We got the notification on a Sunday. Most of us were probably mid-scroll, looking for a distraction from the looming work week, when the algorithm decided it was time to process the death of a 90s icon. James Van Der Beek. Dead at 48. It’s a number that doesn’t sit right. It’s an age where you’re supposed to be worrying about your cholesterol or your kid’s SAT scores, not staring down the barrel of stage four colorectal cancer.

Then came the "details." The news cycle doesn’t just let a man die; it needs a narrative arc. The one that’s currently being fed into the meat grinder of social media is the vow renewal. Days before he passed, Van Der Beek reportedly renewed his wedding vows with his wife, Kimberly, from his bed. It’s a story designed to make you feel something between a sob and a shudder. It’s intimate. It’s devastating. And in the hands of the digital content machine, it’s also high-performing engagement bait.

That’s the trade-off we’ve made. We’ve turned the most private moments of human suffering into a spectator sport optimized for the mobile web. You can almost see the SEO strategists leaning over their desks, tweaking the headlines to ensure "wedding vows" and "deathbed" are close enough together to trigger the right emotional response in the Google News feed. It’s a morbid kind of math.

Van Der Beek was always a strange fit for the celebrity-industrial complex. He was the face of Dawson’s Creek, a show that practically invented the modern teen drama, but he spent the rest of his career trying to outrun that ghost. He became a meme before "meme" was a household word. You know the one—the ugly-cry face. For a decade, his genuine emotional beat on a soundstage in North Carolina was used as a digital punchline for everything from a bad breakup to a dropped ice cream cone. There’s a cruel irony in that. The man who gave the internet its favorite shorthand for performative sadness ended his life in a way that was undeniably, agonizingly real.

But the internet doesn’t do "real" very well. It does "content." We consume these stories through the same glass rectangles we use to order overpriced burrito bowls or check the weather. The friction here is obvious, though we usually ignore it. To get the "raw" story of a dying man’s final romantic gesture, you have to scroll past an ad for a $1,200 mesh router or a sponsored post for a "disruptive" new life insurance startup. The juxtaposition is enough to give you whiplash. The price of our constant connectivity is the total erosion of the sacred. Nothing is too heavy for the feed.

There’s also the specific horror of the age. Forty-eight. For the demographic that grew up watching Van Der Beek navigate the creek, this isn't just a celebrity death. It’s a bug report for their own mortality. It’s a reminder that the hardware eventually fails, no matter how much you optimize the software. We see the headlines about the "vow renewal" and we use them as a shield. We focus on the romance of it because the alternative—thinking about a father of six disappearing before he hits fifty—is too much for a Tuesday afternoon.

The media outlets aren’t going to stop. They can’t. The business model depends on these micro-bursts of collective grief. Every click on a "final photo" gallery is a fraction of a cent in a bucket. It’s a race to the bottom of the emotional well, and we’re all holding the shovels. We demand more access, more "last words," more grainy photos of a man who just wanted to say goodbye to his wife without a million people watching.

We’ve built a world where you can’t even leave the room without someone checking your pulse for clicks. We’ll keep refreshing the page, waiting for the next update, the next quote from an "anonymous source" close to the family. We’ll share the articles and add a "heart" emoji, convinced that we’re participating in a moment of communal mourning rather than just feeding a hungry server farm in Virginia.

What happens when there’s nothing left to harvest? What’s the shelf life of a deathbed vow once the next trending topic drops?

The algorithm is already looking for the next thing. It doesn't have time for a moment of silence. It’s got a bottom line to meet, and your grief is just another data point. How much do we really need to know about a stranger's last breath before we feel like we've gotten our money's worth?