Legacy
This article is unfinished, made public for feedback and contemplation.
The first time you die, is when your heart stops beating.
The second time you die, is the last time someone speaks your name.
Or is it?
Legacy of memory
The concept of “second death” is deeply human, echoed across thousands of years and all peoples across the globe.
The ancient Egyptians believed that the afterlife persisted only as long as living people remembered the name, and therefore built edifices so permanent that they still stand today, 4000 years later. Jews recite the Kaddish on death’s anniversary, intentionally recalling the person. Many Native Americans believe that you “keep the spirit alive” through storytelling, passed down through the generations. The ancient Greeks called it “glory” (κλέος), embodied in the epics, as when Achilles is given the choice between a long, uneventful life or a short life with enduring fame (of course he chooses the latter). The Japanese Obon Festival and the Mexican/Aztec Día de los Muertos reaffirms continued second lives through remembrance. The Korean tradition of Jesa invites the departed with food and bowing, and the Chinese Qingming Festival (清明节) brings honors and rememberance to the tombs of loved ones.
In modern times, the rich perpetuate their names in charitable foundations and carved into cornerstones on university buildings. Discoverers’ names endure in theorems (Pythagorean) and particles (Higgs) and frameworks (Myers-Briggs) and conquered lands (Sandwich Islands).
Selfishly, I’d find comfort if my name were preserved in a truly beloved and useful concept, though it takes more hubris than I possess to lay claim to such a thing, hence SLC or Binstack or Needs Stack or Talk/Walk having their own names, or crediting another’s name in Fermi Estimation, or in cases of Love/Skill/Need and “Is there a problem,” simply remaining untitled.
Recently I’ve become enamored with a different sense of what it means to “leave a legacy”—one that doesn’t involve names. A concept of legacy that still provides motivation and pride in contributing to the knowledge and progress of humanity, without the memory of a person, and without the accumulation of power or money.
Legacy of contribution
The authors of myriad religious texts are unnamed, and yet their stories, lessons, laws, and ethics have determined the world view of tens of billions of humans, and will continue to do so.
If Charles Darwin had written his book anonymously, his ideas would still have echoed through science. Bitcoin thrives despite not knowing the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. If we erased all names from all discoveries, they would not cease to be discoveries, and would not cease to affect us.
As Juliet observed, a rose by any other name would indeed smell as sweet, and her world would have been happier had it not been poisoned by a name. “Romeo and Juliet” itself is an idea that was created long before Shakespeare penned his rendition, related thousands of years earlier in Pyramus and Thisbe, Layla and Majnun, Tristan and Isolde, and surely many others. Though the ultimate origin is lost in time—and might not even be singular—it is clear that ideas can echo wide (in geography) and deep (in time).
Like waves of light, sound, or water, ideas propagate even without reference to the originator. The creator is a stone dropped into a lake; the ideas are waves of influence moving in all directions, potentially infinitely far across time and space, especially if whipped up by new winds and new stones reinforcing the message, even if imperfectly and—better yet—in combination with still more ideas.
Most waves become indiscernible in the tumultuous surface, but they were undeniably part of the force eventually crashing on a distant shore of a distant mind of a distant human.
Releasing a legacy
What does it mean for all of us, today?
It means we should worry less about “content” for the sake of “eyeballs” and more about ideas that are worth repeating. Less about the attention it brings to ourselves, and more about how we can positively influence others, how we can help others become better versions of who they already are.
We should worry instead about how to generate ideas that are so important and true and compelling and repeatable that people wish to repeat it, and therefore the idea nestles in the brains of more and more people, who propagate it in turn. Even if we aren’t the ones doing the repeating and our names aren’t attached to the broadcast and our tweets aren’t the ones being retweeted.
This is easy for me to say. I already have a modicum of fame from writing for 17 years, broadcasting this article to 55,000 newsletter subscribers and a similar number of Twitter “followers” (such an insulting label), and working with thousands of people over 24 years of building companies and helping other entrepreneurs. It’s also easy for me to say, having enough money from selling one company and secondary sales from being the founder of another unicorn. So, sure, I can say “it’s not about fame or money.” A luxury shared by few others.
So, yes, this is a letter to myself, sorting out “legacy” means for me personally, after the goals of fame and money have been achieved, wondering how to contribute without “accumulating power” or other negative manifestations of so-called “legacy.”
Attribution is not without value. Artists should be paid for their work Attribution is useful for fame and money, and these are not trivial things. Proper attribution is ethical, and surely a minimum demand on future creators. Plagiarism is evil.
Still, for you as well, while accumulating fame and money is also worthy, and you should do that, it’s useful to ask: And what else? Or: By what means?
What stones will you drop into the lake? What deserves repetition? What influence do you deserve to have? What are the behaviors you wish to encourage in others? What are the lessons you wish humanity would heed?
You must, because the alternative is a nihilistic descent, remembering that your life is a weak flicker between the 13,770,000,000 years of nothingness that came before you and the far longer expanse after you die, most of which is a featureless soup of maximum-entropy minimum-energy photons. And even during this impossibly improbable blip, you’re just a speck on a soggy marble that is a speck in a star system that is one of billions in a galaxy that is one of billions in a universe 880,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 meters wide. And therefore we should live only for today, and only for ourselves, because to an extremely high degree of precision, we are nothing, and nothing matters.
I can’t argue against that logic. But neither do I have to make that conclusion; it’s equivalent to another nonsensical conclusion: that you might as well kill yourself, because it’s approximately the same thing as living.
Because of course living is not the same as dying. All humankind, for all time, has known this. While traditions differ, we all know this deep truth, even if it’s a truth about being human rather than a truth of physics. The truth is: It does matter.
My dad died 20 years ago, while I was holding his hand.
I had a vivid dream a few weeks after his death. He’s looking directly into my eyes. His face looks like it did when I was growing up, not the way it did in those last moments. He’s not saying anything. Somehow I hear the message regardless. I don’t mean a ghost is communicating; I mean my brain is processing something—something deeply important—just as your thoughts intrude upon you during meditation. The dream intruded upon me, but with wisdom that some part of my brain understood[[ and needed to communicate to the other part. And that wisdom was that, although someone is dead, so long as you remember them they are indeed not dead, and if their words or ideas are reflected in what you say, what you do, what you value, then that part of them is literally and physically living on, in you.
And you to the next.
https://longform.asmartbear.com/legacy/
© 2007-2024 Jason Cohen
@asmartbear
