Legacy is a delusion
Good things come from the pursuit of legacy, by calling it a delusion I don't mean to paint it as a fundamentally bad thing.
To establish some context, I'm putting aside supernatural rewards and punishments like valhalla and hell.
Legacy for the purposes of this post is having an impact that outlives you. People remembering your name. A lot of people claim it as a significant motivation and, I suspect, a lot more people are motivated by it without openly admitting it.
The obvious reason being that it's an antidote to mortality or, at the core, impermanence. Chaos. It's a fear that motivates us all more than we probably admit because most people avoid thinking and talking about more often than they don't. It's the unnamed void that's always there at the edges, creeping in and reminding us every once in a while that it could all end any time. That nothing lasts.
Legacy, or the eternal rewards I'm leaving out of the conversation, is a big shiny counterpoint to impermanence. You might even call it a psychological coping mechanism. We all need them sometimes and a key part of their operation is that they're not entirely rational.
And legacy is pretty irrational. No matter what we do we'll die, and then everyone who knew us will die. Not long after, in the scope of time, everyone who remembers us will die. If we're Einstein then maybe people love and remember us for a few extra centuries before we become a rarely visited piece of ancient history. At some point even Einstein will be forgotten.
So legacy isn't actually an antidote to impermanence, it just feels like it if you don't think about it too much. You can't make a mark on history big enough to last forever in any meaningful sense. Which leaves its impact on the lives we're living. Does it make them better? When people wear t-shirts with Einstein and hearts on them does it echo back through time and give the still living Einstein a tingle? Does he get better orgasms, smoother skin, deeper relationships? I don't think he does.
He probably gets a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment from knowing that he's moved the needle. That he's leaving the world better than he found it. That's worth a lot, but it's not really about legacy, it's about impact. Something which is available to everyone all the time.
I bring this up because periodically I see legacy contextualized as almost a virtue. Something noble to strive for. To me it's a false idol, like fame, celebrity or wealth worship. It comes with a partially broken set of values.
Whereas values that arise from prioritizing the lives we're living and the people we're living them with seem to me to be a lot healthier and more fulfilling. And I think, in a bigger sense, more conducive to a healthy society. If more people are investing their identities and energy in values that give them a meaningful return without needing to achieve a particular level of historical impact, they'll suck less. If legacy is the goal, and you need to step on people, or neglect relationships, or put off mental health in order to get there, it's very easy to rationalize doing it. And if we hold the people who do those things up as ideals, we're tacitly telling society that it's something they should be pursuing too.
To put it one way, and digress a little, we'd probably have a lot less self involved billionaires if we didn't put them on pedastals and talk about them all the time. As things stand it's no wonder that so many children grow up believing that achieving wealth or fame is the best way to get attention. It absolutely is. Whether we love or hate it, we can't shut up about it.
Of course talking about wealth and fame brings in a bunch of factors that aren't necessarily about legacy, and I don't want to turn this into an essay about everything that's wrong with culture. But I do think that all of the above are part of a sort of package of self defeating values that we all (mostly unintentionally) play a part in perpetuating.
I don't expect we're going to stop doing that any time soon but I think at some point, between here and a future where we're not constantly flirting with annihilating ourselves, we're going to need to.
To offer a counterpoint, you don't have to be remembered forever to think that being remembered long after your death is worthwhile, in the same way that you don't have to live forever to think that extending your lifespan is worthwhile.
Personally, I'd much rather be positively remembered for my contributions and positive attributes for two hundred years after I'm dead versus immediately forgotten upon my death, all other things equal.
If we're saying that being remembered doesn't matter at all because eventually we'll be forgotten, we quickly end up in a nihilist death spiral where nothing matters at all because everything will cease to exist at some point.
Even though there's no such thing as perminance, things can still be more or less ephemeral over human timescales, and legacy is the only thing that can offer people a modicum of agency for how the world exists after their deaths.
I do think the pursuit of legacy can be bad, particularly if people are after any legacy at all, not just positive legacies, but that doesn't mean they're delusions.
I don't mean to imply that legacy, in and of itself, is a bad thing. Only that it can lead to contorted values and actions.
Sure, all else being equal I feel the same way. We'll still be dead though. Yes it will matter in some sense to others, but we won't be able to feel it, or share it. The identity that cared about legacy won't exist anymore.
Whereas while you're alive you can both feel and share the results of your impact. Which I think is more meaningful. We tend be better motivated when we can experience the results of our efforts. Also, living a constructive life for its own sake is likely to result in being fondly remembered as a side benefit.
I think most people would actually agree with you because legacy is not the goal, it's just an effect of the goal. The actual goal is to have a positive impact on the world.
If I can improve the lives of those around me, I will obviously be remembered in a positive light when I'm gone. When people say they care about their legacy, they are taking a mental leap from "I am a good person" to "people know that I am a good person" to "I am such a good person that people will remember me even when I'm no longer around".
Yes, I think more often than not the goal is impact which when achieved becomes legacy. Some might start from the point of trying to build legacy but I don’t think that’s as common, and even when it happens still boils down to impact (e.g. someone building wealth to hand down to children or starting a research organization that won’t immediately bear fruit, but may improve many lives within a generation or two).
The irony of legacy is one way to do something that would be remembered would be to become the person who ended the species. The irony is obvious: truly no one would be left who could remember.
Another would be to find a way that causes the world to be unchanging or to stop time. Same irony. The absence of change, forever stasis, would be indistinguishable from death.
All things end. Even our universe is suspected to be impermanent. Entropy wins. The multiverse? We don't know yet but likely the same.
And, so, agreed. In the fullness of time, whatever we leave behind makes no difference. The end is the same.
This could be a reason for nihilism. Or, instead, a reason to appreciate what we have for as long as we're here.
That's how I look at it. The fundamental meaninglessness that follows from impermanence is often talked about as a reason why nothing matters, which is valid. But it's just as much a reason why the moments we get matter more than anything.
If we believe that a black hole is creating a new universe, there is some solace in knowing the star dust that made up you, ultimately might be shaping the next universe.
You're effectively describing Terror Management Theory here. TMT says that there is a fundamental conflict in human nature caused by us being intelligent enough to realise the inevitability of death, which when combined with the natural self-preservation instinct, causes an inescapable existential terror that we spend our lives either ignoring or deluding ourselves about, through religion or philosophy or aligning ourselves with something larger than us (nationalism, culture, family, etc), things that offer immortality, either literal or symbolic. It's why basically every single popular religion promises life after death in some way, shape, or form. It's why people align themselves with their glorious nation that will last a thousand generations.
I've never read about TMT but as you frame it I agree. We underestimate the driving force that is the fear of mortality and because of that it informs our actions in sometimes not great ways.
By avoiding it we can end up with neuroses that often come out in subtle, dark ways. Things that help us ignore it (legacy, spirituality, etc.) are a problem, even if they aren't inherently bad.
Adding: I don't want to give the impression that I'm saying that avoiding thinking about death is wrong. People aren't always in a place where they can handle grappling with mortality. Coping mechanisms like comparmentalization and spiritual bypass are a great short term solution for those times.
I have a thing for this.
12 men have walked on the moon.
Without using the internet, name 3.
Now tell me how important a legacy is.
Lance Armstrong, Buzz Lightyear... you're right I can't name three.
I wouldn't have guessed there were 12 either, all in a 3 year period and all of them American. Crazy.
Did... You say Buzz Lightyear as a joke or an accident?
Hint: Lance Armstrong was a bike racer
I know that too, but he was at least a person!
ETA: Also you misspelled lying liar who doped... But actually given the Tour de France records.... Bike racer is probably good enough
Buzz may have started out as a toy but I think he identifies as a person!
I think there is a whole movie of him coming to the realization he was a toy.
I didn't claim it was canon
Well by fanfic rules they both went to the moon?
That train of thought can be used to justify any kind of inaction. Why should any of us bother to get out of bed at all if we're simply fated to succumb to the void?
Actions and legacy may not last beyond the heat death of the universe, but you can enrich the lives of others for a long time, even long past your death, if you use your time here to leave the world a better place than when you arrived.
We are all fated to succumb to the void. Each of us has to make peace with that, or not. Personally I think the finite nature of existence is a fantastic reason to get out of bed.
I wouldn't lump these two together. My point definitely isn't that actions don't matter.
A person's legacy is determined by their actions, I would say that they matter very much because I tend to think on a shorter time scale. The end of human existence is not relevant to me because it will likely be millennia into the future. I tend to focus my energies on taking care of the people around me and doing my best to make my existence in this world a net positive.
In college, I had a "religions of the world" class and we had a discussion about the meaning of life as described by religions. And some students were claiming that there has to be an afterlife for everything to have meaning. And the professor said "no, it's just that your life and actions have to be remembered. And there doesn't have to be an afterlife for that. There could just be a god (or something) that remembers everything. It doesn't have to be us as individuals.
I know you were trying to avoid leaning on supernatural rewards, but for all we know everything that happens in the universe, including our achievements and morality, are remembered in a way that we can't perceive. And maybe it isn't supernatural, it is just a way of the universe.
Personally, I don't think about legacy but I think about justice. It's highly disturbing that we seem to be in a universe that gives the same outcome to innocent children and mass murderers.
I don't think legacy is a delusion, but I do agree that pursuing a legacy leads to problematic behaviours.
As a personal philosophy, I take the viewpoint that if I happen to be remembered by someone, I want to ensure the thoughts associated with me are positive - so I should live my life accordingly.
Granted, my exact list of "positive" concepts is relative to the time and society I exist in, but reasonable people will agree on the broad strokes.