Story Time: Me & Avicii

The following is a transcript of the video above — please excuse any typos.

The day I found out that Avicii died I was walking off of Ipanema beach in Rio de Janeiro Brazil. It was the first of an 8-day Jiu jitsu training camp — and after 14 hours of travel, we promptly ran face first into Cai-pi-rin-has and sunburns before our first sparing session that night — my teammate looked at his phone to order us an Uber and said -

“Well I guess we’ll never forget where we where the day we found out that Avicii died.”

So far, he’s been right.

All week you couldn’t get into a cab without hearing wake me up or Hey Brother.

Every acai joint, and bar and club — paying tribute to this gone-too-soon button masher.

I don’t particularly like Avicii’s music, but as a former content writer for a global fitness company I’m intimately familiar with his catalogue. I generally keep up with EDM just well enough so that I can have a conversation with an intern and not sound like that meme of Steve buchemmi

But this death hit me oddly hard

Tim Bergling — Avicii’s birth name — had long struggled with his mental health, anxiety and chronic digestive issues associated with excessive alcohol consumption — he even had to have his gallbladder removed at one point. Sadly his cup became too full to keep from pouring over and ended his own life with the broken shards of a wine bottle in a small village off the coast of the Arabian Sea.

Tim was at least in good company in 2018- Mac Miller, Aretha Franklin, Anthony Bourdain, Verne Troyer and my own mother actually — exactly 96 day’s before Tim, which is not unrelated to how I processed his passing.

In recent years, celebrity death has become sort of omnipresent, it seems like not a week goes by without seeing a social media motorcade of “RIPs,” “Heaven just got a real one, bro,” alongside a well-curated image of diciest’s last red carpet appearance.

It feels like it’s happening more frequently, because, it is.

Not because famous people are dying at a faster rate, but because there are way more famous people than there used to be.

The pool of talent and media outlets used to be smaller and harder to access.

But as the means to celebrity become more democratized and the mediums to fill grow, so does number of names and faces that we all know and the more people we will have to mourn.

What hasn’t changed is our bandwidth — the time and emotional energy we can commit to anything, so we live in an era empathetic schizophrenia where we feel a little bit of everything all the time but not for very long and rarely very deep.

Earlier in this piece I referenced my mother’s passing directly after saying the name the actor made famous for playing mini me — that was a strategic choice to create a small moment of dissonance for you that is reflective of this phenomena.

But it was also so I could loop this back to this:

My mom’s death created an existential shift in how I am in the world- quite literally — sadly I’m no stranger to death — but to suddenly lose someone who’s role in the world sits in relief to your own forces you to catch your breath.

Not to turn this into a tech-bro thought experiment, but for me the best way to visualize this is with a Venn diagram (if you don’t know what a Venn diagram is, it’s the one of those graphs of overlapping circles that people draw in meeting when they have nothing productive to contribute.

Over time it would look like this:

a circle: my mom’s life before me

then a circle with a little circle inside: my mom’s life and my life.

And you would notice that our circles grew at the same rate but my circle only existed within her circle.

And then on January 14th 2018 her circle would stop growing, and mine would continue to grow but for the first time only outside of her circle.

Now if you add a third circle to the Venn diagram one that represent’s Avicii’s life, you’ll have three concentric circles for a while, and then on April 20th 2018 precisely as I’m exiting the beautiful blue Atlantic on the coast of Brazil Tim’s circle stops and mine keeps going.

I initially thought it would be something I could describe with an Everest metaphor- a peak, so high that it dwarfed any loss that followed with the exception of a few Avicii-like incidents on my decent back to sea level.

I Then I’d easily be able to calculate the impact of someone’s passing as the inverse of the distance between their circle and my mom’s circle — the less space between them the more effected by it I would be.

But that’s not the right metaphor — honestly, I can hardly follow it.

I think a better one would be, you know those viral videos of color blind people putting on those special glasses to see color for the first time? It’s a lot like that — like you live in a world where this crazy thing has been happening all around you and for the first time ever you can see it everywhere you look.

Once I watched my mom’s circle stop growing — it fundamentally changed the way I saw anyone’s circle stop growing.

So yeah I felt Avicii’s death a lot more than I expected and many more since — but I’m just grateful that I woke up before was all over.