What is the legacy you want to leave behind?

Billions of people have lived and died on this planet, and so long as we collectively do not fuck it up there will be billions upon billions more. How many of them are remembered? How many eventually fade from memory and go forgotten? Stories untold and never to be known.

Life is a complicated, complex, multifaceted mess, and yet we all have two things in common. We are born, and we will die. (Okay, yes, we have a LOT more in common but hear me out.)

We grow up wanting and collecting things throughout life, yet when we die we take nothing with us. If there is any sort of legacy that I want to leave behind that is within my power to control it is this: I do not want to leave a mess for someone else to clean up. Sure, in the grand scheme of things if I’m going to be forgotten then it should eventually not have mattered at all. That doesn’t mean I don’t care. If my actions in life can inspire others to care in the same way, then we’ll have made less problems for future generations. Otherwise, if I didn’t care, and billions of others didn’t either, the world that we inherited would have been more fucked and we would only continue to contribute to making it worse.

Well, all that being said, if there is something I want to leave behind as a lasting legacy in the hopes of being remembered for hundreds of generations, I’d hope it’s something that people will look upon fondly. Maybe a book or two that have some kind of profoundly positive impact on the world. Barring that, because the odds are overwhelmingly against that, I just don’t want someone cleaning up after me and any mistakes I’ve made in the past or will make in the years to come. To go peacefully into the unknown after having lived well without impeding anyone else’s life.