The algorithm doesn’t care about your childhood. It doesn't care about the way you used to sit in front of a heavy CRT television on Wednesday nights, waiting for the soft-focus angst of Capeside to wash away your own high school insecurities. It just sees a spike in search volume.

James Van Der Beek is dead at 48. That’s the headline that’s currently being sliced, diced, and optimized for maximum click-through rates by every SEO ghoul from here to Mountain View. It’s a brutal, jagged pill to swallow. Van Der Beek, the man who effectively pioneered the "sensitive leading man" archetype before the internet turned it into a meme, lost a fight with colorectal cancer. He wasn't old. He was younger than most of the VPs currently steering the platforms where you’re reading this news.

It feels wrong. It feels like a glitch in the timeline we were promised back in 1998.

We’re living through a weird, prolonged funeral for the 90s. But this one hits different because Van Der Beek was one of the few who actually figured out how to survive the transition from "teen idol" to "digital artifact." He didn’t fight the "Crying Dawson" meme; he leaned into it. He understood, long before the rest of us did, that the internet treats human emotion as a commodity. If you can’t beat the GIF, you might as well be the one to post it.

But cancer doesn't care about your digital legacy. It’s a biological siege. There’s a specific, ugly friction in seeing a man who spent his final years posting photos of a rugged, pastoral life in Texas—kids, wide-open spaces, a $20,000 vintage Land Rover—get taken down by a disease that thrives on silence and late diagnoses. We like to think that if you have enough money, enough wellness influencers in your DMs, and enough organic kale, you can buy your way out of the human condition. You can't. The trade-off for all our modern connectivity is a front-row seat to the fact that we’re still just fragile carbon-based lifeforms waiting for the hardware to fail.

The "brave battle" narrative is the first thing the PR machines churn out. It’s a comforting lie. It suggests that if you just fight hard enough, if you’re "brave" enough, you can win. It’s a way to market death so it doesn't look like the messy, chaotic disaster it actually is. Van Der Beek was private about the specifics for a long time, likely because he knew the moment he went public, his life would become a "journey" for us to consume. A content arc. He eventually shared the news, but the timeline was cut short before the "survivor" brand could even take root.

Now, the ghouls are out in force. Google News is currently a graveyard of "James Van Der Beek Net Worth" and "Who is James Van Der Beek’s Wife?" searches. The digital machinery is busy indexing his life, turning 48 years of existence into a series of metadata tags. It’s the same machinery that turned his face into a joke for a decade, and now it’s pivoting to manufacture a sense of collective loss it doesn't actually feel.

We’re obsessed with the mortality of our icons because it reminds us that our own subscriptions are going to expire eventually. Seeing Dawson Leery die makes a certain generation feel like the foundation is rotting. It should. The stars of the WB era weren't just actors; they were the first batch of celebrities we "owned" through the emerging internet fandom. We wrote the fanfic. We clipped the low-res JPEGs. We watched them grow up in 480p and then HD, thinking they were the protagonists of a story that wasn't supposed to have an ending this abrupt.

So, here we are. Another piece of the cultural landscape—the real one, not the buzzword version—gets paved over. We’ll get the tribute reels. We’ll get the "friends of the star" quotes sold to People for five figures. We’ll get the inevitable streaming spike for Dawson's Creek, which Netflix or Max will surely capitalize on with a "Remembering James" category on the home screen by tomorrow morning.

The internet will move on to the next tragedy by Friday. The algorithm will find a new spike to chase. But somewhere in a farmhouse in Texas, there’s a pile of toys and a very expensive, very quiet Land Rover that don't care about the trending topics.

How many more times can we watch our youth get re-indexed before we realize we’re the ones being archived?