Stop Trying to be Remembered
“Remember: Matter: how tiny your share of it. Time: how brief and fleeting your allotment of it. Fate: how small a role you play in it.” - Marcus Aurelius
In Greek mythology the Gods of Olympus offered Achilles a choice — a short, glorious life, or a long, content one. Achilles chose glory, wanting his name to be remembered as the greatest of all warriors. This flaw is not unique to Achilles — as a species we are prone to the delusion of significance. Consider that there have been over 110 billion people who have lived on Earth and how few are remembered. A poetic reminder is Shelley’s “Ozymandias” -
“‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Investor and philosopher Naval Ravikant[i] explains “I think a lot of the struggle we have in life comes from a deep, deep fear of death. It can take form in many ways. One can be that we want to write the great American novel. We want to achieve something in this world. We want to build something. We want to build a great piece of technology, or we want to start an amazing business, or we want to run for office and make a difference. A lot of this comes from this fear that we’re going to die, so we have to build something that lasts beyond us. Obviously, the obsession that parents have with their children. A lot of that is warranted biological love, but some of that is also the quest for immortality. Even some of the beliefs of some of the more outlandish parts of religion I think fall into that. I don’t have the quest for immortality anymore.”
Ravikant continues “The universe has been around for a long time, and the universe is a very, very large place. If you’ll study even the smallest bit of science, for all practical purposes we are nothing. We are amoeba. We are bacteria to the universe. We’re basically monkeys on a small rock orbiting a small backwards star in a huge galaxy, which is in an absolutely staggeringly gigantic universe, which itself may be part of a gigantic multiverse. This universe has been around probably for 10 billion years or more, and will be around for tens of billions of years afterwards. Your existence, my existence is just infinitesimal. It’s like a firefly blinking once in the night. We’re not really here that long, and we don’t really matter that much. Nothing that we do lasts. Eventually, you will fade. Your works will fade. Your children will fade. Your thoughts will fade. These planets will fade. This sun will fade. It will all be gone. There are entire civilizations which we remember now with one or two words. Sumerian. Mayan. Do you know any Sumerians or Mayans? Do you hold any of them in high regard or esteem? Have they outlived their natural lifespan somehow? No.”
Jerry Seinfeld was interviewed by Larry King in 2007. Seinfeld created one of the most successful sitcoms of all time, running from 1989 to 1998 and making him a household name and a billionaire. King asked Seinfeld if his sitcom had been cancelled,“You gave it up, right? They didn’t cancel you. You cancelled them”. Seinfeld reacted with disbelief, “You’re not aware of this? You think I got cancelled? Do you know who I am?”. It’s difficult to know if Seinfeld was having a little fun, as he suggested when King passed away in January 2021, or if this was hubris. Perhaps Seinfeld should have read what Marcus Aurelius wrote in his journal,“Soon, you will have forgotten everything. Soon, everybody will have forgotten you.”
Norman Lear has written and produced over one hundred television shows, received numerous awards and been admitted to the Television Hall of Fame. Yet Lear manages to maintain humility and perspective. In a 2016 talk[ii] the interviewer asked “You’ve lead a life of accomplishment, but you’ve also built a life of meaning. And all of us strive to do both of those things — not all of us manage to. But even those of us who do manage to accomplish both of those, very rarely do we figure out how to do them together. You managed to push culture forward through your art while also achieving world-beating commercial success. How did you do both?”. Lear replied “Here’s where my mind goes when I hear that recitation of all I accomplished. This planet is one of a billion, they tell us, in a universe of which there are billions — billions of universes, billions of planets … which we’re trying to save and it requires saving. But … anything I may have accomplished is — my sister once asked me what she does about something that was going on in Newington, Connecticut. And I said, “Write your alderman or your mayor or something.” She said, “Well I’m not Norman Lear, I’m Claire Lear.” And that was the first time I said what I’m saying, I said, “Claire. With everything you think about what I may have done and everything you’ve done,” — she never left Newington — “can you get your fingers close enough when you consider the size of the planet and so forth, to measure anything I may have done to anything you may have done?”
The realisation of our insignificance requires humility. Carl Sagan’s allegory[iii] “Pale Blue Dot” reminds us that “The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.” Sagan used the perspective of the Voyager spacecraft looking back at the Earth from a distance of six billion kilometres as it left our solar system in February 1990 — “Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. “ Sagan despairs “Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. … Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” Sagan concludes “It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.”
It shouldn’t stop us trying to be the best we can be, but retaining perspective is key to avoiding time spent trying to be remembered. “Nearly everything you do is of no importance,” Ghandi wrote, “but it is important that you do it.” Naval Ravikant came to the same conclusion — “You should realize that this is such a short and precious life that it’s really important that you don’t spend it being unhappy. There’s no excuse for spending most of your life in misery.”
[i] https://tim.blog/naval-ravikant-on-the-tim-ferriss-show-transcript/
[ii] An entertainment icon on living a life of meaning, Norman Lear, TED February 2016
[iii] Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Carl Sagan 1994
