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Thing is, by the time your eulogy is written, you're already dead. I prefer to leave my kids with a tangible legacy than a beautiful story of a guy who was too

Thing is, by the time your eulogy is written, you're already dead. I prefer to leave my kids with a tangible legacy than a beautiful story of a guy who was too kind to be a dick when he needed to. Besides, words chosen for your eulogy depend on the influence you managed to build while still living.

bumby 7y ago
To each their own interpretation, but I definitely did not read that to imply people should be overly kind. To the contrary, I think someone failing to "be a dick when he needed to" is probably a moral failure. As to your last sentence, it probably falls under the quality of the relationships formed that he listed as a 'eulogy virtue'. I would also argue that if legacy is your goal, a legacy of specific ideals can last longer than most tangible artifacts.
mcguire 7y ago
"...a tangible legacy than a beautiful story of a guy who was too kind to be a dick when he needed to..." That is the shortest, best description of Machiavelli's ideas that I've ever seen.
caconym_ 7y ago
> a beautiful story of a guy who was too kind to be a dick when he needed to. This is a narrow and incomplete view of what's being talked about. > words chosen for your eulogy depend on the influence you managed to build while still living. Assuming there's anybody at all around to choose them, and assuming that they are honest, I'd say they depend much more on what sort of person you were. Maybe the influence you built will have a large effect on who hears them, but if you weren't "obsessed with success and prestige" in life then you would probably have been fine with a smaller crowd at your funeral anyway.
westoncb 7y ago
The idea is that the eulogy talks about how you lived your life and what kind of person you were. The way Brooks is using it is just as a tool to grant some perspective; the eulogy in a literal sense is a convenient proxy for something deeper: consider how it would feel if the only honest nice things people could say about you at your funeral were that you were ambitious and successful. Most people would be strongly displeased by that—and yet it's all too easy for the same people to fall into a trap of living their lives in such a way that the values of ambition and success take precedence over everything else.

bumby 7y ago

To each their own interpretation, but I definitely did not read that to imply people should be overly kind. To the contrary, I think someone failing to "be a dick when he needed to" is probably a moral failure. As to your last sentence, it probably falls under the quality of the relationships formed that he listed as a 'eulogy virtue'. I would also argue that if legacy is your goal, a legacy of specific ideals can last longer than most tangible artifacts.

mcguire 7y ago

"...a tangible legacy than a beautiful story of a guy who was too kind to be a dick when he needed to..." That is the shortest, best description of Machiavelli's ideas that I've ever seen.

caconym_ 7y ago

> a beautiful story of a guy who was too kind to be a dick when he needed to. This is a narrow and incomplete view of what's being talked about. > words chosen for your eulogy depend on the influence you managed to build while still living. Assuming there's anybody at all around to choose them, and assuming that they are honest, I'd say they depend much more on what sort of person you were. Maybe the influence you built will have a large effect on who hears them, but if you weren't "obsessed with success and prestige" in life then you would probably have been fine with a smaller crowd at your funeral anyway.

westoncb 7y ago

The idea is that the eulogy talks about how you lived your life and what kind of person you were. The way Brooks is using it is just as a tool to grant some perspective; the eulogy in a literal sense is a convenient proxy for something deeper: consider how it would feel if the only honest nice things people could say about you at your funeral were that you were ambitious and successful. Most people would be strongly displeased by that—and yet it's all too easy for the same people to fall into a trap of living their lives in such a way that the values of ambition and success take precedence over everything else.