“How will we die in the future?”
26.09.2023 13:44
In 2045, around 1.2 million people in Germany will die. A new book project by Wolfgang George and Karsten Weber examines the question of what the end of life will look like in the future. 27 authors examine the social conditions of dying and what everyday individual and institutional care will look like for dying people as well as their relatives and those professionally concerned with death.
The guiding idea of the anthology is to offer analyzes and reflections as well as to highlight developments, trends and scenarios discussed today in relation to this last phase of life and its challenges in 2045. The volume brings together contributions from scientists from various disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, psychology, theology, pedagogy as well as social and cultural sciences as well as from health care practitioners (palliative care, emergency and intensive care, nursing, hospice movement, patient protection ). Looking into the future should help to identify possible challenges in shaping the end of life so that this phase of life can also be experienced humanely in the future.
Ensuring humane care in the future too
The plan is not to just limit it to the anthology and its visions of the future of dying, but rather to develop a project initiated by the TransMIT project area for health care research that will ensure humane care in the future. To this end, the individual wishes, needs and possibilities of those affected, their families and relatives must be placed even more consistently at the center of care provision. The regional multipliers of cities, municipalities and districts are addressed as the starting point for such a resilient approach, characterized by a shared culture of care and responsibility by both citizens and the relevant service providers.
How will the consumerist and service-oriented baby boomers behave?
How will the last phase of life and the associated care of the dying change in the next two years due to the central driving forces such as (socio-)technical development, demographic-sociological conditions, (lack of) personnel, but also climate change and foreseeable economic adjustments Change decades? What is the current state of affairs, what trends exist, is simply continuing them effective or do changes need to be made? Currently, around 80% people in Germany die in hospitals and nursing homes, which does not correspond to the expressed will of the population. How will the consumerist and service-oriented baby boomers behave when they form the central group of the dying population in 2045? What cumulative effects will the losses of traditional family composition and social commitment, which are already evident today, as well as the increasing isolation and the simultaneous increasing need for care and support have? Under these conditions, can it even be possible to make more organized dying at home possible and what role will special outpatient palliative care (SAPV), hospice movement, family doctor care and patient protection play in this? So what should those affected, the professional care providers and, last but not least, politicians prepare for or what role (expectation) will the affected stakeholders have in 2045?
Increasing influence on the understanding of death through (new) media
The consequences of an increasing influence on the understanding of death through (new) media (e.g. games or avatars) and the communication technologies associated with them, which are not yet fully foreseeable, are of particular importance and are highlighted in expert contributions to the book. For example, due to increasing virtualization, which extends to fantasy-driven visualizations, visions of personal dying and death arise, which extend to a transhumanistic human design that suggests immortality. A whole community is currently appropriating the death discourse, creating a new history and probably also business models of dying, death and mourning. The sociologist and theologian Reimer Gronemeyer, who is featured in the thematic area of the anthology, as well as the former Federal Minister of Health. D. Herrmann Gröhe wrote a foreword for each.