The feed doesn’t do dignity. It does velocity.

James Van Der Beek is gone, and within minutes, the digital wake began. It’s a predictable cycle of grainy screenshots, "end of an era" captions, and the inevitable pivot to self-reflection by people who haven’t thought about Capeside, Massachusetts, since the Bush administration. Leading the charge of the bereaved elite was Karan Johar, Bollywood’s primary architect of high-gloss yearning.

Johar took to his platform of choice to mourn the man who defined the late-90s chin-quiver. "I had loved Dawson’s Creek," he wrote, a sentence that feels less like a tribute and more like a brand alignment.

There’s a specific kind of friction when a billionaire producer in Mumbai eulogizes a teen idol from the American suburbs. It’s the friction of the global monoculture working exactly as intended. Johar didn’t just watch the show; he internalized its DNA. If you look at the DNA of Dharma Productions—the over-educated teenagers, the perfectly lit heartbreak, the agonizingly slow-burn romances—you see the ghost of Kevin Williamson’s writing room. Dawson’s Creek was the blueprint for a generation of filmmakers who realized that angst, if packaged with enough soft-focus lighting, sells better than reality.

We’re living in a period where grief is just another form of engagement. Van Der Beek’s passing isn’t just a tragedy for his family; it’s a content peg. For Johar, citing his love for Dawson’s Creek is a way to signal a specific kind of pedigree. It says: I was there. I consumed the Western canon of melodrama. I am part of this specific, televised lineage.

It’s easy to be cynical about it. Actually, it’s mandatory.

The tech platforms we use to "mourn" are designed to reward the fastest, not the most sincere. You don’t get points for sitting in silence. You get points for the 2:00 PM post that catches the mid-day slump in three different time zones. The algorithm treats a celebrity death like a software patch—something to be discussed, dissected, and then buried under the next update. Johar’s post is a data point in a sea of sentimentality, a way to keep the personal brand tethered to a moment of collective nostalgia.

But there’s a deeper, uglier trade-off here. By turning Van Der Beek’s death into a footnote in our own personal histories, we flatten the person into a trope. He becomes "the meme guy" or "the creek guy." We ignore the messy, complicated reality of a career spent trying to outrun a career-defining role. We forget that while we were watching him on a 14-inch CRT TV, he was a human being trapped in the amber of a WB contract.

Johar’s tribute highlights the weird, parasocial debt we think we owe these people. We feel like we knew them because they were the background noise to our first breakups or our tenth-grade failures. We think our "love" for the show entitles us to a piece of the tragedy. It’s a cheap transaction. We give them our attention; they give us a sense of belonging. Then they die, and we use their names to garnish our social media presence.

The cost of this constant connectivity is the death of private mourning. Everything is a broadcast. Even the silence is curated. When Johar says he loved the show, he’s reminding his millions of followers that he’s a student of the craft, a fan of the "it" factor. He’s not talking to Van Der Beek’s family. He’s talking to the mirror, and the mirror is us.

There’s something particularly grim about the timing, too. We’re currently seeing the slow-motion collapse of the very streaming models that kept shows like Dawson’s Creek in the public consciousness. Licensing fees are skyrocketing, and titles are vanishing from libraries overnight. The digital heritage we think we own is actually just a revolving door of 24-month contracts. Van Der Beek’s legacy is tied to a show that might be "unavailable in your region" by next Tuesday.

So, Johar posts. We like. We scroll. The pixels change color, and we move on to a video of a cat or a breakdown of a new AI-generated trailer. We’ve turned the act of remembering into a low-effort reflex. It’s a performance of empathy that costs nothing and settles even less.

The question isn’t whether Johar’s grief is real. The question is whether we’ve lost the ability to tell the difference between a genuine loss and a well-timed update.

How many more childhood icons do we have to burn for the sake of a few thousand likes before the tank finally runs dry?