Elisha Gray, Kia Silverbrook, Gustav Whitehead, Alfred Russel Wallace, Philo Farnsworth. You probably have no idea who they are yet you use derivates of their inventions on a daily basis. I won't mention what they did because it doesn't matter. Most of you won't bother to google them anyway. You have far more important things to attend to other than searching for a name that ended up doing something for you. I mean, do you even know or care about who invented the internet? Even if you do, does it occupy your daily thoughts?
We live based on the idea that our deeds and dreams will remain carved in people's memories yet we are a living proof that the ones that lived before us are nothing but vague amalgamations. We try to derive meaning from life by leaving something behind us. A book, a child, a piece of code, an Instagram page. In reality, we are only adding to a given amount of noise. Nature has carved us in a way that transcends our lives into things around us — whether that is DNA or carved word on a tree. We are on an autopilot of belief that doesn't hold in the long-run. We are conned by mother-nature.
Even so, I can hear you say "It's all good, I feel its worth it" and "You are depressed man". We like to give excuses for the inevitable so we can continue going on ourselves. We use defensive projections to protect us from the fragile wall that shields us from an inescapable reality. Failing to create a meaningful narrative for our lives leads to self-destruction, isolation, abandonment. Being alive entails that we can somehow manipulate the hormones and neurotransmitters in our minds so we control the way we would be remembered. Nonetheless, if you have spend a couple of decades on this rock, you have find out that saying to a depressed person to cheer up is much like to saying to an amputee to grow legs.
A bee, a cat, a bird do their daily chores without thinking. They do them because this who they are. They are born with specific instructions. They follow code that is imprinted inside them. Humans do much the same. We fail to grasp our place in time as much as a bee fails to understand the causality of its actions. Sure, we can envision our own death but that doesn't gives perspective about how easy we will be forgotten no matter what we do.
We have invented ethics, religion and philosophy in an effort to reason with this unsettling fact. Yet, fame doesn't care about good or bad deeds. Memories don't either. You know nothing about the people who I aforementioned above yet you talk, think and see this man on the right more than anyone else. Not that you know much about what he did but the face just translates into something in your mind. History is written from the winners anyways. If Germany had won the narrative would have been different since the allies did much similar atrocities.
The narrative. This is all that matters. The story we chose to say to ourselves so we can carve the memories of those around us. Memories that will anyway fade much like everything around us. You will be remembered by some members of your family, sometimes. Perhaps a few from the next generation will stumble upon your name somewhere. It wont matter much like a scientific reference doesn't play any other role other than getting you credibility.
It is said that most of our memories are fake, mixed up with dreams. The brain can retain only that much and after a while it starts mixing things together, creating shortcuts. Most of your childhood has perished even in your own mind. More than half of you is already dead. What remains are shared snapshots from some members of your family that already have forgotten those times as well. You all agreed to remember some parts and that creates a base for the contemporary you. You are probably also frustrated about how others have created a wrong image of you. No need to worry though. Nobody will remember you because memories themselves are nothing but dreams. Dreams fail to become reality because themselves are based on empty memories.
