What makes you think you can’t leave a significant positive legacy?
You can get involved with your neighbors. Invest in your local community. Adopt an orphan or volunteer at a women’s shelter.
There’s a million things you can do to make a significant impact. Every person you invest in is another person who can go and invest in others.
This idea that anything that’s below the national or worldwide level isn’t significant is a cancer on society.
There are people who lived hundreds of years ago who, sure, you’ll probably have never heard of if you don’t live in the same area as me, but who have had huge impact on the community. The same is true for where you live. I promise you.
Bring your eyes down, and look to make your legacy local. I promise you it’s possible. And I promise you that it’s significant.
No. I’m here while I’m here, and I do my best to help people, when I can and am capable anyways.
There’s no stopping the clock, everyone has their time…
“Rage against the dying of the light”…
… can look like being the best person you can be, for your own sense of morality/justice, for whatever you believe in, for whatever you feel is what, and how, a decent person should be.
Even if someone says that altruism is nonsensical or strictly meaningless/impossible, the fact that somebody even aimed toward it is remarkable nonetheless.
I’m gonna do it, I’m bustin’ out the Architect scene:
Neo
walks to the door on his leftchooses to reject the false dichotomy he has been presented.The Architect: Humph. Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness.
Neo: If I were you, I would hope that we don’t meet again.
The Architect: We won’t.
No. I think too many people obsess about what happens after they’re gone rather than living their life to the fullest. One doesn’t need to make it into history books to leave an impact on the world around them.
The following is a story I was told as a child that I think puts some if this in perspective:
One day a man was walking along the beach when he noticed a boy picking something up and gently throwing it into the ocean. Approaching the boy, he asked, “What are you doing?”
The youth replied, “Throwing starfish back into the ocean. The surf is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them back, they’ll die.”
“Son,” the man said, “don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish? You can’t make a difference!”
After listening politely, the boy bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it back into the surf. Then, smiling at the man, he said, “I made a difference for that one.”
It’s not that hard to leave a significant positive legacy. It only needs to be person-sized. Did you have one pretty good child? Congratulations, you did it! Did you have, like, three good friends? Give yourself a big ol’ check.
These aren’t easy, but they aren’t in general un-do-able.
I don’t care. Our civilization will collapse, the earth will become uninhabitable and the universe will die at some point. So whatever we leave behind ultimately doesn’t matter anyway. I try to make life as enjoyable as possible for myself and my GF and try to be a positive influence for my friends, family, colleagues and neighbourhood. When it’s over, it’s over and I’m not going to worry about what I’m leaving behind. I’m an insignificant speck in the grand scheme of things and I’m just fine with that.
No kids and no legacy to worry about sounds quite good to me actually.
I don’t care about leaving a legacy. I’m here to enjoy myself as much as possible in this very fucked up world.
Lol, I’m probably dead in 30 years or less. I’m over half way there because of a major health condition I lost the genetic lottery on. It is what it is. I like to think I’ve raised a child capable of empathy, that’s all I can do.
I may have, at one point. Then I realized that the only reason anyone leaves a ‘positive legacy’ is because they actively sought to paint themselves that way. In other words, they managed to trick you and everyone else into thinking that it was their singular will that manifested all of this positivity.
Positive legacies are not the product of any one person, they are a collective effort, and the collective shares both the credit and the spoils.
You have to keep in mind, what is a positive legacy? Is it simply being remembered? No, because I’ve surely planted many trees (I drop seeds where I go) — will anyone remember the man who dropped the seeds?
When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.
— God, Futurama
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Looking forward to it actually… Will finally get some peace and quiet…
Curious, how old are you? Like… I heard that older people seem to accept the idea of death better than younger people so I’m just curious.
When I was 18, I had a major existential crisis lol.
Pure anecdotally here, but as im getting older death seems more and more significant and possible and to be feared. Im only in my 30s but somewhere along the line i picked up a self-preservation instinct.
As a kid/teen i was going to live forever. I couldn’t die. The biggest fear was waking up in hospital but even that was farfetched to one as invincible as me.
Nowadays though im perpetually aware that one slight misstep could bring me down skull first on a roadside kerb and it could be game over.
Wrong side of my 30s.
None of us individually truly leave a lasting legacy. Maybe some get to have their name repeated a little longer than others but that’s about it.
Everything that’s happened in human history happened because of communities of people … they might have had a leader but even the leader wouldn’t have made any of it happen without large groups of people. And every single one of those people had a small part to play in making it all happen.
We all have a small part to play during our lives and together all our small parts add up to great things.
Not really. It would be cool to leave a mark on the world, but once I’m dead, I won’t be around to care.
Indifferent.
I’ve been through things that should have killed me.
I’m just happy the ride isn’t over yet.
Being stardust that can think about what stardust is, is pretty neat.
… Maybe I’ll try to make an apple pie sometime soon…
I’m just here to drink, love, and have a good time.
I do yeah. It takes like 1/3 of our lives to mature, 1/3 to do something, and the last 1/3 is to try to match the performance of what we were able to achieve before we wither away.
