# Obession with Legacy By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2022-12-26 Legacy is something that many people are concerned about. How will they be remembered? Who will carry on the family name and genes? What's the best way to preserve old photos, videos, and mementos? These things seem to matter as we wrestle with life, meaning, and endings. However, consider how many people you know about, living or dead. Maybe if you thought hard you could come up with 500 people. Maybe if you kept a log of every person you've ever seen or read about you'd get that number to 100,000. But you'd barely know anything about them. What they thought, who they were, and what impact the left would still be a mystery. Now consider how small this number is versus the approximately 160 billion people who have lived on earth so far. Even extremely generous estimates would mean you are consciously aware of only 0.00625% of humans, and this awareness is only equivalent to a name on a piece of paper. So, what chance does any person have to be remembered beyond a generation or two? It's zero. So, why try? What's the point? Well, if no one tries, there will be no progress. But, more importantly, legacy isn't the point. An obsession with legacy is how optimists become delusional and how pessimists embrace nihilism. #### Related Items [[Nihilism]] [[Delusions]] [[Time]] [[Storytelling]] [[Probability]]