All Punchlines, No Heart Attacks

On the seventh day after a middle-aged man died of sudden cardiac arrest, his wife, Su Qing, used his phone with its shattered screen to find his last comment: “AI-generated filler!!” She didn’t cry. She simply laid her hand on the screen. She remembered that seven days earlier, at 3:47 a.m., he’d suffered a sudden heart attack. His left hand was still resting on Ctrl+S, and the screen showed an unfinished sentence: “Lin Mo finally understood that this world had never given a forty-year-old man...” What came after the dash? Now everyone wanted to know the answer. His withdrawable after-tax balance on Tomato Novel was 237.6 yuan. His short videos on Douyin had stalled at 27 views. When I died, nobody knew who I was. Su Qing posted my obituary using my account, and forty-seven thousand people poured into my novel’s comment section, crying, “Come back.” But I couldn’t come back. This is the deepest fear of an ordinary content creator in the age of AI: working hard and going unnoticed, only to be recognized after death. If you’ve ever worried over your stats and traffic late at night, if you’ve ever feared that no one would notice your hard work, read this, then remind yourself: just being alive is pretty great!