Just a thought that crossed my mind today.
If I was to ask everyone that you’ve ever interacted with (IRL) what their general opinion of you is, what do you hope the most common answer would be?
Would you hope they consider you a successful person, physically attractive, smart, the best in your field, etc?
Personally, my answer is “A good, kind person. Friendly and helpful.”
Just wondering what the rest of feel.
EDIT: Based on the first few responses, I’m thinking I should have clarified better.
I’m not talking about your legacy after you’re dead, I just mean right here, right now. You have left an impression on people. That is inevitable. Surely there aren’t that many people that don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks, but I must admit, it is a valid answer. Maybe you are the person who doesn’t give a fuck what anyone thinks. 🤷🏻♂️
Like Luigi 😉
Doesn’t that depend on the person? I’ve interacted with many people in different ways over the years, and if I made an impact on them it’s probably not something that a couple of words would meaningfully encompass.
To put it differently, if I think about people who have passed away or people who used to live close to me but now live far away so we’re no longer in contact, the people where I think they changed my life or how I think or feel, talking about them always involves telling a story, or maybe two or three. And that’s how it should be, right?
I honestly think obscurity wouldn’t be that bad, that would be a victory
I want my funeral to be a roast but my fiancee asked me not to.
“You want my treasure? You can have it! I left everything I gathered together in one place. Now you just have to find it.”
I don’t know. I really want people to like me. I wouldn’t describe myself as attention starved, but I get upset pretty easily when I learn people don’t like me. I try to be a good friend. I try to be fun. I try to be the life of the party and a social butterfly but not overstay my welcome in the limelight.
Are you me?
“He was just starting to get pretty okay at playing the Appalachian dulcimer.”
My favorite Appalachian hammer dulcimer Christmas album got removed from Spotify a few years ago and I’m still upset.
https://open.spotify.com/album/5XFQyFEhplzuNheYBsCWXL (link to the unplayable album).
Apparently I could download it from Christian bookstore. https://www.christianbook.com/scott-miller/appalachian-christmas/pd/DL153578-CP
Is it weird that i dont want to be remembered? I just want to fade into nothingness. None of it matters anyway
i grew up in a BIG mormon family.
a decade or so ago, a group of 20-ish cousins and i were sitting round the campfire at the reunion. they all discussed among themselves and decided that i am the original black-sheep of the family and they thanked me for being a strong role model for their own journey out of the truly awful mormon religion.
i am very proud of that.
That may be one of the most inspirational stories I’ve heard yet! Proud of you! Fight the power!
I have no need to be remembered by anyone. Memories and legacies are fake human constructs that we’ve made up. We live approx 60ish years and then die. Only kids and or some relatives/spouses will remember you for another few decades before they die too and you’re completely forgotten.
To hang onto the idea that you must leave a legacy behind and be remembered by other people just adds unnecessary stress to one’s life. Not a single person cares about anyone except for themselves (save for some people who may care in some manner about their significant others, kids, maybe a best friend).
I refuse your opinion. There might be a time, a place, a random conversation where I’m remembered. I want people to take my name in a good way, not like Hitler.
It’s not illegal to care about others, you will get something back in life if you help others. Build favours.
To be honest, your comment seems like a huge cry for help.
That’s okay it’s not your opinion so you’re allowed to refuse it. I don’t understand what you mean when you say it seems like a huge cry for help. Could you elaborate?
My guess is that it sounds depressing.
I suppose under a certain lens realism can be viewed as depressing. But when you remember we are all stardust, born from explosions, a rare occurrence in and of itself that resulted in our lives, one doesn’t need remembrance to feel special about themselves. That becomes somewhat trivial in the grand scheme of the universe.
In fact it almost seems like a cry for help to want to be remembered, like as if you are so fearful of death that you’d waste the time you were given making others think you’re somehow better than the rest, when the truth is we are all more alike than we are different.
Anywho, that’s just my perspective on things, cheers
Ya the way you described it is how I feel. The human need for being remembered suggests eternal permanence, which is not compatible with the way we understand physics and how the universe works. Nothing is permanent.
Right now, knowing my public execution won’t be cause for national celebration is a weirdly comforting bit of knowledge.
I want to be remembered for my so-far meager and obscure contributions to the field of mathematics.
Most likely I’ll be remembered as intelligent, kind and sarcastic by a few friends.
Congratulations! Any contributions to math is impressive to me!
“I don’t want to be remembered, I want to live” (paraphrased)
-CGP Grey
Being remembered implies memory carried through time and space. Being remembered implies future humans remembering.
The grand scheme of the cosmos makes it questionable. There’ll be no human being millions of years from now, at least not the humanity that we know of. If humans lasted for the next thousand years, it’ll certainly be a cosmic miracle, because the scientific tendency is a mass extinction event for the foreseeable future (due to factors such as climate change).
We don’t need to try and imagine a foreseeable future. We can look at the past and question ourselves whether it’s possible or not for a person to actually be remembered. Do we know and remember the name of that first person to ever write within language rules, possibly a Sumerian person? Do we know and remember their name, their life, how they looked like, what they ate? What about the first person to ever lit a fire, possibly a hominid? What about the first person to make something that resembled a wheel?
Time’s cruel. I mean, there’s no cruelty as in a human sense, it’s simply a great, ineffable cosmic indifference towards the “order out of chaos” that we call “living beings”. Even when there are memory carriers, people who remember other people, the memories and thoughts they carry will fade into the oblivion of the entropy. It’s how cosmos functions. Order came from the primordial chaos, and to the primordial chaos it must return.
So, how do I want to be remembered? Do I ever want to be? Even if I did want to be remembered, it wouldn’t matter, because all matter and energy will be forgotten amongst the cosmic soup of chaos rearranged by an unstoppable entropy.
That’s deep and all, but I just meant, what are people’s general opinion of you now.
I hope friends will occasionally remember having fun with me and smile.
