Immortal legacy

Humans aspire to leave a trace or a legacy that will perpetuate their passage on earth, long after they are gone. In other words, humans long for the same ultimate thing: immortality, even if they know, that the immortality they seek will only happen after they die.

A well spread belief states that humans try to achieve post mortem immortality by doing and creating things that will outlast them. Some start revolutions, make wars, kill many people, or build business and political empires. Others, more on the creative side, invent or discover things, write books or songs, draw paintings, sculpt stones, compose music, or create art. As for the masses, the individuals lacking the charisma, the talent, or the determination to make history with their deeds or material creations, they procreate children whom they hope and pray would look and be like them.

Few questions are necessary to confirm the validity or probably shed some doubt on the veracity of the above stated belief: to whom are we leaving our eternal legacy? How are they going to appreciate it or judge it? Based on which criteria, defined and decided by whom?

If we attempt to answer these questions with authenticity, we surely run the risk of being greatly disappointed. Because, in truth, we leave our legacy to a community of people that we mostly despised during our lifetime. This same group that may be judging and condemning today, would make the eulogy of our work and glorify us once we are dead. What value can we attach to our legacy, if the people who quantify its value, have neither the talent nor the legitimacy to do so? What importance does people’s opinion carry, when they discuss the genius of a poet, a musician, a painter, an explorer, a scientist, or any creator? Or when they judge a leader’s legacy or actions? What do they know about the level of feelings and thinking that any creator put in their creations? Or the motivations and ambitions that drove a leader or an explorer in their life’s work?

With this in mind, it becomes clear that our immortality through the collective recognition and appreciation of our life’s creation and legacy is futile. In simpler words, it isn’t worth the trouble. And surely it isn’t the direct purpose of our actions and creations. It might happen as a side effect of them because some people living after our death decide that what we did in our lives has an eternal value, good or bad.

The only immortality we could achieve on our own, without relying on someone’s opinion, is through the perpetuation of our DNA, through procreation. We do it without thinking about how the world will appreciate our children, we do it solely based on an egocentric decision to clone ourselves, hoping that our children will do the same, forever. That explains the desire of many parents to become grand-parents, and grand-grand-parents. It is a reassurance that their immortality is on the right track.

So, beyond the “worthless” immortality, which other goals are we pursuing through our actions and the creation of things and beings that will outlive us?

There are primarily two of them. There might be more, but they are, for the largest majority of people, secondary in importance to the first two. Gibran K. Gibran said: “the obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply”. So very simply put, humans pursue two sources of pleasure, therefore satisfaction through their actions and creations. They do and create firstly, to be admired by others, and secondly, to show their superiority over the non-doers and non-creators. In distance third, there would be the idea of bringing a certain kind of value such as pleasure, happiness, money, … to the people they care about. But it is so distant that only few people with a very clear and sharp vision of how this life would be worth living could see that third possibility.

Our immortal legacy is, therefore, a very hypocritical yet exalting expression of our desire to be admired and our un-avowed feeling of demonstrating our superiority. At the end, in a very unexpected way, we do leave behind us an immortal legacy, which had traversed and will continue to traverse humanity throughout its existence. The immortal legacy we leave behind is not the things we create and the actions we undertake and is not our names in history books. Our immortal legacy is the devil’s favorite sin, it is the mother, sister and daughter of the ego. We have been passing it along, from one generation to another, through our teachings, attitudes and actions. The immortal legacy we leave behind for eternity is simply our vanity!