50 years from now nobody will care about code you wrote, neat charts you made in Visio, or that you managed to get acquihired. Give your grandchildren something to care about.
Banks, power plants & other utilities, satellites, etc. spring to mind, sure, but even the more mundane.
If you're on OS X/macOS, here is the source code to the command line utility `cat`: http://opensource.apple.com//source/text_cmds/text_cmds-71/c...
Released by Berkley in 1989 making it at least 27 years old already, there are lines of code in there probably going back to the 1977 release, because this of course goes back to old school Berkley System Distribution release. 40 years old, next year, then. Can't see it's going to be modified much in the next 10 years.
I expect there is code being written today that will be considered useful enough to still be used in 50 years. I know a guy who worked on weather modelling for the Met Office - I bet his code is still in the models being run in 50 years time. It might have been modified, but there is a real chance his code stays intact.
Code has a half-life, not a use-by date. Work on code that embraces that, and write code with that attitude.
If you're working on some crappy app or site you _know_ will be dead in 2 years time, you might be OK with that. You might not. If you're not, go look for the careers where the half-life is extended.
Nothing you do, or statistically anyone does, matters after you move on whether it's moving on from that job or moving on from this mortal coil. Regret needs to be framed in the sense of did you regret what you did at that moment for that moment.
Thinking about your accomplishments in the frame of years after your dead is going to just depress you to the point you're going to consider making that end come a whole lot sooner.
Give your grandchildren something to care about? Why would they? By the time they come around, everything you've done is old news. Then your great-grandchildren, well they won't know anything about you. Your great-great-grandchildren won't even know you existed, just like everybody else on the planet. Don't do things to try to create a legacy that no one cares about.
I regret plenty, but I also don't care that I'm a meaningless nothing in the universe.
I know less about my great-grandparents, but I admire them for emigrating to America and struggling to make a better life for their kids.
Granted, on the cosmic timeline their actions don't amount to too much (because nobody's do). But I definitely feel the impact of my great and great-great grandparent's decisions.
Spend time with your kids, keep your marriage together. Love your family. They'll (eventually) see that you did, and they'll care very much about that.
I would say its the lack of a conscious choice that makes us using our phones so much.
Where was such analysis involved in driving my usage patterns?
Even if they do, it won't matter to you because you will cease to exist.
I plan on keeping these things in the family as long as possible.
Make things and leave them behind, and hopefully your family will still cherish them. I write and make board and video games, I'm hoping some of those will stay in the family. I also want to get into woodworking once I own a home, and make custom components for my games.
Once I managed to disconnect the stuff from the people/memories, I felt a huge relief just decluttering. I have maybe a book or a note from people, and of course photos, but I have procured only furniture/cuttlery/paintings/etc that I like, not those I inherited "just because". And I'd gladly see my children just chuck everything I don't have time to get rid of before I die, and hope that they remember me fondly as a person, not as someone dumping a houseful of emotional and literal baggage on them.
I'm likely projecting, and am sorry/happy if this is not your situation, but I identified up to a point and wanted to suggest to people like me that decluttering/chucking out old junk can be very relieving.
Worrying what your future grandchildren think about you is a ridiculous way to live your life.
It is easy to get your perception of meaningful poisoned by ideas like religion, so one has to be careful how he spends his precious moments in his window of consciousness
My big regret: not moving to the PacNW when I had the chance in my mid-20s. Things would probably be extremely different for me now if I had. Or maybe I should have tried moving to Asia; women there appreciate intelligent but quiet men who have good careers.
So if I'm really really lucky, 50 years from now someone will still be using some code I wrote. That's really the best I can hope for as far as having "an impact".
But that still means that if you're 50, the best you're likely to do (unless you're rich) is a woman who's in her early 40s, and that's really too old to have kids without assistance, and you'll run a greater risk of Down's.
Even if you're really rich, the 20-something girls who'll want you are going to be materialistic airheads, and will get boring pretty quick, and will not have any real feelings for you.
The other problem is finding a willing female. I don't know about you, but I would not expect to find a 25-30 year old woman wanting to have kids with me when I'm in my 50s, and really don't think that's realistic even at my current age (early 40s). Maybe you're better at talking your way into much younger women's pants than me.
I can also look for women around 40 like myself (which I've done), but here there's tons of problems: 1) many already have kids, and don't want more; 2) the ones that do are usually never married and suddenly are realizing they don't have much time left to have kids. Many of them are never-married for a good reason... (they're so nutty that no man sticks around for long). And they're frequently desperate, but in a bad way: they won't give anyone a chance because they want to find Mr. Perfect after a single date. They have completely unrealistic expectations; I've seen it many times here.
As an aside, I went on a Tinder date with a 43yo woman a while ago. We talked on the phone before meeting up, and one of the first things she told me was how she wanted kids and had already tried one round of IVF!! Talk about TMI... Of course, if she's on fertility drugs and taking IVF, that means that 1) she's likely infertile already, and 2) considering I'm just starting with her, it's likely she'll keep doing IVF while we're dating and end up with some anonymous donor's kid, and not mine. (And if we did have a kid together, it almost certainly wouldn't be conceived naturally.) Luckily, I guess, she didn't want to meet up again after the first date.
Honestly, I think it's a lost cause. At this age range, it's just too hard to find someone that wants kids and is in a good position to have them, and still is a great partner in every other way. The dating pool is simply too small, and most of the people in the dating pool have way too many issues.
Luckily, I just started dating someone who's really nice, very attractive, and really likes me, but she doesn't want kids. Considering this is the first woman I've had more than 2 very casual dates with since my divorce 2 years ago, the idea of passing up this opportunity just isn't appealing.