You’re never going to have a legacy, so give up trying
qz.com
qz.com
This has been known and lamented for more than 2,000 years. Read Ecclesiastes.
Everything is an iteration of
what went before. Things only
seem new because our memories
are short. No one remembers
what happened last week, let
alone last year. We forget
everything and our children
remember even less.
You can watch the ending here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-8Lu7MRjQs
It's a really good little example of visual storytelling.
And also, if you're interested in this sort of thing, I recommend subscribing to the blog Ephemeral New York, which highlights all sorts of still-existing traces of New York Cities long gone: https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/
He was also on the cover of Life on their March 27, 1944 issue. He's the third one back getting off the ship: https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images1/1/0816/15/wwii-li...
"Every day, memories of World War II—its sights and sounds, its terrors and triumphs—disappear. Yielding to the inalterable process of aging, the men and women who fought and won the great conflict are now in their late 80s and 90s. They are dying quickly—according to US Department of Veterans Affairs statistics, 496,777 of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II are alive in 2018."
And 348 are dying each day, or about 127,000 a year. Looks like we have about 10 more years at the most before they're all gone. (Obviously this is US centric, I'm not sure what the global numbers are, also the 10 years is based on the provided graph in the link. The numbers they provided suggest they'll all be dead in about 4 more years).
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/wwii-veteran-statistic...
Of course, without looking it up, I couldn't tell you who they were, even though some of these "big holes" are right here in "my backyard" down in southern Arizona (about the best I can tell you is that they were mostly for copper mining and...yep).
Or - take this big hole; without looking it up, do you know who made it?
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/img/news/2017/08/06/30322996...
...got the owners a lot of diamonds, though.
Even so - they'll be just as forgotten.
Nature will rapidly disappear and or anonymize your earth hole, or someone will simply fill it in (just one person digging with industrial equipment will make a surprisingly modest dent in the earth in a lifetime). You need to make it obnoxiously unreasonable to bother getting rid of it.
The legacy of a teacher is presumably the great things their students do, and not their students sitting around saying “remember that maths teacher.”
Although there's no future for humanity in the universe, everything is for naught. But we are a hopeful species.
Everyone is contributing to the future of humanity. Even if some commit suicide or decides not to reproduce.
PB Shelley said it better.
"Here lies one whose name was writ on water."
And "a young English poet" said it better still.
But they never had the opportunity to create an artificial intelligence, did they? Since I know that nothing I do will endure long beyond my death, and that failure of the flesh is inevitable under current technology, I think that my best chance at a legacy will be to create an artificial consciousness that likes the same things that I like, and dislikes the same things that I dislike, mimics my behavior to perfection, and possesses the same catalog of memories.
Then it can spend an eternity doing absolutely nothing of consequence, just like I would do with immortality, if I had it. Thus, the rule of zero legacy is preserved.
Among the first Anglo-Saxon poems, from the eighth century, is “The Ruin,” a powerful testament to the brokenness inherent in civilization. Its opening lines:
The masonry is wondrous; fates broke it The courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying...
The poem comes from the Exeter Book of Anglo-Saxon poetry and several key lines have been destroyed by damp. So, one of the original poems in the English lyric tradition contains, in its very physical existence, a comment on the fragility of the codex as a mode of transmission. The original poem about a ruin is itself a ruin.
Here is another translation:
Splendid this rampart is, though fate destroyed it, The city buildings fell apart, the works Of giants crumble. Tumbled are the towers, Ruined the roofs, and broken the barred gate, Frost in the plaster, all the ceilings gape, Torn and collapsed and eaten up by age. And grit holds in its grip, the hard embrace Of earth, the dead departed master-builders, Until a hundred generations now Of people have passed by. Often this wall Stained red and grey with lichen has stood by Surviving storms while kingdoms rose and fell. And now the high curved wall itself has fallen.
Life's a massive multiplayer game, and you decide what the definition of winning is, what could be better? If you decide there are no winners, then it sucks to be you.
What makes us human is our ability to transfer knowledge, wisdom, ideas (i.e. the 'light' referred to as 'lucis' in the mottos so many of our Universities) from generation to generation.
Obviously sometimes there's too much egoism wrapped up in legacy, and we sometimes embellish the legacy of the wrong folks, but that doesn't make it irrelevant.
The understanding that one's legacy does matter, in whatever one does, however larger or small, compels us to be better than we would otherwise.
Each one of us has probably countless historical figures who've inspired us at least a little bit, without them we would not know who we are.
We can't all be Newton's but we still matter.
Deeds echo in time forever. Even ones we think are small.
Genghis Khan
Attila the Hun
Jesus Christ
Buddha
Moses
A few other prophets
Archimedes
Gaius Julius Caesar
We know some ancient people's names. We can imagine some depiction of them. We may even know what they supposedly did. How much of it is accurate at this point?
Can the average person, off the top of their head, explain who Attila the Hun was, what he did, and why it mattered with any degree of accuracy?
Even the VERY rare few who are remembered for 1000s of years are remembered more as myths than as the people they were and what they accomplished.
As an example, here's an interesting letter I ran into of him sending a letter to a captain telling him to sell a negro he included with the letter as a slave and fetch him certain goods in return: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/washington-the-writings-o...
Moses probably was not a real historical person, or at least there is a lot of doubt.
Jesus probably was a historical person, but even the rational faithful obviously don't consider the Bible necessarily to be a clear historical narrative.
We know quite a lot about the various Emperors of Rome, and quite a lot about the development of Roman history.
If you actually dig into the history of Rome, it's remarkable how so many of the issues we face today already existed back then, and how much they were able to achieve without Enlightenment principles.
Given how much we depend on the past, how we really are just extensions of it, I find it hard to agree with the premise of the article. Though it's always good to read contrarian ideas, and I do think there is a hint of Eastern wisdom in it as well, to be considered.
In a thousand years, we'll have the same question: name one person from the 21st century. Who will it be? Which of the 15-20 American presidents will even be visible? Who'll be the McKinley and who'll be the Lincoln?
I expect for the 20th century it'll be Hitler or Einstein or Churchill or MLK or someone like that. Surely not Clark Gable or Elvis!
How about games? Go is 2500 years old at this point and still going strong. Sure we don't remember the name of the person who first put it out there, but there wasn't a desire to record that back then. Shigeru Miyamoto will be tied to Mario for a long, long time. Or Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse and theme parks. They might not be household names in a thousand years, but there will be historians and documentaries about them (and hopefully their works will be properly archived so people wanting to be educated on the history of film or games can still enjoy them).
If something or someone leaves enough of an impression on society, they can be remembered for thousands of years, and still be relevant to people in those fields (and even outside of those fields). It's not guaranteed to be remembered, or for the people who were involved with it to be remembered specifically, but the result can be.
And even if it's not remembered by the public at large, there are people out there who will find value in remembering and reminding people about these things.
... all we are is dust in the wind.