All of this misses the point entirely. We don&#x27;t mourn people as a sort of achievement award for a life well spent. We mourn people we feel a connection with, because of the pain we feel at losing the connection.<p>Jobs was a gifted promoter whose public speaking style tilted casual, informal, and personable. He was effective in part because, at least on stage, he made you like him.<p>Lots of people are likable, and when they die we don&#x27;t mourn them, because we never think about them. But Jobs forced people to think about him, because he was the public face of a blockbuster series of products that people talked about year-round. It&#x27;s not that launching those products was so praiseworthy that it &quot;earned&quot; him a mourning. It&#x27;s that the combination of his on-stage personality and the popularity of those products more or less forced us to.<p>That&#x27;s not a bad thing, by the way. I think there&#x27;s something human and basically nourishing about thinking about strangers as people, and constructing even a fabricated, artificial form of empathy for what they and their loved ones are going through. That those emotions have no practical connection to the world we live in is irrelevant.