Have you ever wondered who the first human was that is remembered to this day? Probably Kushim, but we don’t actually know if this was a single person or a title given to multiple people. Kushim lived approximately 5000 years ago. What he did? He traded barley.
It seems safe to assume that every one of us has the desire to transcend the life we are given. In the same breath it is often said that what we fear about death is not so much the end of our existence in the human form but to be forgotten eternally, which is what we dread if there is no transformation from the self that we employ our bodies with to any other spec of remembrance for those who come after us. The easiest way to leave behind such a quality was once believed to be having children, who we try to equip not only with our genes but also with our knowledge and beliefs. For many reasons, a lot of people nowadays seem to prefer to impact society and leave a legacy rather by spreading their memes instead. If you try to accomplish either one, you should however expect to end up failing, but not because you haven’t tried hard enough, but because legacy is an illusion.
For a start, let’s begin with the relativity of remembrance. After all, you might read this looking up to people like Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Mother Mary or Laozi. But whoever is it that you aspire to be, they probably lived during the last two and a half millennia. Given that humans may have developed their cognitive abilities to the level that we see today already seventy thousand years ago, it is reasonable to believe that your ancestors might have had similar idols they looked up to with the same fanaticism that we will never hear of again.
The same goes for your lineage: After all, who really remembers their great-great grandfather? And then, who remembers them in such a sense that one can really speak of an internal image of that human personality and not just a pile of ever retold legends? Maybe you belong to a prestigious family that keeps a well organized record of their ancestry. But even if this is the case, science reminds you not only that at some ridiculous point, every point on the tree of human life runs together to the genetic code of a select few where every idea of specific inheritance of any quality that defines „you“ becomes absurd, but also that any medium encapsulating such a history of inheritance is doomed to decay (except maybe the genetic code itself).
The killer argument is of course that if you provide your companions in this blink of time that is gifted to your „self“ in this human form with an idea that is so important and inspiring, that it changes the course of history, clearly you will be remembered, right? Here, a famous proverb enters the stage to crash your hopes: That nothing is as powerful as an idea, whose time has come.
This we see all the time in science, where discoveries are made by different people sometimes with only months or weeks of separation, only because the puzzle pieces finally lay out clearly enough for any human to see. Think of Newton and Leibnitz, independently discovering calculus, but also Einstein, who, despite public opinion, had lots of colleagues coming to similar conclusions like Lorentz and Hilbert. Modern network science shows us that success breeds success and especially with similar outcomes, history often favors individuals rather for arbitrary reasons than their distinct contributions. It seems as if certain ideas have their own way to come into existence and will always find a vessel to do so. Given enough time, the names we attach to these people will gradually fade, until we acknowledge that the circumstances were just right for a big discovery to be made. After all, it would seem mad from our perspective to search for a single human who made the discovery of agriculture. And maybe already in the near future, where some hope for machines to lead the big discoveries, we will look back laughing at the idea of the single scientific, artistic or spiritual genius.
Whether you will be remembered or not, whether you will uncover something mind-bending and world-changing or leave behind a dynasty that will last over thousands of years is not in your power, and it will certainly not be there forever. On cosmic timescales, whatever it is that defines you will die, and your ideas will fade in the same cosmic blink they were born into. Don’t believe that the wouldn’t be found without you, because in an endless universe (which remains well within cosmological possibilities) everything that can happen, will happen.
It is no wonder that given this bleak outlook, countless spiritual traditions favor one way to deal with it, which is also regarded as the hardest: If you manage to accept your fate, and simultaneously „stretch out into infinity“ without fear as some put it, you will ultimately conclude that your time is best spent caring for those in your immediate vicinity. And while you do that, you might well find yourself leaving something behind.