We All Want to be Somebody, but We Also Like Being Nobody
Thoughts on immortality, legacy-building, and why not all of us want it (despite what we may say)
In Search of Immortality
In the prologue of the game Cyberpunk 2077, you are introduced to your fixer (a person who arranges gigs for you) for the opening mission, Dexter DeShawn. DeShawn tasks you with stealing a biochip known as the Relic from the Arasaka Corporation, the world’s most powerful and influential megacorporation. In the course of your conversation with DeShawn, he asks you
Would you rather live in peace as Mister/Miss Nobody, die ripe, old and smellin’ slightly of urine? Or go down for all times in a blaze of glory, smellin’ near like posies, ‘thout seein’ your thirtieth?
It’s a simple, oft-posed question throughout all kinds of media. You’ve almost certainly heard the adage “the candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long.” We would all like to be “somebody,” to be remembered by history, to have our names, at the bare minimum, be remembered long after we pass on from this mortal realm. As of the writing of this article, we, unfortunately, do not have the ability to radically extend our lifespans; immortality is still out of reach. It is for this reason that we try the next best thing: being remembered by history. Some are willing to even commit heinous acts to gain notoriety and be “somebody” in the grand scheme of history, even if that “somebody” is infamous. A classical example of this is the case of Herostratus. Herostratus was an ancient Greek who is known solely for burning down the 2nd Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World, in an effort to have his name immortalized. In addition to being executed for his deeply sacrilegious act, the Ephesian authorities would establish a law forbidding anyone from mentioning his name in any capacity, be it in speech or in writing. However, given that we know his name and the act he committed, it appears that the Ephesian authorities failed in their efforts while Herostratus succeeded in his. Furthermore, the names of those who condemned him have been, ironically enough, lost to history. (Side note: I’ve heard it postulated that “Herostratus” was not his real name, but rather a placeholder name so as to posthumously deny him the satisfaction of having his real name remembered by history. This is hearsay though.)
So what if we don’t want our names remembered for the wrong reasons? What if we would like future generations to extoll us, or at the very least not curse us? Well, unless you’ve won the genetic $2 billion Powerball jackpot with respect to athleticism, intelligence, or creativity, it’s gonna be hard. Your best bet, if you solely want your name and nothing else to be remembered (the bare minimum), is to build some grand stone (for the best chance of survival) structure that has your name engraved on it. (After all, Ozymandias’s name was still known.) There are plenty of examples of this happening throughout history, instances in which we know little about a person except for their enormous and opulent tomb. The first example that may come to mind for you might be Mausolus (especially given how mausoleums are named after him.) Mausolus was a satrap (governor) of the Achaemenid Empire, specifically in Anatolia. We do actually know a decent amount about Mausolus and his reign, but the specifics of his life are not particularly interesting. What he is remembered for is his enormous tomb at Halicarnassus.
This Wonder of the Ancient World would survive over 1500 years before eventually succumbing to a series of earthquakes over the years, progressively disintegrating before eventually being stripped apart for stone by the Knights Hospitaller to be used to fortify their own castle on the Anatolian mainland against the Ottoman Empire. Mausolus was not a particularly remarkable figure of history, but we know if him (and use his name in a word) because of his legacy left in the form of his tomb. Mausolus is not the only noble to be remembered by history for his tomb. In addition to various Egyptian pharaohs (e.g. Tutankhamun and Khufu), there are plenty of Chinese nobles known only to us because of their tombs and not their actions. Prince Liu Sheng, Marquis Yi of Zeng, King Cuo of Zhongshan, and Lady Dai, among others, are remembered almost solely because of their tombs that feature an abundance of well-preserved Ancient Chinese art, mainly in the form of bronzes and jades. (I did not mention the most famous Ancient Chinese tomb, that of Qin Shi Huang, because its owner is known for more than just his tomb. Another note on the tombs is that, in China at least, a large tomb was a symbol of your family’s wealth and status, and they were places to be revered by your descendants, hence their opulence.) Ironically enough, then, it may be that you will be immortalized by the place that your very much dead corpse lies for the rest of eternity.
If tombs aren’t your style, you could be like the wealthy families of Bologna and build enormous stone towers to show off your wealth, but this strategy doesn’t have a great success rate (only about 20-25% of the towers built during 12th and 13th centuries have survived to the present day). We could go on listing all the various kinds of opulent stone structures built by the wealthy in an effort to be remembered by history, but I want to move onto another point: most rich people today aren’t creating grand monuments like those of the old days. One of the most recent examples of wealth being poured into an enormous vanity project by a wealthy family is the Biltmore Estate of the Vanderbilts.
However, the Vanderbilts were a deviation from the norm of what wealthy families of the Gilded Age did, and what they started to do then is what many wealthy people do today: charity. In 1889, the same year the Biltmore Estate began construction, Andrew Carnegie, self-made ultra-rich steel baron, outlined in his essay, commonly known as “The Gospel of Wealth,” the philanthropic duty that he believed wealthy people of his time had to the lower classes and to society in general, a sort of noblesse oblige. In summary, he believed that the ultra-wealthy should wisely manage and invest their wealth, spending it on causes that contribute to society rather than on vanity projects, a stark contrast from what the old money (read: nobility) of the Old World believed. Carnegie’s gospel proved wildly influential; if you’re not so sure, just remember why that one building on your college campus had that name. Odds are that a wealthy individual donated it because they believed in furthering the cause of education. And guess what? Their name is on it! Nothing’s changed! I don’t know who Saieh, Stuart, Rosenwald, or Regenstein are, but I sure as hell know their names. Now of course there’s plenty more philanthropic enterprises to plaster your name on than just university buildings. I’m just using their examples as a humorous callback to the first kind of legacy-building (big stone structures), but the ultra-wealthy truly have taken Carnegie’s words to heart, whether they know it or not. The Giving Pledge, an organization founded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet that encourages the ultra-wealthy to give away 50% or more of their wealth to philanthropic causes once they die, is a very strong reading of Carnegie’s gospel. A true who’s who of the world’s wealthiest people have made the pledge. Sure today we say that names like “Bill Gates” and “Elon Musk” would never be forgotten, but think about how many people probably only know the name “Carnegie” from Carnegie Hall or “Vanderbilt” from Vanderbilt University (or Vanderbilt Beach if you’re from Southwest Florida). Just as how steel and railroads have less importance in today’s world than in late 1800’s, so too may software and rocketry lose importance in the future to new industries. By then, people may only know the name “Gates” because of the Gates Foundation, and we might only remember Ken Griffin because one of Harvard’s graduate schools and UChicago’s economics department bear his name (among other things of course). Funnily enough, in the same vein of larger tombs corresponding to greater wealth and influence, the more often your name appears on foundations, museums, and universities, the wealthier you probably are.
This culture of philanthropy happens much to the chagrin of various online-prone spheres. The first group with objections to this are an assortment of conservatives whom I will dub “trads.” Trads believe that the wealthy should be giving their fortune to solely their children and other descendants. Trads view philanthropy as wasteful at best and actively harmful at worst (see the many strong reactions had to a breakdown of MacKenzie Scott’s charitable donations). They view it as a symbol of the degradation of kinship ties in today’s society, among many other things. (I won’t make a judgement value on these views, but what I will say is that the wealth of the ultra-wealthy is on a truly unfathomable level. Even if Bill Gates were to donate 99% of his wealth to charity, his 3 children would inherit ~$445 million each. Suppose they all live to 100 years old; that means they’d have to spend $4.45 million a year to burn through all their money by the time they die, assuming they don’t work at all and assuming they don’t invest or do anything else with that money, that is. And yes, I know that net worth ≠ cash on hand, of course I do. I’m simply trying to illustrate a point here on how large 1 billion actually is.) The other group upset with the philanthropic status quo are the effective altruists. Particularly popular among rationalist-type spheres, they think that modern charity is going to waste and that if we just used math and reason, we could allocate all those billions of dollars so much more efficiently. (I know that effective altruists talk about far more than just charity [in general they just talk a lot], but this specific part of this specific essay is about charity, and so that is what I’ll be focusing on. If you’re unsatisfied with that, leave a comment or something, idk man.) In practice, this amounts to a whole lot of pontificating with not too much doing on the part of effective altruists, though there are exceptions (see malaria nets and Making Sunsets). At any rate, neither movement has gone particularly mainstream, and our elites still heed the words of the prophet Carnegie.
Now, I haven’t mentioned another method of attaining a long-lasting legacy that many may think of first: adventure. Think of Cortes, Pizarro, da Gama, Columbus, and Magellan, among countless others. When people still know their names centuries after they’ve passed, why have I neglected them and those that have done similar things. The main reason I haven’t discussed them or this method of legacy-building is because in today’s hyper-interconnected world, there really is not much adventure left to be had. The world is the smallest its been in human history, and it will only get smaller. Lord Miles is the best we got (make of that what you will). Additionally, spacefaring is going to take many more years to become a thing; unfortunately, I may not get to see it accomplished (I very much would like to be proven wrong though). For this perhaps short stretch of time in the grand scheme of history, there is almost no more adventure to be had. Even the last of the world’s most infamous adventurers, the Taliban, have been swamped by the 9-to-5 office life. (Though, this ties into the first point I made, that being that most people don’t want to be remembered for ill deeds.)
Who Wants to be Nobody?
So I’ve talked for a while now about the ways to make a name for yourself and be remembered by history that don’t require genetic luck. Generally, accruing wealth is not dependent on winning the genetic lottery; genetic luck is an often sufficient, but by no means necessary condition to getting rich. The necessary condition to fortune is drive. There must be, within a person, the burning desire to rise above others, to keep working and striving towards an ever-unreachable ultimate goal of “success” no matter how many people they have to trample over, how many backs they have to stab, how many asses they have to kiss. It’s this attitude in life that leads to people making names for themselves, and most people don’t have it. We all like the idea of being “somebody,” the idea of being renowned by our peers the world over, the idea of our names being echoed long after we’ve passed on, but at the end of the day, how many of us are willing to sacrifice the comfort we’ve grown accustomed to? How many of us are willing to upend our lives, our relationships, our habits in the name of pursuing some ill-defined greatness with not a single guarantee of success? The answer is not most of us. In life, inertia is perhaps the strongest of forces. We grow addicted to the comforts and routines of our lives because the unknown is infinitely vast and dangerous. And to be quite honest, it’s perfectly understandable, especially when one has a family to take care of. To seek “immortality” is, in that scenario, selfish. After all, you’re risking not only your own livelihood but the livelihood of your family in the effort to be “somebody.” More often than not, you’re going to fail and lose perhaps the most valuable thing in the world: unconditional love. But you blew it, your bank account’s deep in the red, and in your cold, lonely motel room your only company is your thoughts, and they can’t help but show you everything you had, everything you threw away. You pick up the bottle of Fireball you’ve been downing and take another sip. The cinnamon burns; it stings more than the last time, like a tiger clawing through your throat trying to get out. But you drown the tiger. And your thoughts. You thought you could be immortal, but in your current state, you’re more dead than if you were to put a bullet between your eyes.
We think about our missed opportunities, about the risks we never took and how if we had just taken them we would’ve been millionaires for sure, but that’s because we don’t want to think about the alternative. We assign low probabilities to misfortunate events because we just don’t want them to happen.1 We like believing that we’ll always come out on top, and to be honest, that is important belief to hold. To believe otherwise is to surrender oneself to defeatism, a far more dangerous mindset. The key lies in tempering our expectations and in adequately managing our goals in life. Most people will take the slow route and keep putting money into their 401k’s and IRAs because they know with high certainty that they’ll be ok. They’ll keep the mortgage and, when they’re older, they’ll buy that condo in Pelican Bay. Their highs will never reach Everest, but their lows will stay above sea level.
For more on the optimism bias https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/optimism-bias.