The Immortality Project: or Why I Decided It’s Okay To Be Forgotten
I used to want to be immortal.
Not immortal in a physical sense (who wants to live forever?), but I wanted the memory of me, my achievements, and who I am to be remembered. If you’ve read Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of not Giving A F*ck (which, let’s be honest, a lot of you have heard of and pretend to have read to look cool in front of your intellectual friends), then you’ll know this as the immortality project.
I’ve created a lot of “immortality projects” — my Medium posts, my articles, my videos, my films, my podcasts. But I never felt that I did enough — I wasn’t working hard enough in order to be remembered forever, to be talked about at family dinners, to be revered in history classrooms. I kept looking up and realizing that there were so many more people that will be remembered, and that in the fight for the memories of future generations, there was no way I would win.
It stressed me out. A lot. I kept thinking about how, despite living each day, death would bring a finality to both my physical and conceptual presence.
But that’s a reality that we need to face and accept — not a reality we can fight.
Let’s talk about it from a logical standpoint first. Here’s a number game for you. Think of how many people you want to influence, how many people you want to know you.
Do you think about that number? Is it 1 million? 10? Or maybe it’s 7 billion, like me?
I used to think that I’d want all 7 billion people on earth to know my name, my face, my achievements. From the stores on the Upper East Side to the alleys of Zimbabwe, people’s eyes would sparkle with familiarity once they heard my name. I would be as famous as the words “OK” and “Coca-Cola”.
(Thankfully, I’ve now realized that this dream was not only impossible, but also pretty douchey.)
Realistically, we probably won’t touch more than 1 million people’s lives. Even in the best case scenario, you’re still looking at a number sub-1 billion. And honestly, that’s really not that big of a problem. There’s even an upside to accepting that a lot of people won’t know you and remember you. But let’s get the bad parts out of the way first.
When you die, you die.
When you die, you’ll be forgotten. If you’re a pessimist like I am, you can also consider the thought that your death may only be a temporary afterthought for your friends and family, as they slowly move on from their grief back into their old selves without any real changes that people say you get after you have a close one die.
Realistically though, your family and friends and the people you love will remember you. Yes, the memory might fade after a few generations, but as long as your family keeps producing offspring, you may find comfort in the fact that your name will still pop up every now and then, during an extended family gathering or while flipping through old photo albums or through iCloud (hey, just being realistic).
But your ideas? They’ll be gone. Your achievements? Forgotten. There’s little that will remember you outside of your direct family and friends. When you die, you, as a whole, as a concept, as an idea, as a thought, will also die. Forever.
You can be you without worrying about what people will remember about you.
But the upside with knowing that you’ll never be that well known and will be almost entirely forgotten when you die is realizing that no matter how bad you think life is, no matter how problems you face, no matter how many mistakes you made throughout your lifetime, people forget. They do.
Throughout my debating career, I have had the chance to lose in the grandfinals three times. I remember these losses very clearly, as if they are deeply cut wounds that my mind keeps picking in order to keep it from healing. But everyone else has forgotten about it. No one else spends their time thinking about my losses, my failures, my mistakes.
And no one spends time thinking about yours either. Chalk it up to everyone being too busy focusing on themselves, or people not really caring, whatever. Your mistakes don’t leave as big of an impact as you think it might, and once you learn to accept that, and accept that people will not dwell over your mistakes as much as you do, it’s easier to move on to the next projects and stages of your life.
I now know that I’ll never be immortalized. Few will remember me, and even less will cherish my memory. And that’s okay. It means whatever I choose to do now will not really matter in the long run.
What means is that I can do whatever I want, without waiting for permission, without waiting for someone to tell me I’m special, without waiting for a green light or a cosmic sign. I’m free to make mistakes that will be forgotten.
And maybe, that’s what it really means to be human. To accept that your life, no matter how hard you try, is finite, and you must do what you want with your finite time, not wasting it thinking about what other people think about you (most of the time, they don’t).
Mortality is both depressing and liberating. It’s time we accepted that and live our lives.
