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 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.