What legacy are you going to leave behind? or is this a question that causes you anxiety so it is illegal to ask?
I have been thinking about legacies for some time.
Some people leave a strong legacy, but for it to be maintained the current generation's humans need to have some kind of political motive to keep it alive, otherwise the attention span of the current gen is already of an goldfish. But legacies can also be a private thing.
For example, you are a thief who steals something and then gets caught, but then you get out and steal something again and again get caught, but you don't stop, you go out and steal something again and again get caught....wait the legacy here will be of getting caught and police being good at their job. No, let me think of another example.
Let's say you invented some financial instrument that is unethical but it makes some people a lot of money, so what would be the legacy here? Well, for some people you'd be remembered as the money maker but for some you will be someone who ruined their life. So legacy can be polarising.
Governments maintain legacy because it helps them politically. But I am not going to elaborate on this. Why? Because then we are treading waters that concern freedom, choice, and conspiracies. I don't wanna get into that.
Anyway, legacy. So what will be your legacy? What will you leave behind? A statement which makes sense to me is that leave the world a better place than it was when you were born. But how do you leave the world a better place? You throw garbage into the garbage bin, you don't drive recklessly, you smile at people, you help people, and there a lot of other things that you can do. You don't necessarily need to invent the cure for cancer. Doing small things, compounds. Maybe you can get entry to heaven, if something like that exists and you want to go there.
So now you legacy is that you were a kind person and helped people. But what if you beat up your kid? What kind of legacy does that leave for your kid? He might see you as cruel. I don't even want to imagine a world where a person beats a girl child. So "he". It will leave a bad aftertaste and whenever your kin remembers you it will be the moments of trauma. He might forgive you as time passes. But it will always be a memory that influences his worldview.
Coming back to my earlier point, legacy can be polarising. A human can never be perfect. You will always be a villain in someone else's story. But the upcoming generations will have goldfish attention span so...what do you know. Public memory is short. Every generation rewrites importance based on its own needs.
What do you want to be remembered for? See people will always remember what you did wrong, they will hardly remember what you did right. Why? Because the mind works that way, you also have to consider who matters more. Your family might remember you differently than your friends, your co workers might remember you differently than your neighbours. I think you can leave different legacies for different set of people.
You can be a fun person for your friends, you can be a responsible person for your family, you can be someone who rings the bell and hides for your neighbours, you can be someone who snitches on your co workers so you get the promotion. Different legacies, for different people. Now you just have to make a priority list of who matters more, and whose opinion matters more to you. You can be a good parent to your kids, but a bully to their friends. So what do you wanna be? What will you choice? What is important? Ask yourself.
Once in a while, go out alone, buy an ice cream, sit on the bench on the footpath (if your country has footpaths, or benches), and while eating the ice cream just look around and think, what matters to you? Money, money matters a lot. But well, other things please. If you don't want to think then you can just enjoy the ice cream, you know. I am not preaching here. Just trying to put an idea into your mind.
I know that a lot of you are smart and have already realised the polarising effects of legacy. And a lot of you don't care about legacy. But the memories of you will keep you alive. Like a man said, "A man is forgotten not when he dies, but when something something", I am not remembering correctly. See? I don't really care about the quote lmao. This is why I don't remember it correctly, but I have the gist, you die when you are forgotten. You can always create a bot and train it with your memories and data, but who will pay for that service to be up forever? There will be a time when the bot goes away.
I do understand that one cannot be a good person all the time, society is cruel and one has to be practical, you have to become a villain sometimes to get what you want. You have to be assertive and violent at times to take back what is yours. You cannot be good all the time, because it is not genuine. You are not Captain Carrot from the Discworld novels. You are a human, who lives on Earth.
If you disappeared tomorrow, will your friends check up on you? What stories will they tell on your funeral without a body? Will they be good stories? Reminds me of this quote:
But not every thinks like our Beloved Lord Ram. They might hate you even after dying. Doesn't do them good though, you are dead, unless they know some technique/magic to resurrect from the dead just to make you suffer, that also kinda seems like a petty thing to do, but if some protagonist did this in an anime then people will enjoy it.
