In our modern civilization, we still have not come to terms with the notion of death and its message. Like birth, death is a truth of life, and it cannot be conquered immediately as other aspects of life can be—through rationality, reason, faith, or science. So far, anyhow.

The most common moments for those near death, as they lay in their hospital bed, involve entering a reflective state—a state that factually proposes reflection on their total experience of life. Some fragment of their consciousness looks back at the picture reel. This is reflection. Like all reflections, it comes before movement, before action, before a new event arises. When something ends, we understand the sensations of an ending. Yet these are not recalled by those about to die; instead, there is a profound state of peace waiting to emerge and snatch the soul. It is clear: death is not the end.

Yet, despite this, people still have a great fear of dying—of losing their idea of themselves, the thing they name "I," the life they have lived, and the mind they have occupied. This fear is proof that we have not come to terms with the bare truths of existence. We do not fear opening a door, we have mastered the ability to open doors and not be overwhelmed by the act of opening the door.

Like birth, death is an ultimate truth—a seizure of a specific experience that disappears. It happens to every living animal on the planet and can occur at any singular moment in time. We are in total, blind submission to death and have zero influence or control over its final completion. The only control we can exert over death is through rational choice: we can choose not to do something that threatens our life. When we feel the impulse to jump from the edge of a cliff as we look down, we know to ignore this impulse and instead seek the experience we were having prior, looking ahead to the future.

When we are diving, we know not to descend beyond a certain depth, as this would potentially eliminate our conscious experience. These are the markings of our hopelessness in the face of death. These facts, however, we readily all agree upon. We know them to be subordinate, objective truths of our lives. We know it is an objective benefit not to jump from the cliff’s edge, no matter what intrusive thoughts the mind imposes on us. We know that death removes what we experience in the conscious present state. Just as with the cliff, we know we cannot control this great event; eventually, we will have to face it. It is a weight that lingers over us every minute.

But we like to ignore death. We push it away for our entire lives. Only when we notice the perils of aging do we begin to reflect on its role as the evicter from our inherited home. On these grounds, it becomes clear that our relationship with death is fundamentally infantile. It is spiritually immature, and likewise is our relationship to birth. Each year, we celebrate another marking on the biological record—another succession in our survival against death. Birthdays are just markers of survival against the vanquishes of death’s lure, and therefore, they are treated as worthy of celebration because we have remained calm under the threat of death. It would make sense to incorporate weekly birthdays under this general view, but we prefer to wait until the full cycle of the year has passed.

Our relationship to these frameworks surrounding the topic of animal lifespans is lived as though they are not true.

The graveyard is one of the only things in life that has not, and perhaps will never, age. By its sheer appearance, it remains archaic, untouched. We have not yet tampered with its natural state. It is one of the few things we have left alone throughout time. Of course, through technological advancements, we have gained access to better materials and tools. In this respect, the graveyard has evolved with us. But in our modern world, the graveyard has not been attended to sufficiently. It appears to me that we have left death alone because of certain moral and ethical traditions.

I believe the reason for this is that we have not evolved in our consciousness to consider the possibility of death as a mere fact of life. Similarly, we have not evolved the design and nature of the graveyard. In our all-too-human manners, we have focused on the material aspects of the graveyard and its contents: the choice of wood for coffins, the material of gravestones. We still have only two options: cremation or burial.

When you visit villages or small towns in the countryside, you will often find old rural graveyards near churches, typically on church grounds. The gravestones lie next to each other with their grimy concrete slabs. In most cases, as you walk through these graveyards, you will find yourself walking on the dead beneath you. Yet, this is not an act of disrespect or hatred toward the deceased. These graveyards are simply cluttered with the dead. Next to these locations, you will often find media companies, takeaways, barbers, banks, and even taxi ranks.

This is the dilemma we face in our modern environments. These graveyards that host the dead have become mere museums of death. They lie next to an entire modern complex, and the juxtaposition is vast and unsettling. In the near but distant future, as houses and streets become more modernized, these places will become nuisances for sight. They inspire only nostalgia for a past that has no relation to the individual seeing them in today’s world.

This otherworldliness happens so frequently, and it is not to our benefit. We find ourselves divided between realities, and our current reality must be upheld to the highest regard since it is the only active thing we are to contend with. Our world is, by its nature, already difficult to experience, and its rapid evolution demands simplicity. These graveyards, like the old wooden broom in a modern garage, no longer sit well.

The current state of our concepts of graveyards and its relation to death are apart of the same problem. This is an infantile problem, we are not mature enough to understand there is no need to honour the dead as they did during the past, we honour them in memory, and in our lives and at our homes, the issue here is that we have not matured enough to be able to accept these fundamental laws of life, instead, we want to interject with the notion that there is some sort of meaning that can be derived from the corpse of a loved one underneath the ground, yet knowing that they have left the earth. They are no longer here.

It comes to a matter of fear, again, it is an issue of letting go and making room for new forms of life, if you could converse with the person who you had lost and they could actively see and talk to you, it would be an objective truth, which we happen to apply during these times of grief anyway, that the person would not want you to suffer in grief nor waste time doing it and they would say "get over it its apart of life, I am okay, everything is fine!". Just like the child who will not let go of his teddy bear because it is his truest friend, we find ourselves not letting go of the idea that our loved one has gone from the earth. For every time you have announced to the dead that you miss them or that you have done a thing for them you really are only ever talking to yourself, spinning your own narrative, it is schizophrenia in sobriety without the chattering of entities.

The issue of this here is that if it gives a person meaning to converse with the dead, if they stop and abandon this what are they to do to fill the void? Is the void already not being filled with the emotions of grief? are they not being filled with the transition of daylight to night? Are there not duties to be attended too, tasks to complete? The magnitude of an individual's death is never enough to stop the process of life from happening, again this is a fact that we actively live by. It is a truth we live by in totality: their death does not stop our lives. Everything we apply to the notion of loss is merely a method of convincing ourselves that we are honorable—justifying our right to pity ourselves.

These are facts, not opinions. We all understand that life goes on after loss. It may take months or even years, but eventually, we will establish some other defining figure or element in our lives. These are the truths of death we live by. Yet, believing that graveyards must be preserved as symbols of sociological essence must be reconsidered.

Perhaps behind these archaic graveyards lies a collective fear of life’s bare truths—a refusal to confront mortality without the crutch of artistic hypocrisy. We believe that gravestones are useful for mourning, when perhaps true mourning requires no physical marker. It demands the capacity to process pain internally, without alchemizing it through tangible symbols.

Even after you have honored a deceased loved one, it is only for a short while that you carry this ritual within you. Eventually, life reabsorbs the memory, and your mind’s natural processes submerge the experience into the greater stream of consciousness. The agony disperses into various corners of your being, and by the unspoken law of existence, you must move forward.

I can make an objective claim about the possibility of our future: graveyards will become relics of the past—memories preserved through photographs and whatever remnants of old churches we choose to keep in sync with the evolution of modern existence. This transformation will emerge from a societal evolution toward a more warrior-like acceptance of mortality. We will no longer fear death, rendering gravestones and burial sites unnecessary.

Instead, we might allocate specific national ceremonies to honor those who died during certain years—large-scale events held annually across countries to memorialize the dead. Cremation could remain for those families who wish to hold onto some physical essence of their loved ones.

However, if the evolution of our mind can fully accept these fundamental truths of life, I propose that even these ceremonies will become obsolete. The human animal, equipped with a deeper understanding of life's cyclical patterns, will have no need for outward displays of mourning—only the quiet, inherent knowledge that life continues.

The instinct to honor the dead is something that, in itself, has no influence on the lifespan of an individual. How many times has it happened that a colleague has lost a loved one and needed time off work? Or when Queen Elizabeth died, we held a ceremony for her—now, months later, she is forgotten.

This is the cornerstone of our capabilities as humans: we forget and continue striving for life in forward motion. We complicate this truth by honoring our dead in fleeting moments. Bear in mind, the act of honoring is short-lived. We commemorate the dead through countless other means beyond graves and funerals.

In terms of the religious nature of funerals, particularly in Christianity, every funeral I’ve attended has housed non-believers, skeptics, part-time Christians, and broken families temporarily united by the aesthetics of the funeral despite rejecting its theological underpinnings. Afterward, these same individuals return to their habitual detachment, continuing to ignore each other’s lives. This reveals the underlying hypocrisy of the funeral. In such cases, the funeral is not a religious binding—it is, quite simply, a coping mechanism, an act of immaturity on the part of the attendees.

People who do not believe in or practice Christianity still desire Christian funerals. There are arguments to be made here: perhaps these individuals are believers without realizing it. Perhaps their instincts drive them toward Christianity’s symbolic and ritualistic expressions during life’s great eschatological moments. There is something deeply instinctual here, something that psychoanalytic theory would interpret as the unconscious return of the repressed: a collective need for symbolic closure that transcends belief itself.

Still, I believe humanity is capable of transcending this symbolic dependency. The future may bring an existential reorientation, where graveyards and funerals no longer function as necessary conduits for grief. Instead, collective memorialization could evolve into national commemorative events—annual acknowledgments of mortality stripped of individualistic attachment. Memory would be internalized, unburdened by material objects like gravestones or coffins.

I envision a world where humanity reaches a state of existential maturity—a psychological evolution that no longer requires symbolic repositories for grief. We would accept death not as something to resist or aestheticize, but as an immutable feature of existence. Death, like birth, would simply be, requiring no spectacle or architectural permanence.

In this future, humanity might finally relinquish its archaic necro aesthetic practices. There would be no gravestones to mark what memory already preserves. No funerals to stage loss, no symbolic spaces to anchor meaning. Instead, there would be only the lived experience of mortality—silent, enduring, and inextricably woven into the fabric of conscious life.

Our species must abandon the metaphysical crutches that have kept us tethered to the past, to a fear of the unknown. We must learn to integrate the reality of death as a continuous aspect of lived experience—not as an interruption, but as life’s final, inevitable condition. Only then can we fully occupy the present, free from the compulsive need to memorialize or monumentalize what is already understood: that life persists, even in death’s shadow.

As our civilization expands, the issue of overcrowding becomes a pressing inevitability—not just in cities, but in how we allocate land to the dead. Graveyards, by their nature, are static, fixed in place, and resistant to time’s forward motion.

They take up space meant for the living, creating an ever-growing lattice of absence carved into the landscape. This is more than a logistical problem—it is a psychological one. Humanity’s refusal to relinquish its need for physical memorials reveals a spiritual paralysis, a dependency on symbols that claim permanence where none exists. As graves multiply, they lock future generations into inherited zones of mourning, tethering the living to the past.

The true solution is not found in city planning or legislation—it is a psychological revolution. We must overcome our compulsive need to materialize memory through stone and earth. A future unburdened by graveyards would be a future where loss is processed internally, where memory lives in consciousness rather than the ground.

This would free not just land, but the collective mind—allowing us to build forward, unchained by necro-spatial inertia. In this evolution, death would be accepted as a lived truth, no longer requiring space but simply belonging to the perpetual stream of existence.