our climbing national debt, our inability to get anything accomplished in general, and on and on. Various remedies have been proposed from all corners, but in a country of 340 million people and almost as many agendas, none of these solutions seems especially plausible. If you’d have asked me a few weeks ago for my own thoughts on the matter I’d have confessed to being at a total loss, but in a moment of pure epiphany just the other day, it occurred to me that the cure for what ails this nation has been right under our noses this whole time: we all just need to fake our own deaths and start over.
Faking one’s own death is a time-honored tradition which, in some cultures, is considered common courtesy when you’ve exhausted all other options for pulling your life out of the gutter except enlisting the help of your fellow man. Who among us, when asked by a friend to be a personal reference on a job application, hasn’t earnestly wished them dead? Mind you, this fantasy wouldn’t have to come true for us to be let off the hook, as it would serve our purpose just the same if they merely pretended to die and never spoke to us again. And while I don’t suggest this strategy lightly, it is unquestionably the integrity move when compared to imposing upon your friend to float you fifty bucks until payday or lend you their pickup truck when you move back into your parents’ house and can’t afford to rent a U-Haul.
I understand the instinct by some to reject this idea out of hand, but given what’s at stake, I would implore you to hear me out all the same. I’m going to start by making my full case in favor of the proposition, and then, in the interest of fairness, I’ll set forth my best steel man argument against it and leave it up to you to decide whether you can, in good conscience, walk away from this solution.
The case for:
I’ve never seen any metrics indicating how many Americans are dissatisfied with their jobs, but in lieu of googling it, we’ll say it’s 87%. (That feels about right, and in a piece advocating the faking of something so solemn as death, it would be the height of hypocrisy to use a real statistic.) In light of this sobering figure, imagine the excitement the great majority of us would feel at being able to pursue an entirely new career! This is not at all to say that some of us shouldn’t remain within our present fields and industries, as people could be put in serious danger if certain of us stray too far. Airline pilots, to name one obvious example, should not trade places with restauranteurs or investment bankers. Instead, once everyone thinks they’re deceased, the pilots should move a few hundred miles away and become baggage handlers at the closest airport. Not knowing the maximum amount of weight a particular airplane can handle is a potential safety hazard, so it would be a ridiculous waste of their expertise to seek out a clean slate in some completely unrelated line of work.
Those of us who wouldn’t be putting lives at risk by changing our careers will have more freedom to choose, but may have to put more creativity into writing our fraudulent résumés. And it will be especially important that we don’t spell anything wrong or prospective employers will deem us unfit for hire for whatever job it is we’ve always wanted to do but never learned how. When we’re asked about our work experience during interviews, everyone in the room will know it’s all a hunk of baloney, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that the interviewers will have attained their positions that way too, so they’re nobody to judge. And although I imagine most of us have been fired from one job or another, think of what a relief it would be to not have to explain the circumstances of a past termination – unless you’re boneheaded enough to put a long gap in your fake work history, in which case, that’s on you. Rest assured that everything will otherwise be fine so long as you practice beforehand and are able to make it sound just convincing enough that they just might’ve actually bought it if they didn’t know beforehand it was a total crock of shit.
And speaking of jobs, let’s explore something completely different with the overwhelmingly positive effect this would have on the environment. My guess is that most folks won’t stray too far in their relocation, but it’s inevitable that several million will want to avoid any possibility of resettling in the same town chosen by any of the myriad Tinder hookups to whom they have given herpes, and thus will move across the country instead. I think it’s fair to say most people don’t know how climate change works – especially those with persistent, raging herpes, as they tend not to be the conscientious sort – so a good number are bound to mistake any difference in temperatures between their home state and their new location for a sudden change in America’s climate, and finally accept the need to decrease their carbon footprint. (In fairness, climate change is very difficult thing for the unwashed masses to understand, and I would explain it here but I don’t want to get sidetracked. Let’s just say the best way to summarize it is that climate and weather are not the same thing, and vice versa.)
If you’re still not convinced this is a good idea, I would ask you to honestly reflect on all the mistakes you’ve made in life, and then imagine them washed away in an instant. No one you meet in your new life is going to assume you’re perfect, but think of all the dumb things you’ve learned the hard way not to do, and now picture yourself among new friends with no knowledge of your having done them before! For example, I once sharted my pants in the patio section of a bar, drunk as a skunk, in the middle of the day. What I wouldn’t give to erase this from the minds of the three or four people who knew about it before and the many more who are just finding out about it now. If I could go back and relive that fateful day, you better believe I would’ve decided to wait until the Uber ride home to do it, in which case I’m sure I could’ve sworn the driver to secrecy in exchange for a few extra clams and a 5-star rating. The carelessness of youth haunts so many of us, but the tragic reality is that we can’t redo our late thirties, so instead, why not just rewrite them?
Some may worry over the impact this will have on arts and entertainment, but I believe it would be fairly minimal, all things considered. Writers won’t have to change a thing but our names, and since we never go outside, we might not even have to move. Actors will be just fine, for if Jared Leto’s turn in House of Gucci has taught us anything, it’s that Hollywood makeup artists have the ability to completely transform a person’s appearance. And if they can make some average joe into a smoking hot sex symbol, there’s no reason why they couldn’t also make him look unrecognizably ugly if need be. (With any luck, the people who start new lives as Hollywood makeup artists would be just as good at that as they were at plumbing.) Musicians will have to rename their bands but they can still tour so long as they make a dramatic change to their typical attire and we’ll all pretend we don’t know it’s them. If Radiohead changes their name to Spotifytorso and dresses up like a Mariachi band, I’m still happy to pay $250 to sit in the nosebleed seats of my local sports arena and listen to their “cover” of Karma Police. Comedians are the one type of performer I think we can all agree to do without, given how we’ve recently become educated to the fact that making light of anything – absolutely anything at all – is inherently problematic.
We may not be able to laugh in good conscience anymore, but nor would we cry nearly as often. With everyone in on the plan, we won’t have to feel sad when we hear about one of our friends or family members dying, as the operating assumption will be that it’s fake. People will obviously continue to actually die at normal rates, so there will be some real ones sprinkled in here and there, but with the vast majority of death notices being phony, we’ll all just figure whenever we hear of a friend’s death that the “better place” they’re actually in is like Corpus Christi or some shit. And I’m sure we can all agree that most everyone currently in romantic relationships are only staying because they don’t want to get dinged by their landlord for breaking their shared apartment lease four months early. This way, couples can exchange a “somber” goodbye at the idea of having to go their separate ways and start over after faking their respective deaths for the good of the nation, but as soon as each is out of the earshot of the other, they’ll jump in the air and click their heels together. “Hot damn!” they’ll both exclaim. “Never again with his/her/their pubes on the toilet seat!”
If you’re still not on board, I’m sorry it’s come to this, but I’m going to have to pull out the big guns. Biblical scholars argue about when and where the contents of the Good Book were first assembled, but what is not in dispute is that the first list of Commandments actually included an eleventh which did not survive the cut. From scrolls recently unearthed in modern day Palestine, it was revealed that the book of Exodus originally had a 27th verse, which read, in part: “Shouldst thou find thyself ensnared in all manner of turmoil, verily thou shalt falsify thine own demise and beginneth anew in the village just up the road a little ways.” Why this verse was left out is hotly debated, with some suggesting that one of the editors was about to fake his own death and didn’t want anyone stealing his idea. My hypothesis is much more mundane, that they just didn’t want to introduce the complexity of if/then scenarios, and instead decided to keep it to ten things you should unconditionally never do. Plus, I think they realized there would come a day when smarty-pants atheists were liable to ask where the rest of the flow chart was and challenge the practicality of etching the whole thing, arrows and all, into stone tablets.
And now, as promised, the case against:
Some people may not wanna do it.
In conclusion, I’m sure you’ll agree I’ve tirelessly analyzed all the relevant factors and presented them to you in such a way that you can make an informed decision about this. I don’t expect your answer now, as I’m sensitive to the reality that there are certain drawbacks to this measure, and that saying goodbye forever to friends and family is not something most folks are eager to do at the drop of a hat. So go ahead and sleep on it and we’ll check in again in the morning, at which time I have every confidence you’ll have come to the conclusion this is the best and most practical path to freedom from all that torments us as a people. And hey, on the off chance it doesn’t go as planned, we can always just say fuck it and give everybody their original lives back. I’ve never faked my own death before so I’m not entirely sure what all it entails, but if I can hit Undo whenever I type something I realize afterward is monumentally stupid and don’t want to put it out into the world, how much harder could it be to reset all of society back to where it was before everyone assumed new identities? After all, assumptions are just abstract thoughts.
As we all well know, there are three guarantees in life: death, taxes, and passing away. With that in mind, let’s not lose sight of the obvious bonus that comes with this course of action, which is the near perfect dress rehearsal it provides for the actual end from which none of us will escape. When the time comes to shuffle off this mortal coil for real, we’ll have already gone through the motions at half speed, so the specter of annihilation won’t seem nearly so imposing! And for those disinclined to heed the pronouncements of the aforementioned Old Testament God, I’ll leave you with the gentler words of the Apostle Paul in his second letter to the Thessalonians: “Unto death, dear brothers, fake it ’til you make it.”
I await your response.