Legacy

I started writing the next paragraph a month ago but while writing it, I realized that I was writing just to write. I felt like I didn’t really have anything to say. Reading it back didn’t feel juicy, even though writing it felt natural. I wanted to reflect about identity. Who I am and who I wanted to be, ideally. Since then, I started listening to the audio book of Karl Ove Knausgård’s (wilfully poorly titled) My Struggle and watched an insightful interrogation of the Mormon tradwife trend on social media by Alyssa Grenfell. In this video, she is discussing some posts from the personal blog of one of the foremost influencers in this space, Hannah Neeleman (@ballerinafarm). Both are instances of peoples deeply personal writings becoming part of their very public legacy. Both worked actively, intensely and successfully on creating a legacy for themselves. Knausgård explicitly identifies this as ‘his struggle’ early in the book, which really is the literary equivalent of the personal blog of a proto-influencer. Knausgård, I’m sure, would not enjoy this review and I might regret this analysis once I made it further than the first half of the first of six books. Either way, it made me think of this post I started writing differently, I think I was dancing around legacy, not identity. What I will be remembered for, if at all, is inextricably linked to how I perceive myself.

Undeniable facts

I am undeniably a scientist and a parent. These are labels I have earned in the Malcolm-Gladwell-10 000-hours (MG10kh) sense and in multiple other measurable ways. If I had amnesia, there would be a trail of public records that would convince me of these facts about me. If I was trapped on an island with strangers, I could convince them of these facts about me because of my own conviction of them. But am I a writer because I write a blog? Am I a programmer because I wrote some R packages in the pre-LLM era? Am I a gardener because I water the house plants? Am I a fisherman because I own a fishing rod and have caught a fish once? Am I a philosopher because I keep asking stupid questions?

There is a gradient to these identifiers, some I am obviously not (yet) and some I might be, depending on who you ask, or when you ask me. There are countless things I undeniably am, but many of them feel too commonplace to consider them part of my identity. I am a husband, a brother and so on. But unlike ‘parent’, these don’t feel like expressive labels, more like implicit traits. I think that legacy is the differentiator and the line I draw for things I actively work towards becoming. I don’t care if anyone remembers me as a fisherman or a philosopher. My hypothetical obituary in a local print newspaper would probably include husband and brother, just because that’s the convention for local print newspapers (RIP). But I deeply hope that my life will amount to some things that are more interesting to remember me by than that. That’s not a constant driving force, like for Knausgård, but certainly one of the background noises in my heuristic for life choices.

It’s always the patriarchy or capitalism, bro

Admitting to that urge seems taboo. A clear violation of the Law of Jante, the villagers will cast me out when they read this one. And it might be toxic masculinity. The patriarchy imposing itself on my happiness and contributing to my anxiety of not spending my time in a worthwhile manner when I’m not being the most memorable main character I could be. The cultural equivalent of man-spreading, the ingrained entitlement of a white boy. I’m not saying this to rhetorically wave it away or ridicule the thought, I genuinely think that’s what it might be. But it’s there and I need to decide whether to keep it on board or work to let it go.

On one hand, I believe that I would be happier without it. Lighter and less constrained. Knausgård says that happiness isn’t the point (he implies legacy is). But as I wrote before, even if happiness is not the main point, it’s certainly something I would like more of. I won’t link all the relevant posts, but anything tagged ‘reflection’ is about this in some way. I at least think that if I’m always unhappy, I’m wasting my life. So if I can identify something that I can do less of and be more happy, I would consider it. But I don’t think this really gets to the core of how I want to be remembered. ‘Legacy’ sounds like a masturbatory, grandiose, Caesarean concept. This is probably close to what drives Knausgård. To create something bigger than oneself. An eternal monument to an existence. That requires work and would probably be in the way of my happiness. But I don’t think that’s what I’m striving for. Rather a lasting imprint on time. An ancient tag on a Roman temple ruin rather than Bellum Gallicum.

In hindsight, he was pretty funny

I don’t want to be remembered as an academically successful scientist or brilliant programmer. I mean, I would not say no to an accidental Nobel prize for some important science. But I’m not willing to put in the work or would view that as an inherently desirable thing to be on my eternal record. I want my legacy to be fun. ‘He was memorable and unique person who was funny, sad, smart and kind. That he became a niche celebrity after self-publishing a time travel romance about polygamous weed farmers was only one of the strange twists our lives took as a result of his unique concoction of self-diagnosed mental disorders.’ Or something like that.

I want my daughter to be a happy, well-rounded and resourceful person not in-spite of me, but in part because of me. I want to be remembered as a writer only insofar as my writing is a persistent embodiment of what I want to read more of in the world. The same goes for science, programming, art, conversations and relationships. I want many people to feel like it was interesting to know that I existed. But I want people to know I existed. Not like a tradwife influencer or Knausgård, but like someone Tor’s Cabinet of Curiosities might make an episode about in 200 years.