LEGACY
We often lie to each other and ourselves by claiming that we don’t care what others think of us, that we are unbothered by the opinions of people who don’t matter to us. This coping mechanism evolves based on who or what it is that is the source of our stress; the people closest to us are often the easiest to shun. It has become fashionable to ‘cut’ people out of our lives when we begin to feel any kind of resistance to our ideal life. We have all become ‘my way or the highway’ people. All in the name of wellness and mental health. It is much more difficult, however, for us to ignore the world and all of the opinions within it.
We expect our loved ones to remember us after we have passed on, regardless of how much our relationships may have soured over the years; the blood that binds people is something that transcends most feuds. For those of us who can’t count on our families to keep our memories alive, and even those of us who can, there is a kind of immortality that lies in the echoed whispers of a high school after it has emptied out, the curb-side conversation that never ends but instead swaps out participants as people come and go, and the lore passed down to the people just now occupying the spaces once inhabited by us.
It is for this reason that many of us care so greatly about what society thinks of us, how they will remember us, if at all, and how we can best fit in, even when we’re trying to stand out. It is a fine line between in line and out of line, and our actions during our lifetime determine how we end up being judged by society in the end. The ideals and attributes of the society that one is living in determine what one’s life will be judged against, but as much as you may try and be a paragon of social excellence, there will always be social change that comes along and clashes with the status quo. The closer we are to the end, the more difficult it is to adapt as people become set in their ways.
For this reason, most people are forgotten long before they ever die. It is usually not out of feelings of contempt or malice but is more akin to nature reacting to a threat. When someone is in harmony with the tenets of society, even if there are disagreements in some minor way, as long as the majority of the individual’s behaviour is deemed acceptable, society is willing to continue carrying the torch. But if an individual, for example, Kanye West, decides to go against the grain in such a way that it creates too much friction, even the artistic contributions that were previously in tune with societal expectations aren’t enough to soothe the rough edges.
The opposite can also be true. There are many examples of people making significant contributions to humanity but having their achievements go unrecognized for a long time, often long beyond their death. Van Gogh and H.P. Lovecraft are two examples of artists who never lived to see their work be appreciated by society, died in poverty, and were never recognized by the society of their time for being the great artists that they were. While his work is revered in literary circles today, Lovecraft held beliefs that would not be accepted today, but since he was from a time when such views were the norm, it becomes less poignant, almost accepted.
Alan Turing was a revolutionary mathematician and code breaker who served his country in helping defeat the Nazis. He didn’t play a minor role either; without him, there would have been much more bloodshed amongst the Allies. Having been a gay man, Alan Turing was shamed by the British government and forced to undergo hormone therapy for his illegal homosexuality, his contributions ignored. Today, something like this is much less of an issue, and we would even celebrate a man such as Alan Turing as the zeitgeist has shifted into a more progressive direction.
Society’s expectations change with the winds, but the constants remain. Be good to your fellow man, be worth remembering, because ultimately it’s the people who carry the burden of keeping those flames alive. No one wants to die, but the thing that makes death so haunting is the idea of being lost to time, just another brick in the wall. So we cling to our reputations, our hopes of the lives we touched while we were here being enough to give life to our memory as we leave behind a legacy, however deep, in the hands of those we will never live to meet. We hope it will be enough.
