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Comment by NKosmatos | Hacker News Reader

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NKosmatos

Well not really changed my life, but somethings I frequently think and try to follow.

Try to be nice and helpful to others.

Nothing that you do or say will matter after a couple of hundred years.

It’s better to regret something you’ve done, than something you haven’t.

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> Nothing that you do or say will matter after a couple of hundred years.

I don't think this is true at all.

Our names will be unremembered but that's a different thing. To the future we are as gods.

Think of all the people alive 200 years ago. I would say that, for the overwhelmingly vast majority, nothing they said or did matters now.

At the very least they had children, but also a lot of small things probably have a very long lasting effect.

The point is more that it doesn't matter in the way the person wanting to be remembered would want it to be, or in the way the person wanting to be forgotten fears it to be.

The most memorable thing most normal people could do is change their last name before having children.

If you’re Newton, Einstein, Gates, Elon or some other important figure, then I agree with you. But for the vast majority of all the rest of normal people (~99%), no one is going to remember us, no one is going to remember what we said or did and for sure our actions are going to have almost zero impact on the course of this timeline. It’s true that some individuals will play a very important role in the continuation of our civilization, but these are just a few compared to the billions of humans.

If you have children and they have children, etc, then at least something you did will matter to someone.

It may never be written in history books but every person alive today has an unbroken string of “things done” that stretches back in time.

And even if you never had children, anything you did or said that resulted in someone else having children shook the pillars of history.

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