“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”
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About this quote
Most of our anxiety about meaning comes from treating the future like a judge. If nothing lasts forever, your real power is how you spend today and who you help. Focus on things that improve your days: finish one project and keep steady routines. Feeling unsettled? Turn that worry into a small, useful action right now.
When to use it
- When I'm up at 2 a.m. rewriting my dissertation introduction and panicking about whether anyone will ever read it, I tell myself to finish this chapter and stop chasing immortality.
- As a hospice nurse sitting with a family who asks if their loved one will be remembered, I remind them we can't control that, but we can make these hours calm and real.
- When my startup founders start arguing about changing the world instead of shipping, I say we can't promise eternity, so let's build something useful for people now.
- Before a marathon when I get obsessed with records and being remembered, I tell myself to train for the way running makes me better today, not for a name on a list.