What We Leave Behind
A Dose of Rationality Newsletter and Enquiries, Vol. II
The philosopher is that which never forgets their own mortality. The intransigence of the transience of all that is. No one lives forever. Nothing lasts forever. Perhaps it is this very fact that gives life meaning in the first place. We are bounded not only by finite space, but finite time. What we do, what we become; well, that is what life is.
My own nature is ephemeral, mutable; in flux. I no longer consider myself to be the same person as the Anthony of the past. I know that Anthony did great things, important things. Work that has touched thousands of lives. Work that will hopefully influence the future of our species in a positive way. Work that will outlive the body I inhabit.
The fact that the Anthony of the past was able to recognize this importance; is that why they did it? Solely to be remembered? Solely to leave something behind, a legacy of sorts?
I personally don’t think so. Know thyself, commandeth the Oracle at Delphi. If I know my past self, the person I once was did not really desire to do much of importance at all. They were, to put it mildly, a slacker. They didn’t want money or fame. They did end up with one of the two anyway. A rather large audience even now. What you all saw in me at the time, even I don’t know. But here we are.
Consider the counterfactual. Consider a world absent the popular writings of Anthony Remis. In such a world, I would still leave something behind upon my corporeal departure. I would leave my corpse, for one. The atoms and molecules which had once propelled me scattered to a billion, billion places. And I would leave a negative legacy, a legacy absent that which could have been.
The ‘negative legacy’ is an interesting idea. The trope of “multiverses” has become popularized to such an extent that I think you can understand it without much effort. Imagine everything you could have ever done with your life, but didn’t. Thinking about it this way, the list of negative legacies each and every one of us have must be enormous. A finite but arbitrarily large number. Does that matter?
And really, even a legacy of writings or anything else is dependent on the existence of someone or something to later observe them. Humanity will not last forever. Who knows how long we have until we either go extinct or are transformed into something even stranger. All that we leave behind in the great sands of time will one day be consumed in a champagne supernova of our very Sol.
But we do what we do anyway. Because when you really think about it, living for the purpose of a legacy isn’t really living at all. It’s about the here and now and the things we can control. The past is the past now. The future is never guaranteed. Make the present moment extraordinary.
It goes without saying, but I’m always grateful for those of you coming along with me on this ride; the only one any of us ever get.
This has been A Dose of Rationality Newsletter and Enquiries, Vol. II.
AR