My father was dead less than a month when I received a letter from his funeral home. The mail was hand-addressed. Another sympathy card, I thought, very nice. But no, rather than a note of condolence, the letter turned out to be something else I should have anticipated: a form asking me to “visit our Facebook page and leave a review. We appreciate your comments.”

Having never administered a father’s death and interment before, I frankly do not have much to go on when I consider death services. My dad’s ashes seemed properly cremated. His remains were returned to me in a sealed plastic box in a timely manner; this is all true.

But after paying out thousands of dollars, isn’t that all just standard funeral home procedure? Is there an emoji that represents my feelings toward this final transaction in the cycle of life? Would the crying face, the angry face, the wow face — or perhaps the heart — reflect my impression of a business that turned a small profit over my dad’s demise?

What is clear is that the standard “like” button would just not do. Services rendered over the burial of a parent require an escalated Facebook response.

Like death and taxes, requests for “feedback” have become the unavoidable consequence of just about any interaction. My inbox is now inundated daily with such demands.

“Share your thoughts,” begins one email, from my freelancer-payment system, about which I have no thoughts. “We’d like your feedback!” exclaims another, this one from L.L. Bean; here my online “shopping experience” consisted of purchasing a pair of rain boots, about which I have little to “share.”

“Reminder: James, We Value Your Feedback,” Delta Air Lines writes with increasing urgency after a flight to Chicago — following up on a similar missive I deliberately ignored just three days before. After a series of concerts, Carnegie Hall “invites” me to consider a “favorite memory” and “share your story on social media” about these special and all-too-rare evenings out with my wife.

Long ago I gave up ranking my occasional Uber trips on its scale of one to five stars. It was nothing personal. The drivers have always been hard workers who conveyed me successfully from Point A to Point B.

It’s just that once my trip is over I tend to focus on other things rather than adjudicate my transit experience. Could my lack of feedback be why my own passenger ranking hovers at 4.6 and why nearby cars seem to ignore my requests?

Fortunately, for now at least, I can still summon my local radio car service by telephone, no follow-up required.

“Feedback” has become the unrecompensed currency of the digital age. (China has recently implemented an Orwellian “social credit system” to rank every individual and business with a centralized score that will determine everything from jobs to schools to internet speeds.)

The largely automated requests have little to do with genuine interest in personal experience. These interactions are rather the coins in the fountain of our search engine algorithms.

They are the wishes of good fortune and the offerings of appeasement from the gods of Big Data. Look, they say in their piles at the bottom of the pool, other humans were here, and they did things just as you do things.

By now, we all know these numbers can lie. Maybe someone’s nephew loves to leave reviews for his uncle’s takeout? Or some tech titan found another buyer to slice and dice my every move into bits and bytes?

Still, as though I were inspecting a diamond through a loupe, like most anybody else, I now pore over these online results before making even the most mundane decisions. Why does this hotel have more stars than that one? Why should this coffee maker have a thousand more reviews than some other?

Having suffered a series of strokes, my father lived his life blissfully unaware of these demands on contemporary life. For over a decade he did not have an email address or even an internet connection. So I was the one to administer his online bill payments, contest his charges through chats and field hundreds of requests for comments, likes and testimonials.

After 87 loving, fruitful and honest years as a veteran, architect and parent, he chose to leave this bitter earth at just the right moment. He avoided the exit survey.

James Panero is executive editor of The New Criterion.