9 ms·

I've read books whose gist is the same point this author makes, and I agree it's such a freeing realization. Out of the estimated 117 billion[1] humans who hav

I've read books whose gist is the same point this author makes, and I agree it's such a freeing realization. Out of the estimated 117 billion[1] humans who have walked the Earth, how many who have died can we actually name off the top of our heads? A few hundred at best? Maybe a few thousand if you're a history buff? And of that group, how many will still be remembered at the heat death of the universe? I'd bet money that the answer is "none of them". So what's the point of trying to be remembered or leave a legacy? It's a game that we're destined to lose, so why play? Personally, I don't care how big my gravestone is, or whether I have my name on the side of a building, or whether I have an element in the periodic table named after me. Because it'll all come crumbling down in the end. This too shall pass. And rather than being depressing, it's actually liberating. It means I'm done climbing the corporate ladder. It means I can work just hard enough to pay the bills at my day job, while leaving ample free time to engage with creative pursuits that satisfy me. It means I can have kids if it makes me happy, but I don't feel pressured to out of a sense of "continuing the family line" or some other bullshit. No matter how hard I try, literally nothing you or I do will be remembered on a long enough timespan. Hell, I don't even know the names of my great-grandparents, and chances are that, if I ever have kids, my great-grandkids won't remember mine. It's like Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" quote[2]. I don't know what the meaning of life is, but I'm pretty sure it's not "try to wrest some sort of immortality by being remembered after you're gone". 1. https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/#:~:text=This%20major%20change%20in%20our,ever%20been%20born%20on%20Earth https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived.... 2. https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot

Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
> so why play? Projected or perceived legacy after passing is correlated with level of consumption while alive. Always has and always will be. Roman Emperors, Kings etc. they got to be on coins and have monuments erected after them after their death, AND at the same time they were the person with the most conspicous consumption in the whole country while still alive. Case in point: Queen Elizabeth II.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  I don't see how that answers the question. Or are you saying that the answer is "to consume a lot"?
  - Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
    To consume a lot of high quality things and experiences.
    - toomanyrichies 4y ago
      Maybe you know something I don't, but consumption never did the trick for me. And believe me, I've engaged in some pretty hard-core consumption. Long-term travel, drugs and alcohol, material possessions, sex, etc. I'll grant you that all of it resulted in temporary elation, but none of it resulted in long-term contentment. I hope you have better luck with it than I did. But I doubt my luck would change if I simply tried consuming even harder.
      - Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
        You have simply been alive for too long. Or are paying too much attention to the wider scope. One of the two or a combination of the two. In countries where there is a fast turnover such as sub-saharn Africa, people don't have such problems. They get out in the morning trying to get more and they die way before they hit the wall of diminishing returns and for sure way before start wondering about the wider scope. With regards to wondering too much about the wider scope it becomes perfectly clear that having a high IQ isn't always an advantage. You want to be the luckiest dumbass to achieve both maximum consumption and the ability to never ever start pondering concepts such as the wider scope or any of the unsolvable phylosphical questions
- toomanyrichies 4y ago
  Consumption seems like a never-ending treadmill of its own. I'm quite the foodie, but I've made peace with the fact that there will always be more restaurants out there than I can possibly hope to dine at during my lifetime. You could say the same thing about music, art, etc. It's like Bud Fox said in the movie "Wall Street"- "How many yachts can you water-ski behind?"
rochak 4y ago
At the end of the day, it all comes down to what is more important for you as opposed to what others think should be more important for you. We are nothing but our choices and experiences that come out of those. That is how I try to live my life despite the weird expectations the community I come from has from me. I simply don't care about what others think and that is just an incredible feeling.
xwdv 4y ago
> It means I'm done climbing the corporate ladder. It means I can work just hard enough to pay the bills at my day job, while leaving ample free time to engage with creative pursuits that satisfy me. Not so fast there buddy. The reason for climbing corporate ladders is to enrich your own life and give you more wealth, which can make your life far more comfortable and gain you respect and recognition amongst peers when it is most valuable: while you are alive. Even if you could be remembered all throughout time and even past the heat death of the universe, it would be pointless because you are dead and cannot experience this fame. You wouldn’t care either way, that’s what makes death so final. If you are not careful, you could just end up as a wage slave contributing to the rise of someone else’s awesome life. And then you can experience the pain of being forgotten when it hurts the most: while you are still alive. You won’t have to wait till the heat death of the universe to finally be forgotten, people can just stop giving a shit about you right now. Keep climbing.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  Hah. Some decades in now, the people I remember most have been anything but climbers. They were just here near me and the others they cared about. If being remembered is your motivation, you don't need to go anywhere. In fact, you're probably climbing away from the people who already recognize and respect you best already.
- mellosouls 4y ago
  The reason for climbing corporate ladders is to [... and] gain you respect and recognition amongst peers when it is most valuable: while you are alive. "Peers", maybe but that just means "other people who value climbing corporate ladders" - who tend to be quite superficial people.
- toomanyrichies 4y ago
  > The reason for climbing corporate ladders is to enrich your own life and give you more wealth, which can make your life far more comfortable and gain you respect and recognition amongst peers... But that's the thing- I don't actually need any of those things. My upper-middle class life is already comfortable. My peers already respect me. Sure, there could always be more money and respect, but that would always be the case, no matter how high I climb. There will always be someone with more money and respect than I have. There is no "Final Boss". Even Elon Musk (currently the world's richest person) probably compares himself with historical figures whose wealth would put his to shame (Alexander The Great, Mansa Musa, Marcus Licinius Crassus, etc.). It's like the old (and probably apocryphal) story of the conversation between Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut [1]. I have something the ladder climbers will never have- enough. I can either continue deferring happiness until I reach the next rung of the ladder (and there's always another rung), or I can decline to climb at all and choose happiness today, right now. 1. https://alearningaday.blog/2019/06/04/joseph-heller-and-enough/ https://alearningaday.blog/2019/06/04/joseph-heller-and-enou...
bufordtwain 4y ago
Nobody will remember: - Your salary - Your fancy title - How ‘busy’ you were - How stressed you were - How many hours you worked People will remember: - The giant monoliths you have erected to your own majesty - Poems about the monoliths, or at least a few of the good lines -Tim Carmody (tweet)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
victor106 4y ago
So are you saying you do things just so people remember you? I wonder where would we as a species be if Newton or Einstein or Steve Jobs and a million others who contributed their little might to advancing our species forward thought the same?
- toomanyrichies 4y ago
  > So are you saying you do things just so people remember you? No, that's the opposite of what I'm saying. > I wonder where would we as a species be if Newton or Einstein or Steve Jobs and a million others who contributed their little might to advancing our species forward thought the same? Is my life better because those people did what they did? Absolutely. Would I be sad if they hadn't existed, or had lived a less noteworthy life? Probably not, because I wouldn't know any better. If you Google "Who was the smartest person in history?", you'll probably encounter the name William James Sidis, who reportedly had taught himself multiple languages (and invented another) by the age of 8. In 1925 he wrote a book called "The Animate and the Inanimate", which (among other things) predicted the existence of black holes almost 15 years before Einstein did. And yet, we'll never know what ground-breaking work he could have done or advancements he could have made. Because he chose to live a life of solitude, and died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 46. Imagine for a minute that I could travel to an alternate universe, one where Sidis became the next Newton and made incredible discoveries that advanced the course of human knowledge and contributed to countless new discoveries to which I bore witness. I might be more depressed as a result, if I saw how much better off humanity's lot was. But imagine if I saw that we'd be worse off. Maybe Sidis would have discovered scientific principles which would have been usurped by Hitler or the like to build weapons that made the atom bomb looks like a child's toy, and which humanity used to destroy itself. If that's what I saw in this alternate universe, I'd be happier since I'd know that we had avoided that fate. Odds are, his contributions would have been a bit of a mixed bag. But it doesn't matter, because I can't mourn what I can't see. The answer to "where will we as a species be?" is (eventually) "consigned to the dustbin of history". We can make every effort to be the next Newton or Einstein or Steve Jobs. And if we make someone else's life more comfortable or interesting or fun or whatever in the meantime, I'd argue that's a worthy pursuit. But re-read that Carl Sagan quote I linked to earlier [1], and think about how insignificant their contributions were in the grand scheme of things. I hope they enjoyed themselves while they were alive. Because now that they're gone, the clock is ticking on their legacy. Think of the most famous person you can (Jesus, Gandhi, etc.), and know that there will come a day when someone will utter that person's name for the last time. You don't owe the future of humanity anything. Nor did Newton, Einstein, or Jobs. That hypothetical future humanity doesn't even exist yet, and given our trajectory as a species, it's almost hubris to assume that they will. 1. https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot
crdrost 4y ago
So my nerdiness is a very particular niche and a book about certain conference on Episcopalian growing pains called Shaping Our Future happened to fit into it, like nobody I show this book to seems to find it interesting but me, haha. But one of the talks given at that Episcopalian conference claimed, much to my shock, that we needed more little kids running around during the church service, not less... even raising the idea that maybe children's ministry breakaways were not correct. What unimaginable chaos did they intend for my solemn-leaning Catholic-raised soul? Never! But then the talk quoted a different work by Stanley Hauerwas, > The Christian community’s openness to new life and our conviction of the sovereignty of God over that life are but two sides of the same conviction. Christians believe that we have the time in this existence to care for new life, especially as such life is dependent and vulnerable, because it is not our task to rule this world or to “make our mark on history.” We can thus take the time to live in history as God’s people who have nothing more important to do than to have and care for children. [emphasis mine.] So there I was running around, trying to make my mark on history, it was not going especially well heh... Really marked a big shift in my attitudes.
- Klinky 4y ago
  What if caring for new life is of no interest to someone? This advice just sounds like pigeonholing people into roles, making sure people know their place, and don't ask too many questions.
  - crdrost 4y ago
    So I don't necessarily want to get too far into this because this is HN and religious discussion kind of doesn't belong here... But let me say very briefly that if someone calls themselves a Christian but mocks you for not having children, then in the selfsame breath they are mocking every modern Catholic priest; most monks, nuns, and hermits; the guy who wrote half of the New Testament; and yes, even Jesus himself. So that the community as a whole is open to New Life and that each individual person feels like they are not in a rush and could potentially parent children if that is the gift that they are called to, should never be mistaken for a requirement that each individual person must do whatever they can to have children.
maroonblazer 4y ago
Relatedly, the idea that the notion of a 'self' is an illusion is similarly liberating. It takes work to remind yourself (our vocabulary doesn't help!) that this is the case, just as it takes work to remind yourself that your vision is blinded in the area where your optic nerve pokes through your eye. But there it is. Plenty has been written about this, dating back centuries. The best distillation of it I found is in "Losing Ourselves" by Jay Garfield[0] Both of these realizations have impressed upon me the importance of living in the moment. Of being there for others who are in need. Of trying to make the experience we all share here a bit better. Because that's all we have - the here and now. [0]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59576734-losing-ourselves https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59576734-losing-ourselve...
- EGreg 4y ago
  I don't really understand this concept. I had my cofounder quote Alan Watts to me with that same thing. An illusion implies that someone is being fooled. Who is that someone, if there is no self? Are we supposed to believe that there is no separation between us and a bunch of rocks nearby? Personally, it seems to me that our concepts of morality and existence are just a bunch of wordplay, and the reason some question sounds "mystical" is because we omit a clause. For example, rather than saying "A should B" you should say "If A wants C to happen, then A should B". And that can be much more easily defined. Otherwise, "objective morality" makes as much sense as "objective sense of humor". Can a joke be "objectively funny" if almost no one laughs at it?
  - maroonblazer 4y ago
    > Are we supposed to believe that there is no separation between us and a bunch of rocks nearby? I'm not sure how the above follows from the illusion of 'self'. Despite the self being an illusion, we're still persons, and thus distinct from rocks, and everything else, including other persons. The illusion is that there's a subject at the center of experience. I.e., we don't sense that we're identical to experience, we feel that we're having an experience. That there's some locus of control, independent of the rest of our body, including our brain, that's steering the ship. That's the illusion.
  - 4y ago
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
Well, if we're going by the metric of what will be remembered for the longest time, then the most important things are to bring people together [1]; find true love [2]; and make sure you don't sell shoddy, low-grade copper. [3] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narmer_Palette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narmer_Palette [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_2461 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_2461 [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
- toomanyrichies 4y ago
  > ...make sure you don't sell shoddy, low-grade copper. [3] I wish I could be around in 10,000 years when future historians are puzzling over a digital document that they think is of extreme historical significance, but is actually some angry Karen's 1-star Yelp review for a Cheesecake Factory in Little Rock, Arkansas.
tartoran 4y ago
Doing things to be remembered is like putting the cart before the horse. People who we remember and cherish for what they left behind did whatever they did from a complete different context, they were most likely natural at what they did and they very likely enjoyed every moment of it and working hard wasn’t imposed from the outside.
zelphirkalt 4y ago
If you ask me, it is not about being remembered. It is about actual effect one has on the world. Some actions have tendencies to influence the world in certain ways, which we can often recognize. To do ones best to improve things does not mean to do only things others might remember. It is a far greater set of actions than that.
pronlover723 4y ago
I don't see life as a way to be remembered. I see life as a way to enjoy yourself and help others enjoy themselves. Following that train of thought, doing something that betters more people's lives is an arguably positive thing and many of the ways of helping others better their lives require lots of work. Who cares if no one is around after the heat death of the universe. People are alive now. Many people's lives are pretty nice now, especially compared to say 150+ years ago where people had little time for leisure because they had to farm all day or clean clothing all day and cook. I can certainly imagine we'll get the post scarcity world where even more people will have all their basic needs met. I'd like to be small part of helping to get us there whether or not anyone remembers me. And, I'd go even further, it's better than a life of "not giving a fuck because nothing matters". "not giving a fuck because nothing matters" to me means you can murder people because nothing matters. It's all just space dust so who cares if you rearrange that pile of space dust from a thinking feeling person into a pile a goo. I don't buy into that.
- toomanyrichies 4y ago
  If you read my other comments in this thread, you'll find we're largely in agreement.
- sph 4y ago
  > "not giving a fuck because nothing matters" to me means you can murder people because nothing matters I don't think that's true. I've lived like nothing matters for most of my adult life, yet I have no desire nor stomach to hurt people on purpose. It's like that misbelief religious people have about atheism: if there's no God, there's no ethics. That's completely wrong. Believing that nothing matters doesn't turn me into a psychopath.
  - pronlover723 4y ago
    I'm also atheist. But if I take the position that nothing matters then I mean that, nothing matters, that includes the suffering of others. If you disagree then like me, you agree something actually matters.
marcus_holmes 4y ago
This hit me while wandering around Wells Cathedral (Somerset, UK). There are marble memorials up on the walls with people's names on them. To be able to afford this after your death, you'd have to be rich and famous (or highly connected to the clergy, I guess). The cathedral has been there for a few hundred years, and there are a few hundred names, so roughly speaking about 25 people in each generation got their names up there. From a population of somewhere between 250K-500K (at a rough guess - there's ~500 churches in the diocese), so 1 in 10,000 people at best, maybe. I had no idea who any of them were. Still don't. The tiny fraction of wildly successful people who could afford to have their names immortalised in marble are still forgotten. I will be forgotten. Nothing matters.

Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago

> so why play? Projected or perceived legacy after passing is correlated with level of consumption while alive. Always has and always will be. Roman Emperors, Kings etc. they got to be on coins and have monuments erected after them after their death, AND at the same time they were the person with the most conspicous consumption in the whole country while still alive. Case in point: Queen Elizabeth II.

swatcoder 4y ago
I don't see how that answers the question. Or are you saying that the answer is "to consume a lot"?
- Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
  To consume a lot of high quality things and experiences.
  - toomanyrichies 4y ago
    Maybe you know something I don't, but consumption never did the trick for me. And believe me, I've engaged in some pretty hard-core consumption. Long-term travel, drugs and alcohol, material possessions, sex, etc. I'll grant you that all of it resulted in temporary elation, but none of it resulted in long-term contentment. I hope you have better luck with it than I did. But I doubt my luck would change if I simply tried consuming even harder.
    - Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
      You have simply been alive for too long. Or are paying too much attention to the wider scope. One of the two or a combination of the two. In countries where there is a fast turnover such as sub-saharn Africa, people don't have such problems. They get out in the morning trying to get more and they die way before they hit the wall of diminishing returns and for sure way before start wondering about the wider scope. With regards to wondering too much about the wider scope it becomes perfectly clear that having a high IQ isn't always an advantage. You want to be the luckiest dumbass to achieve both maximum consumption and the ability to never ever start pondering concepts such as the wider scope or any of the unsolvable phylosphical questions
toomanyrichies 4y ago
Consumption seems like a never-ending treadmill of its own. I'm quite the foodie, but I've made peace with the fact that there will always be more restaurants out there than I can possibly hope to dine at during my lifetime. You could say the same thing about music, art, etc. It's like Bud Fox said in the movie "Wall Street"- "How many yachts can you water-ski behind?"

rochak 4y ago

At the end of the day, it all comes down to what is more important for you as opposed to what others think should be more important for you. We are nothing but our choices and experiences that come out of those. That is how I try to live my life despite the weird expectations the community I come from has from me. I simply don't care about what others think and that is just an incredible feeling.

xwdv 4y ago

> It means I'm done climbing the corporate ladder. It means I can work just hard enough to pay the bills at my day job, while leaving ample free time to engage with creative pursuits that satisfy me. Not so fast there buddy. The reason for climbing corporate ladders is to enrich your own life and give you more wealth, which can make your life far more comfortable and gain you respect and recognition amongst peers when it is most valuable: while you are alive. Even if you could be remembered all throughout time and even past the heat death of the universe, it would be pointless because you are dead and cannot experience this fame. You wouldn’t care either way, that’s what makes death so final. If you are not careful, you could just end up as a wage slave contributing to the rise of someone else’s awesome life. And then you can experience the pain of being forgotten when it hurts the most: while you are still alive. You won’t have to wait till the heat death of the universe to finally be forgotten, people can just stop giving a shit about you right now. Keep climbing.

swatcoder 4y ago
Hah. Some decades in now, the people I remember most have been anything but climbers. They were just here near me and the others they cared about. If being remembered is your motivation, you don't need to go anywhere. In fact, you're probably climbing away from the people who already recognize and respect you best already.
mellosouls 4y ago
The reason for climbing corporate ladders is to [... and] gain you respect and recognition amongst peers when it is most valuable: while you are alive. "Peers", maybe but that just means "other people who value climbing corporate ladders" - who tend to be quite superficial people.
toomanyrichies 4y ago
> The reason for climbing corporate ladders is to enrich your own life and give you more wealth, which can make your life far more comfortable and gain you respect and recognition amongst peers... But that's the thing- I don't actually need any of those things. My upper-middle class life is already comfortable. My peers already respect me. Sure, there could always be more money and respect, but that would always be the case, no matter how high I climb. There will always be someone with more money and respect than I have. There is no "Final Boss". Even Elon Musk (currently the world's richest person) probably compares himself with historical figures whose wealth would put his to shame (Alexander The Great, Mansa Musa, Marcus Licinius Crassus, etc.). It's like the old (and probably apocryphal) story of the conversation between Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut [1]. I have something the ladder climbers will never have- enough. I can either continue deferring happiness until I reach the next rung of the ladder (and there's always another rung), or I can decline to climb at all and choose happiness today, right now. 1. https://alearningaday.blog/2019/06/04/joseph-heller-and-enough/ https://alearningaday.blog/2019/06/04/joseph-heller-and-enou...

bufordtwain 4y ago

Nobody will remember: - Your salary - Your fancy title - How ‘busy’ you were - How stressed you were - How many hours you worked People will remember: - The giant monoliths you have erected to your own majesty - Poems about the monoliths, or at least a few of the good lines -Tim Carmody (tweet)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

victor106 4y ago

So are you saying you do things just so people remember you? I wonder where would we as a species be if Newton or Einstein or Steve Jobs and a million others who contributed their little might to advancing our species forward thought the same?

toomanyrichies 4y ago
> So are you saying you do things just so people remember you? No, that's the opposite of what I'm saying. > I wonder where would we as a species be if Newton or Einstein or Steve Jobs and a million others who contributed their little might to advancing our species forward thought the same? Is my life better because those people did what they did? Absolutely. Would I be sad if they hadn't existed, or had lived a less noteworthy life? Probably not, because I wouldn't know any better. If you Google "Who was the smartest person in history?", you'll probably encounter the name William James Sidis, who reportedly had taught himself multiple languages (and invented another) by the age of 8. In 1925 he wrote a book called "The Animate and the Inanimate", which (among other things) predicted the existence of black holes almost 15 years before Einstein did. And yet, we'll never know what ground-breaking work he could have done or advancements he could have made. Because he chose to live a life of solitude, and died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 46. Imagine for a minute that I could travel to an alternate universe, one where Sidis became the next Newton and made incredible discoveries that advanced the course of human knowledge and contributed to countless new discoveries to which I bore witness. I might be more depressed as a result, if I saw how much better off humanity's lot was. But imagine if I saw that we'd be worse off. Maybe Sidis would have discovered scientific principles which would have been usurped by Hitler or the like to build weapons that made the atom bomb looks like a child's toy, and which humanity used to destroy itself. If that's what I saw in this alternate universe, I'd be happier since I'd know that we had avoided that fate. Odds are, his contributions would have been a bit of a mixed bag. But it doesn't matter, because I can't mourn what I can't see. The answer to "where will we as a species be?" is (eventually) "consigned to the dustbin of history". We can make every effort to be the next Newton or Einstein or Steve Jobs. And if we make someone else's life more comfortable or interesting or fun or whatever in the meantime, I'd argue that's a worthy pursuit. But re-read that Carl Sagan quote I linked to earlier [1], and think about how insignificant their contributions were in the grand scheme of things. I hope they enjoyed themselves while they were alive. Because now that they're gone, the clock is ticking on their legacy. Think of the most famous person you can (Jesus, Gandhi, etc.), and know that there will come a day when someone will utter that person's name for the last time. You don't owe the future of humanity anything. Nor did Newton, Einstein, or Jobs. That hypothetical future humanity doesn't even exist yet, and given our trajectory as a species, it's almost hubris to assume that they will. 1. https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot

crdrost 4y ago

So my nerdiness is a very particular niche and a book about certain conference on Episcopalian growing pains called Shaping Our Future happened to fit into it, like nobody I show this book to seems to find it interesting but me, haha. But one of the talks given at that Episcopalian conference claimed, much to my shock, that we needed more little kids running around during the church service, not less... even raising the idea that maybe children's ministry breakaways were not correct. What unimaginable chaos did they intend for my solemn-leaning Catholic-raised soul? Never! But then the talk quoted a different work by Stanley Hauerwas, > The Christian community’s openness to new life and our conviction of the sovereignty of God over that life are but two sides of the same conviction. Christians believe that we have the time in this existence to care for new life, especially as such life is dependent and vulnerable, because it is not our task to rule this world or to “make our mark on history.” We can thus take the time to live in history as God’s people who have nothing more important to do than to have and care for children. [emphasis mine.] So there I was running around, trying to make my mark on history, it was not going especially well heh... Really marked a big shift in my attitudes.

Klinky 4y ago
What if caring for new life is of no interest to someone? This advice just sounds like pigeonholing people into roles, making sure people know their place, and don't ask too many questions.
- crdrost 4y ago
  So I don't necessarily want to get too far into this because this is HN and religious discussion kind of doesn't belong here... But let me say very briefly that if someone calls themselves a Christian but mocks you for not having children, then in the selfsame breath they are mocking every modern Catholic priest; most monks, nuns, and hermits; the guy who wrote half of the New Testament; and yes, even Jesus himself. So that the community as a whole is open to New Life and that each individual person feels like they are not in a rush and could potentially parent children if that is the gift that they are called to, should never be mistaken for a requirement that each individual person must do whatever they can to have children.

maroonblazer 4y ago

Relatedly, the idea that the notion of a 'self' is an illusion is similarly liberating. It takes work to remind yourself (our vocabulary doesn't help!) that this is the case, just as it takes work to remind yourself that your vision is blinded in the area where your optic nerve pokes through your eye. But there it is. Plenty has been written about this, dating back centuries. The best distillation of it I found is in "Losing Ourselves" by Jay Garfield[0] Both of these realizations have impressed upon me the importance of living in the moment. Of being there for others who are in need. Of trying to make the experience we all share here a bit better. Because that's all we have - the here and now. [0]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59576734-losing-ourselves https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59576734-losing-ourselve...

EGreg 4y ago
I don't really understand this concept. I had my cofounder quote Alan Watts to me with that same thing. An illusion implies that someone is being fooled. Who is that someone, if there is no self? Are we supposed to believe that there is no separation between us and a bunch of rocks nearby? Personally, it seems to me that our concepts of morality and existence are just a bunch of wordplay, and the reason some question sounds "mystical" is because we omit a clause. For example, rather than saying "A should B" you should say "If A wants C to happen, then A should B". And that can be much more easily defined. Otherwise, "objective morality" makes as much sense as "objective sense of humor". Can a joke be "objectively funny" if almost no one laughs at it?
- maroonblazer 4y ago
  > Are we supposed to believe that there is no separation between us and a bunch of rocks nearby? I'm not sure how the above follows from the illusion of 'self'. Despite the self being an illusion, we're still persons, and thus distinct from rocks, and everything else, including other persons. The illusion is that there's a subject at the center of experience. I.e., we don't sense that we're identical to experience, we feel that we're having an experience. That there's some locus of control, independent of the rest of our body, including our brain, that's steering the ship. That's the illusion.
- 4y ago

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago

Well, if we're going by the metric of what will be remembered for the longest time, then the most important things are to bring people together [1]; find true love [2]; and make sure you don't sell shoddy, low-grade copper. [3] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narmer_Palette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narmer_Palette [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_2461 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_2461 [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir

toomanyrichies 4y ago
> ...make sure you don't sell shoddy, low-grade copper. [3] I wish I could be around in 10,000 years when future historians are puzzling over a digital document that they think is of extreme historical significance, but is actually some angry Karen's 1-star Yelp review for a Cheesecake Factory in Little Rock, Arkansas.

tartoran 4y ago

Doing things to be remembered is like putting the cart before the horse. People who we remember and cherish for what they left behind did whatever they did from a complete different context, they were most likely natural at what they did and they very likely enjoyed every moment of it and working hard wasn’t imposed from the outside.

zelphirkalt 4y ago

If you ask me, it is not about being remembered. It is about actual effect one has on the world. Some actions have tendencies to influence the world in certain ways, which we can often recognize. To do ones best to improve things does not mean to do only things others might remember. It is a far greater set of actions than that.

pronlover723 4y ago

I don't see life as a way to be remembered. I see life as a way to enjoy yourself and help others enjoy themselves. Following that train of thought, doing something that betters more people's lives is an arguably positive thing and many of the ways of helping others better their lives require lots of work. Who cares if no one is around after the heat death of the universe. People are alive now. Many people's lives are pretty nice now, especially compared to say 150+ years ago where people had little time for leisure because they had to farm all day or clean clothing all day and cook. I can certainly imagine we'll get the post scarcity world where even more people will have all their basic needs met. I'd like to be small part of helping to get us there whether or not anyone remembers me. And, I'd go even further, it's better than a life of "not giving a fuck because nothing matters". "not giving a fuck because nothing matters" to me means you can murder people because nothing matters. It's all just space dust so who cares if you rearrange that pile of space dust from a thinking feeling person into a pile a goo. I don't buy into that.

toomanyrichies 4y ago
If you read my other comments in this thread, you'll find we're largely in agreement.
sph 4y ago
> "not giving a fuck because nothing matters" to me means you can murder people because nothing matters I don't think that's true. I've lived like nothing matters for most of my adult life, yet I have no desire nor stomach to hurt people on purpose. It's like that misbelief religious people have about atheism: if there's no God, there's no ethics. That's completely wrong. Believing that nothing matters doesn't turn me into a psychopath.
- pronlover723 4y ago
  I'm also atheist. But if I take the position that nothing matters then I mean that, nothing matters, that includes the suffering of others. If you disagree then like me, you agree something actually matters.

marcus_holmes 4y ago

This hit me while wandering around Wells Cathedral (Somerset, UK). There are marble memorials up on the walls with people's names on them. To be able to afford this after your death, you'd have to be rich and famous (or highly connected to the clergy, I guess). The cathedral has been there for a few hundred years, and there are a few hundred names, so roughly speaking about 25 people in each generation got their names up there. From a population of somewhere between 250K-500K (at a rough guess - there's ~500 churches in the diocese), so 1 in 10,000 people at best, maybe. I had no idea who any of them were. Still don't. The tiny fraction of wildly successful people who could afford to have their names immortalised in marble are still forgotten. I will be forgotten. Nothing matters.