Business, Ethics, and Dehumanization Theme Analysis

While They Both Die at the End doesn’t engage outright with the question of whether or not the Death-Cast system (a business that gives people 24 hours’ notice of their death) is good or moral, it does ask a number of questions about the morality of the way that businesses and individuals with something to gain respond to Death-Cast. Though the novel never comes down explicitly on whether these responses are wholly good or bad, it does show that businesses will almost always take an opportunity to make money when it’s available—at times, with little regard for the ethics of doing so. However, the novel also goes to great lengths to show that while corporations may approach situations like this with a profit-first mindset (and, at times, with little genuine regard for the people their businesses ostensibly serve), the individuals who work for these companies are still human—and they overwhelmingly suffer from the dehumanizing nature of many of these businesses, at times even more than the people they’re exploiting to do so.

Responses to the Death-Cast system range from restaurants offering discounts or free meals to Deckers (people dying that day) to the rise of entirely new industries. These industries include the virtual travel industry, which creates interactive experiences so that Deckers can “travel the world” before dying; the virtual reality experience industry, which allows Deckers to swim with sharks, skydive, and engage in other dangerous activities in a virtual setting that won’t kill them; and the new sub-industry of apps and social media platforms to serve Deckers. In theory, all of these businesses and industries exist to do a good thing by giving dying people the opportunity to connect, make memories, and generally live up their final day alive. However, throughout the novel, Mateo (who’s just been informed of his death) is acutely aware that these companies nevertheless exist to make money. For these companies, Deckers are a fantastic consumer group: according to Mateo, their money is going to be useless as soon as they die, so many Deckers use their last day to spend money with wild abandon. At times, though, Mateo questions whether it’s ethical for companies to take advantage of this reality. Though Last Friend, the friend-connecting app that Mateo and Rufus use to meet, is free, several others—including a hookup app that connects people with Deckers for no-strings-attached one-night stands—charges a per-day fee. Is it really ethical, Mateo wonders, to put a price on a final sexual experience, or on a sexual experience with a Decker? For that matter, is it ethical for the local virtual travel plaza to ask for donations from Deckers but to charge accompanying friends and family members $100 for the privilege of spending their last day with their loved in a faux foreign country? Though neither Mateo nor the novel fully answer this question, the novel does suggest that despite the fact that these apps and industries serve important needs, there are nevertheless serious ethical questions surrounding the businesses’ models and their very existence.

While Mateo and Rufus mostly engage with these companies as just another pair of consumers in impersonal customer service situations, the novel’s occasional shift to a third-person narrator provides insight into some of these customer service personnel and the emotional toll of working in these industries. Overwhelmingly, the novel shows that while Deckers and their loved ones might be the financial victims of business practices that are arguably predatory, the employees of these businesses also suffer day in and day out on an emotional level. In some cases, they even numb themselves to the realities of their job and, in some ways, become less human. Andrea, a Death-Cast herald (a person tasked with notifying Deckers of their death), is one of those who has checked out emotionally. She believes that Deckers are no longer people; they’re just a list of phone calls to get through in order to break her record of 90 calls in one three-hour shift. This mindset allows her to focus on the fantastic pay and benefits she receives as a herald, but it also means that her manner during the calls leaves a lot to be desired. She calls Mateo and continuously mixes up his name with that of her last call, something that unfairly raises Mateo’s hope that his ending up on the Death-Cast list was a mistake. Because she doesn’t care about the implications of her job, she is objectively bad at it—but she is able to live with herself.

Other employees, such as the VR center attendant Deirdre and the herald Victor, take an entirely different tack. Deirdre considers suicide because she can’t stand how impersonal and consumerist her job is. She feels complicit in helping Deckers waste their last day spending money on experiences that she believes are no substitute for the real thing—or for spending time with loved ones. Victor, too, pours all he can into comforting Deckers whom he calls—and because of this, he finds himself needing to use the free counseling that Death-Cast offers its employees, as the emotional toll of his job starts to severely impact his mental health. Deirdre and Victor’s experiences make the case that compassionate employees of these companies are possibly the ones who suffer the most from this consumerist response to Death-Cast, as well as the ones best positioned to recognize the potentially unethical aspects of their employers and their line of work as a whole. Though They Both Die at the End offers no real remedies for the consequences of this capitalist response to Death-Cast, it nevertheless makes it clear that there are major ethical and moral issues that arise when companies commodify death. Doing so dehumanizes both those who are dying and those who serve the dying.