“Focus on social experiences while alive, not who will see me after I die”: A Study on the Tension between End-of-Life Loneliness and the Mechanisms of Digital Legacy

The end of life is often accompanied by profound loneliness, loss of agency, and concerns about meaning. While prior research in thanatechnology has largely focused on digital legacy management and post-mortem arrangements, the perspectives of dying individuals themselves remain underexplored. This study investigates how individuals experiencing loneliness at the end of life perceive and respond to six types of digital legacy mechanisms: platform persistence, digital asset transfer, pre-composed communication, memory structuring and maintenance, simulated interaction, and community co-creation. We conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 17 terminally ill participants who were experiencing long-term loneliness. Thematic analysis revealed a systematic rejection of the first five mechanisms, not because of their individual functions, but because they share a paradigm of persistent governance that transforms the deceased into a manageable digital object. This rejection was shaped by three cross-mechanism themes: the absence of trustworthy agents, an ethic of burden reduction, and a shift of attention from posthumous arrangements to present-moment experience. In contrast, the community co-creation mechanism received higher acceptance because it emphasizes immediate companionship and low-commitment participation. We discuss implications for the design of thanatechnology, arguing for a shift from posthumous governance toward present-oriented digital companionship systems.