What We Leave Behind | 7-17-25

I’ve found myself thinking quite a lot lately about the concept of a legacy. Similarly to the classic tale of Alexander Hamilton in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, I think that it’s reasonable to wonder what makes our lives worth it: what will survive us and have the potential to imbue us with continuous meaning even when we are no longer physically alive. Here are some of my thoughts.

In a purely reductive sense, the only things that make life worth living are the things that will survive us after we are gone. I don’t even believe this much myself from practical experience, especially given the fact that I take so much joy in the fleeting and ephemeral experiences that we humans compile over the course of our lifetimes. However, when you think about it, death is very final. We can’t say that we’ve gotten anything out of life when we die because that implies there’s a place to take the things we’ve “gotten” to. While this introduces questions of faith, I am personally an atheist, which makes things rather depressing at this stage. What is the only marker of our lives that can be said to be worth it? It cannot be our raw memories or experiences, because we don’t get to keep those as souvenirs. They die with us. Similarly, it cannot be our money or our possessions, because they are no longer of use to us once we die. Well, then what can we point to as making our lives worth it? Here is my theory. I think that the only things that, strictly speaking, give our lives meaning, are the small (or large) impacts that we make as a human on our world and community. This is because those impacts will outlast us, and will have the potential to continue doing so for a long period of time as time trickles down. Our impacts on others and on the world around us will represent the worth of our lives, because they will outlive us and signify a meaningful contribution that we will have made to something other than ourselves. In a poem that I penned in school inspired by the Great Gatsby, I wrote that “the party never ends, but the people leave and die”. I think this is especially fitting in the context of this post because it’s true: time never stops moving towards its ultimate conclusion (if there ever will be one), but we take our turn in the limelight and then shuffle off in death. The only things that we can point to as being fundamentally worth it are the contributions we make to the party. And this leads me to my next thought:

I love the Butterfly Effect. The Butterfly effect, as I understand it, is the capacity of even small perturbations to create massive changes in completely different locales as a result of the domino chain of random events resulting from those little nudges. The butterfly wing beating once can create a snowstorm in China, or something to that effect. Why is this so awesome? Well, when I was first having these questions about what made life worth it, I was remembering a deep philosophical dilemma that I thought about when I was younger: that no matter what we do in our life, everyone will forget it if we go far enough into the future. I think that this was in reaction to a quote from Meditations or something of that vein. It’s less of a practical truth than a general musing on the state of things, but it made me deeply concerned. Will nothing I do ever survive, or achieve some level of immortality? Why would I choose to care about my life, if there is no prospect of a deeper value or relevance in the future? This was the crux of my dilemma, that I’ve taken so long to get to the point of. Well, I’ve realized recently that what gives me comfort, what I appeal to in order to make my worries and anxieties go away, is the Butterfly Effect. In the specific context of any one human life, it gives me confidence that, without the (relatively minor) contributions/ripples/waves/energy that one propagated into the universe during their lifetime, history would never have unfolded the same way. Each and every one of us, in our own small, little ways, is completely responsible for any part of the future that will ever occur, because if we had not made the choices we had made, even seemingly huge and impersonal phenomena would have happened very differently. This is my God, although I don’t pray to it, because it gives me comfort and assurance of my life after death. Not a heaven, but a continuous type of relevance as part of the stream of human history.

This leads me to another one of my thoughts (hopefully the last in this stream of consciousness post). You build on your impact in the world through your relationships with other people. One of the best ways to continue propagating your legacy, to take even more absolute ownership of your role in the universe, is to have children. I can’t wait to have kids, to impart my knowledge and small amounts of wisdom to them, and to know that their waves and ripples in the universe will each carry a little undertone of what I taught them, and the energy that I imparted to them at specific times in their lives. Each parent impacts each child, whether through aspects of their presence or absence, and as such, you impact their children, and their grandchildren, and so on and so forth. Your presence and being trickles down through the years because of the example you set and the way that you live. The exact same is true of people. Each relationship you build with friends, or acquaintances, or enemies, is one in which you have made an impact on the other person, and they have made an impact on you. It is another strand in the web of ways you have made your mark on the world. And as those individual lives trickle further and further out, so too does your impact on the world. This helps me tie together mentally strands of one of my favorite pieces of philosophy and ethics: How you do anything is how you do everything (because it impacts your legacy in the world by how you impact other people). This way of thinking also builds up so many meaningful connections in my mind. For example, it reveals an explanation for your obligation to follow laws, to help uphold a just society, to be compassionate and kind, and so many other moral platitudes that we are taught but never taught explicitly why. For argument’s sake, you don’t need to do any of these things, but I feel like knowing they are all tied to your life’s work and your legacy through your morals is a powerful connection to make.

However, for argument’s sake, you could achieve some truly massive influence in the world by doing truly terrible things instead. You will definitely achieve relevance by being a monster, and teaching people what not to do, of course. And again, for argument’s sake, why is this (obviously) wrong? I had to think about it for a bit, and this is my answer: Although you are not directly indebted to anyone else in their lives, or required to choose the good side of the coin versus the bad, I think that my philosophy of life rests almost entirely on empathy. This is empathy in a very specific context, too. It’s not feeling bad for a person because a bad thing happened to them, or relating to someone who’s going through similar problem: It’s empathy on a humanity-level scale. This is empathy about the fundamental nature of the human experience. The reason you should choose kindness over evil, to choose good relevance over bad, is because you are just trying to live your best life, and everyone else is in the same boat as you. It reminds me of the Golden Rule: Treat others how you wish to be treated, because you would want the same in your situation. How can you expect good things to happen to you if you don’t treat others that way yourself? I truly think it’s remarkable how central the Golden Rule was to my education and childhood, and likely the childhood of so many others, because it’s so powerful and easily applied to philosophy on a grand scale. We should be kind because everyone is also trying to do the same thing you are: live your best life, leave your best legacy. So be conscious of that: Don’t sacrifice yourself for it, but be conscious of it.

This was a lot, I will probably need to update this further and extensively. Just know that, as a child, I read a lottt of philosophy books. I was obsessed with being a good person. I was confused about the reasons to be good, just as much as the method. I wanted a rigorous way to understand it all. This post is far from that, just a collection of thoughts in my head, but it represents the ways that I explain the world to myself, and have learned to love my place in it. If you remember anything from this post, remember this:

Who you are makes a difference: Your legacy is assured through the relationships you build and the ripples you make in the world. That’s what makes life worth living. Live your life fully, in every location and in every way you can, because you make more ripples that way. And do it while not getting in the way of anyone else trying to do the same.