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.