In the grand, rotting tapestry of modern existence, there is perhaps no thread more representative of our collective spiritual failure than the recent, lonely expiry of Jiang Ting. She was a forty-six-year-old woman in Shanghai who had the audacity to die shortly before Christmas. She didn’t die in a blaze of glory, nor amidst the weeping embraces of a loving family. No, she died as most of you likely will: alone, in a one-bedroom apartment, surrounded by the deafening silence of a society that had long since ceased to perceive her as anything other than a consumer of oxygen and takeout containers.

Naturally, because humanity is a species of voyeuristic ghouls, her death has sparked a 'debate.' The media, always eager to feast on the marrow of tragedy for clicks, has latched onto this story not out of genuine mourning, but because it highlights a terrifying logistical inconvenience. Jiang had no partner. No children. Her parents were dead. She was a demographic dead end in a country obsessed with numbers. Neighbors, those paragons of useless hindsight, described her as 'quiet.' They only saw her when she was fetching food or going to work—the two primary functions of the modern drone. 'She rarely chats,' one neighbor mumbled to a reporter, likely while trying to remember if they owed the corpse any money. It is the classic epitaph of the urban invisible: she didn't bother us until the smell started.

But let us cut through the performative sadness and get to the meat of the matter, shall we? The reaction to Jiang’s decomposition is not one of heartbreak; it is one of hygienic panic. Enter Xiong Sisi, another professional living in the solitary confinement we call 'independence' in Shanghai. Her reaction to the news was so beautifully, horrifyingly pragmatic that it deserves to be carved onto the tombstone of the 21st century. She isn't worried about the metaphysical void or the crushing loneliness of the soul. No, she told the press: “I don’t care how I’m buried, but if I rot there, it’s bad for the house.”

There it is. The naked, unvarnished truth. We have reached a point in our civilizational decline where the primary anxiety regarding death is its impact on property values. God forbid your liquefying remains stain the parquet flooring or lower the resale price for the landlord. It is the ultimate capitalist triumph: even in death, you are an asset liability. You are not a tragedy; you are a cleaning fee.

So, what is the solution offered by the brilliant minds of the tech sector? Is it a return to community? A strengthening of social bonds? Don't be an idiot. The solution is an app. Specifically, the 'Are You Dead?' app. This is apparently where we are now. Because marriage rates and birth rates have plummeted to record lows—because people are finally realizing that bringing children into this burning dumpster fire of a world is a questionable investment—we now need software to poke us with a digital stick to see if we are still twitching.

This app is being touted as a 'practical response' to the isolation crisis. It is nothing of the sort. It is the final surrender. It is an admission that we have built a world so cold, so atomized, and so utterly devoid of human connection that we need an algorithm to check our pulse because no human being will bother to do it. The app effectively automates the role of the concerned relative, outsourcing empathy to a server farm. It pings you, and if you don't respond, it presumably alerts someone to come collect the meat before it devalues the real estate. How efficient. How wonderfully, terrifically bleak.

The Chinese media debates whether this is 'troubling.' It is beyond troubling; it is the logical conclusion of a species that hates itself. We have traded the messy, annoying, intrusive nature of family and community for the sterile silence of the apartment block, and now we are shocked—shocked!—that there is no one there to hold our hand when the lights go out. The Left will blame the pressures of capitalism for isolating the worker; the Right will blame the abandonment of 'traditional values' for the lack of families. Both are missing the point. The point is that humans have created a society where a woman can exist for forty-six years and her primary legacy is a debate about whether her corpse will ruin the Feng Shui.

So, go ahead. Download the app. Let the algorithm watch over you. It’s the perfect companion for the modern age: it doesn't judge, it doesn't eat your food, and it ensures that when you finally expire, someone will come to scrub the floors promptly. Jiang Ting is gone, but the apartment is available, and thanks to the app, the next tenant won’t even smell the despair.