Episode 35: Your Legacy is Now

[00:00:00] Speaker: When you die, your name has a shelf life. For some, it's going to be a lot longer than for others. It could be thousands of years before you're forgotten, but forgotten you will become. It may be hard to believe, but someday, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Taylor Swift, and the Beatles will all be forgotten, and likely sooner than you think.

As a person that really enjoys reading about history, and as an American, I can only remember the names of three presidents that came after James Madison and before Woodrow Wilson. That would be Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant. They're the only ones that come to mind. And that was not that long ago.

200 years ago, relatively speaking, is not a long time at all. Those are two lifespans of some very long lived people. There are standouts, of course. Most people have heard of Caesar, but I doubt many of them know who Caesar was, or that it was just a title, and could have been applied to quite a few different people.

Jesus, of course, stands out, but then he is the focal point of all adherence of Christianity globally. Go back another several thousand years and other than a handful of scholars that study that period of time, people hardly know anything. Even if we manage to maintain good records on humanity indefinitely into the future, we will all become irrelevant.

Nothing more than a name for ourselves. The idea that a person can stay relevant forever in the world of the living is absurd. Maybe if you can manage to convince us all that you're actually the Messiah, then you might succeed, but I wouldn't count on that. If you're extremely successful, you may become a footnote in history, like the old railroad tycoons.

We're the early industrialists of days gone by, but your contributions will eventually be forgotten by all but a handful of historians, if not forgotten entirely. If our legacy is defined by what we leave behind for future generations, then arguably being remembered is the least of what we can offer and likely the first thing to disappear.

The legacy we leave is far less how you are remembered, but how other people were changed by us. I like to think that the actions of a good person that gives their life helping others ultimately has a longer impact on the world than anything else. The lessons and examples that you set that people will learn from may not have your name associated with them, but wisdom can last for many, many generations.

The everyday lessons taught colonists to their children here in the United States To some extent, still live on today, 300 years later, even though almost no one today can name a single historical figure from that period of time until you get to the Revolutionary War. In a way, I think when we have children, we sometimes hope that we can live forever through them.

They are, after all, literally made from us, or at least they have half the blueprints that make up who we are. So it feels like in a very real sense, we can live forever that way, but your children are not you. If you have children that you have nothing to do with, it's hard to say that you left a legacy through them.

They may look like you and have some of your traits, but they are always going to be uniquely different and separate from you. I recently learned from watching a YouTube video, so take it with a grain of salt, that the way genes are passed down, it becomes statistically unlikely that any of your genome is passed down to your grandchildren once you get past like, It can happen, but it's, uh, more of a lottery system.

The exception being if you are a male with an unbroken chain of male descendants. So, certain genomes win the lottery and end up contributing an outsized amount, while most others lose and eventually contribute nothing. So even the hope that our children will pass some part of us on forever is largely hopeless.

All that being said, the only way I can The only way that we can make a lasting legacy is through our actions in life. Like a stone thrown into water that makes a ripple in a pond, the impact of the ripple may diminish infinitely, but it still continues infinitely. I think the reason children are important to our legacy Or not because they're going to pass on your name or your genome to future generations, but because you will never make a bigger impact on a person than you will your own children.

So if you can bring the best out of them, you can give the most to the world around you. And naturally, without children, there literally is no future for us to even be talking about. You can focus on getting your name on buildings, or you can make lots of impacts in the world by affecting other people's lives, hopefully for the better.

I think it's worth noting as well that sometimes people get convinced that getting rich and powerful is the best way to leave an impression on this world, and you will. But that impression will be fairly limited. To people's working lives, and I think the impact that most people are actually seeking are the kinds of impacts that don't affect what people do at work, but how they move through life.

I would like to believe that someday my influence made people more content joyful, resilient, or wise, and I think that's what we all really care about the most. When I was going to college, I watched so many buildings from the seventies get torn down or renamed. And the same will probably happen to your buildings too.

So why do we want to propagate our name into the world anyways? I think for a lot of us, having your name in the world is a symbol and it feels like we've made an impact. It is really only a symbol though. It holds meaning to us as a symbol, but it is nothing more. So the real question is, What is that name representing?

What do we want other people to see or to envy when they see that name? Our legacy as I see it is here and now. The number of people impacted by you is not going to be the masses of some future generation, but rather the people around you here and now. If you want a legacy, you need to build it with the people around you.

Why do we even want to be remembered in the future so badly? It's a time that is irrelevant to us. Those in the future may gain some benefit from viewing the past, but there's nothing for us to gain from an unknowable future. Ironically, it seems like We are far more preoccupied with the future than the past, which in turn would imply that the people living in the future will likewise be more preoccupied with the future than the past, and probably will not be thinking very much about us, because they will more likely be thinking about their own futures and worrying about their own legacies just as we are now.

The only place that is truly our own is now. So what are we doing? Looking into the future can certainly help create a more comfortable present for us in the future. But how much energy do we waste with blinders on to what we can offer now? Acting in the now to do things good or bad takes care of the future regardless.

If you are consistently doing good things in the now, you are likely to have good things happen in the future. So it almost isn't even worth thinking about the future when there is plenty for you to do And to enjoy and to learn in this very moment. So considering the impossible task of building a legacy that lasts through time, maybe your legacy is better served by defining it by how much you are currently offering to others today.

I love the examples I have in my ancestors and I appreciate their quote legacy. But if I go far enough backwards in time, I really have no legacy to draw from because I know nothing about them. I can appreciate the things my ancestors built, and the foundations they laid, but all of those things were completed in order to help people in their time, and consequently served us generations later.

But someday, they will be forgotten, and maybe our generation, or some other generation down the line, will be admired, or despised, while the people in the past that we admired, will Or despised today will be mostly forgotten. There are billions of people in the world. There are likely thousands that live within a few miles of you and there's not a single one of them that wouldn't benefit from some help.

On occasion, let's worry about who we can help today and let tomorrow take care of itself.