6/27, Xi’an
Every year, I call this date my “death anniversary.” In 2022, this was the day I woke up in a hospital bed, so it turned into a strange private ritual. What people like to call a sense of ritual is, for me, only a way of reminding myself that on that day, in that year, I almost died. Everything that happened afterward sometimes feels as if another version of me—one from a different “what if” branch—continued living on a separate fork in reality.
Over the past year, and again at certain moments in the first half of this year, I’ve felt an intense anxiety about death. But death anxiety is not really fear of dying itself. It is fear of ultimate death.
At the studio, we run death-experience events. In each round, the people who “die” are taken into a small dark room and placed in total darkness, where they speak through a microphone with me, acting as the “god of death.” I always ask them the same question: if this had been a short life, among the nine strangers you met today, who left the deepest impression on you?
And almost every time, there is one person no one really remembers.
Even strangers in a one-time activity usually leave some kind of trace. Sometimes it is a meaningful conversation. Sometimes it is something shallow and accidental—even being resented because you look too much like someone’s ex still counts as being remembered. But the person no one remembers at all is the one experiencing what I think of as ultimate death.
There was once a lifestyle influencer who came to one of these sessions with a carefully curated persona built around being an “only daughter” and an independent woman. Throughout the entire event, she refused to engage with anyone on a deeper level. Even after her “death,” while sitting in the dark room, she chose solitude over conversation. When the event ended, she accused us of failing to provide the kind of service she expected, and even suggested the whole thing was a scam.
She seemed to have lived for so long under constant attention—posting daily life across platforms, receiving approval and interest from others as a matter of habit—that when she complained and no one fell to the ground to perform customer service for her, she was outraged.
So we asked her: during the event, did you pay attention to anyone else?
Her answer was: “There was no need.”
Which was interesting, because in that session, she was the only person who experienced ultimate death.
“Have you ever thought about why no one remembers you?”
She left the group in anger.
Of course she did not want to answer that question. More than that, she did not even believe it was a question worth asking.
The way people resist ultimate death is by leaving something behind. Having a child so someone will care for you in old age, or killing someone and becoming the subject of a manhunt—at their core, they are not as different as they appear. Both are ways of forcing yourself into the memory of others. The first is becoming more and more difficult. The second is far too costly.
Creation is also a way of leaving something behind. But now creation is under pressure from digitalization and AI at the same time. What is made can be erased more easily, altered more easily, imitated more easily, even replaced.
I’ve always liked the worldview of the Japanese RPG Xenoblade. In it, people are born into a cycle, sent into battle, reduced to ruin, and made to fight until death over and over again, becoming puppets for the killing and amusement of others. Only a few are allowed to reach a kind of coming-of-age ceremony, where, under the praise of a send-off melody, they dissolve into points of light and vanish into the sky. Only those people are permitted to truly leave the cycle behind—only they can cross over into the side that gets to enjoy the killing, and then continue enjoying it again and again.
Which of these two repetitions is more cruel?
The first wipes memory clean and sends life back to the beginning, born once more for war. The second preserves hatred, forcing people to torment others again and again in order to feel their own existence. The first kind of life still contains countless possibilities. Even if someone is wiped out by another nation the moment they are born, that is still one thread among innumerable causal lines. But the second kind has only one possibility left: endless killing.
What makes this more interesting is that the first is aligned with free will, while the second is a death-facing kind of fatalism. These two do not resolve each other. Most of the time, they stand in opposition. If everyone dies anyway, then why keep living?
Free will is what makes the final judgment. If the system collapses, then death is nothing more than the arc of a body leaping downward.
Take a familiar example. In fortune-telling, people often ask whether two people are meant for each other. If they are not, then separation is treated as inevitable. If someone knew that result in advance, would they still stay with their partner until the end? Some people would cut their losses early. Some would accept fate and simply enjoy the days they still have together. But most people never get to see that “result” ahead of time.
The appeal of fatalism is that it places a marked coordinate on the map in advance. It is like an unremovable marker in a game interface. Even while you are off doing other quests, the marker remains at the edge of the minimap. Then one day, you drift closer and closer to it. At that point, you get to decide: do you walk over and see what is there, or do you avoid it and leave as quickly as possible?
That marker on the map does not disappear until you actually arrive.
That is death anxiety.
It is there all the time—while you are busy with other tasks, and even while you bury yourself in meaningless side quests just to avoid it.
That point might be death itself. It might be the child who is about to leave you. It might be discovering that your husband has already changed his heart. It might be learning that your wife never loved you at all. It might be the medical report confirming a terminal illness.
And ultimate death is this: before you have even reached that point, you tell yourself that life as it is is good enough, and that you will never want to know what that marker actually means.