Bloodline doesn’t have to end for that to happen. Even if you have kids, in three generations no one will remember your name or your life. Do you know the names and history of your great great grandparents? No one will remember us and it will not be important whether they do or don’t.
This is very true, and also, the reverse is true as well: your bloodline can end yet you can still be remembered if you did something remarkable enough. I’m sure there are tons of well known figures in history whose bloodlines are no more today
One of the things I learned as a scientist is that for any major accomplishment, there are thousands of people who did difficult, necessary, and not-widely-recognized work to make that accomplishment possible.
My favorite example of this was just a few years ago, when the media all reported that a woman had found a black hole. The coverage was all about her and how surprising it was… she was on a team of 6. We all just decided, fuck the 5 other people on her team who all worked together on the project. She wasn’t even a team lead or anything.
I like to think that things are even more complicated, as we depend on a lot of people, even if we are not aware of it: random taxi/bus drivers, restaurant/grocery staff, your ISP workers, random factory workers, etc.
We depend on far mote people than we realize, and not just us but also people working in advancing the limits of human knowledge. We wouldn’t have Einstein without some of his totally unexpected yet unkownly related contemporanies. Following this logic, we wouldn’t have Einstein without his grandparents, and even those grandparent’s contemporanies, and this just keeps going.
Bloodline doesn’t have to end for that to happen. Even if you have kids, in three generations no one will remember your name or your life. Do you know the names and history of your great great grandparents? No one will remember us and it will not be important whether they do or don’t.
This is very true, and also, the reverse is true as well: your bloodline can end yet you can still be remembered if you did something remarkable enough. I’m sure there are tons of well known figures in history whose bloodlines are no more today
One of the things I learned as a scientist is that for any major accomplishment, there are thousands of people who did difficult, necessary, and not-widely-recognized work to make that accomplishment possible.
My favorite example of this was just a few years ago, when the media all reported that a woman had found a black hole. The coverage was all about her and how surprising it was… she was on a team of 6. We all just decided, fuck the 5 other people on her team who all worked together on the project. She wasn’t even a team lead or anything.
I like to think that things are even more complicated, as we depend on a lot of people, even if we are not aware of it: random taxi/bus drivers, restaurant/grocery staff, your ISP workers, random factory workers, etc.
We depend on far mote people than we realize, and not just us but also people working in advancing the limits of human knowledge. We wouldn’t have Einstein without some of his totally unexpected yet unkownly related contemporanies. Following this logic, we wouldn’t have Einstein without his grandparents, and even those grandparent’s contemporanies, and this just keeps going.
As Lain says, we are all connected.
Agree, and I love that.
Even Steve jobs will be forgotten soon enough. My kids don’t even know who he is.
Not having to build some bullshit legacy is so freeing.
I can focus on my version of a good life, and ensure my time with my direct family is fulfilling.
Everything else is just pointless drama.