Content warning: thinking about death, how things don't outlast us, the futility of legacy, and what is truly important

Yesterday before bed I was thinking about this series, and my mind started playing with the question of "what's the use of it". One of the first things that came into my mind was that I simply enjoy writing it. But the second, which was slightly surprising to realize, was that this whole set of posts is a sort of documentation for where my mind is at a given moment, and that will be useful for others when I'm gone.

Now, it's undoubtedly true that this series is an extremely useful documentation system. I've benefited from it multiple times since I started it, as it makes it really easy to find ideas I thought important enough to jot down or issues I was struggling with. However, what surprised me is that a relatively big part of me is thinking of this in terms of "those that come after". As part of a "legacy".

On the surface, the idea of a legacy makes sense. I could even understand how someone might directly want to leave one behind. However, in my almost hypnagogic state I saw just how absurd an idea this is. It doesn't matter what kind of legacy you leave, it doesn't matter what you do, once you're gone you're gone. The experiences that others might have with respect to the things you created are completely inconsequential to you. It could very well be said that once you pass away, the rest of the universe stops existing1. I realized that working to leave a legacy is a moot, empty, unsatisfying position to take, as we're basically moving the "fruits of our labor" to a point in time beyond our own expiration.

After some thinking about it, I realized there are some other (few) things I'm subconsciously doing in my daily life with mostly the goal of leaving behind something "nice" for others to find. All effort that I could be spending somewhere else, somewhere more important.

Ahh, but then the obvious question that we need to answer is "What is important"? This is probably one that I've been thinking about the longest. What are indeed the important things?

Sometimes the answer seems very clear. I've had multiple occasions when the insight arises that the most important thing is to "love each other", to "co-be" with one another in this vast, beautiful universe. Two specifically strong occasions come to mind.

The first was during my first experience with taking acid. A huge part of my trip was dedicated to being in awe at how much time and effort we spend trying to outdo one another, to compete, to mistrust, and (most importantly) how much time we spend resenting others and/or worrying how they might hurt us. It's just so much. It's hard to properly appreciate in our normal mental states because it's such a common feeling. It's basically our base model of being. But at that moment, I had like three or four hours where this feeling was lifted from me, and I felt how silly it was. How stupid that we spend so much time worrying about trivial stuff, truly unimportant things, rather than properly seeing the majestic beauty of the universe around us. How, in reality, we all breathe through each other, all part of the same awe-inspiring whole.

The other occasion is not so grand, but that doesn't mean it wasn't as important. This actually wasn't a single occurrence but happened multiple times throughout my master's degree studies. When I was in the midst of it I really didn't feel like stress was a major part of my life (we never do; that's the problem with chronic stress), but in retrospect I can clearly see that during that time I was so fucking stressed, constantly. The academic work itself wasn't that hard, but I was really suffering from social anxiety, and I was also working a side job to help pay the bills2. I frequently had semi-panic attacks that would slowly build up for months until eventually I would explode. Thankfully, my wife was with me, and she magically knew when it was about to happen. She would force me to talk, and I would feel my anxiety slowly deflating back to baseline (still high compared to my present level). It doesn't really matter what we spoke about, more so that every time we did I found myself with that same all-pervading feeling of "man, I'm such an idiot here worrying about things that really have no importance at all! I should focus on what's really important". That would keep me going for a month or so before it would repeat again.

I think that as humans we tend not to evaluate our approach to life unless we're faced with a strong difficulty. If we're always perfectly comfortable, then what is to push us to see the irritants in our life, what to motivate us to be better, to find a better way? Only if we see suffering do we do something to fix it. As the famous saying goes (paraphrasing): "only if you feel the heat of the flame do you remove your hand from the fire".

Though striving to keep what's "important" in the center of your thoughts is not an easy thing to do. Once you grasp it, it will stay there for a bit, but after a while it gets pushed aside by other interests, worries, desires. Other ideas and thoughts. Until eventually you forget how important the important thing is. You start worrying about how to be more handsome, or how to make more money, or worrying about what your neighbor might think of you. But someday, like today, the idea of what is important will come back, for a while at least.

All this discussion reminded me of a really nice quote I saw on Reddit a while back. Paraphrasing again:

Don’t try to be who your parents wanted you to be. Be who you want your kids to become.

I think we often let ourselves be swept this way and that by the cultural ideas of our times. We let external influences tell us "what is important".

Oh here, you need to have the latest iPhone to be someone others take seriously, or you need to be making a six-figure salary in order to consider yourself at least moderately successful, or work hard now so you can spend your later time doing what you want, among many other examples.

But these all terribly miss the point. They're all about stuff or about status. They all directly target our insecurities, give us a straight path to feeling valuable, to feeling like we're someone that has some weight in the world.

But are those things important? No, not really. They're only important if you don't allow yourself to accept your vulnerabilities and insecurities. Accept there's no way to patch them up, and immediately many of these cultural ideas just stop having any weight to them. Accept that being scared and insecure and raw is the real human condition; everything else is just makeup.

What is important, then, is seeing each other for who we are without letting our differences cloud our perception. What's important is spending time with the people you care about. What's important is spending time with yourself and allowing yourself to grow.

Footnotes

  1. Important aside: this view, of course, depends very much on the outlook you have with respect to what happens after you die. I don't mean to disrespect other ideologies; as far as I know there's really no proof of any of them being correct, so we're all free to believe our own crazy shit. Though for the purposes of this argument I'm using my own ontological view of believing in reincarnation, and once this you goes its whole universe goes with it. ↩

  2. There's also another cause that I don't want to get into here because it might be too long, but it's still worth mentioning in passing. For most of my life I've had hypochondria (the older I get the less I suffer from it, though), but at the same time I have a terrible aversion to needles and, by extension, doctors. So you can imagine something like: my stress would trigger my hypochondria, which would launch me into an unending spiral of dread. I can't even begin to tell you how many hours upon hours (probably whole days or weeks) I've spent unsleeping at night, convinced I had some terrible disease and convinced I would die in the next week. ↩