Remember to remember that almost no-one will remember.

I stayed with my parents recently and spent a lazy afternoon looking through the family photos. 

Of course my folks were easy to spot, and there were plenty of statements like ‘Mum you look awesome here,’ or ‘Dad do you still have that woollen sweater, and if so can I have it?’. 

My Grandma and Grandpa, who have both passed, were also easy for me to identify in the albums, but quite reasonably, I had to point them out to my wife and kids. 

Beyond them, though, as we went further back, the faces, all in black and white by this point, blurred into one another. When I asked Mum if she could identify who was who, she often couldn’t. 

So basically, this is my ratio of how much I think about key people in my life.

What’s stuck with me since is:

1. I’m sure Dad’s still got that sweater, and surely I can talk him into giving it to me.

2. Almost everyone gets forgotten. 

If I think back on my family, I think about my Grandma and Grandpa maybe once a year. But I don’t think about my great-grandparents or their parents. Really anyone that passed away over fifty years ago, I basically never think about. 

Beyond my family, even the super famous people of the last few thousand years, I don’t think about all that much. Let’s be honest: you know the names Cleopatra, Shakespeare, and Leonardo Da Vinci, but (unless you work at their museum or a professor who studies them), you don’t often think about them, do you?

So the humbling lesson for me is I’ll almost certainly be forgotten. Even if I do something crazy like become the Queen of Egypt or revolutionize literature, basically everyone within a few decades will rarely think about me once I die.

But the empowering thing I’m realizing is that the lives that my ancestors led and all the big decisions they made are part of who I am today. In the same way, I use language that was forwarded by Shakespeare and technologies that were inspired by Da Vinci. 

So we probably shouldn’t make decisions in life based on what we think people might remember us for. Because, almost certainly, most won’t. Quite liberating, really. But, we should add to the betterment of the world because that seems to be what lasts.