What is afterward your life? They say life is short, really short. Look at all the years that has passed by, so many years, just like that, in a blink of an eye, it seems. How many years you think you are going to live, sixty, maybe eighty or maybe even more, but how much time you are actually going to live?
It is estimated that if you separate all the time you are going to spend in working mindlessly, being a toddler, sleeping and doing other everyday stuff; you hardly have ten to fifteen years in your hands to actually live. To me though time is relative, an hour is a completely different matter of time for two different beings.
Some insects live for only a day or two and yet it’s a complete circle of life for them, you can’t say their life is short, or maybe you can say it because it is short for you, but for them it’s a whole life. Meaning of twenty-four hours for them is not what it is for you, for them it’s also eighty years.
Having said that, as you grow older, you will find that years come across as smaller and smaller in durations, you may feel that when you were younger, they felt more elaborated in your perception. It is said that this is due to our comparison of present time with the time we had already spent living. The time duration of a single year is notably short in retrospective to all the years you have lived till now, and this duration is only going to appear shorter and shorter, as you stack up more and more years in your life.
The preservation
It’s not a wonder that life appears short to many, our experiences back up the belief, and then there is uncertainty tethered to it, you never know when and where it’s going to end. All this leads us to a path of self-preservation, preservation while we are alive and preservation for, after we are not.
We want to stay alive, therefore, we want to prolong our lives; we want to stretch it as far as possible. But we all know as the evidence provides it, we are going to die sooner or later, it’s inevitable. So, what can be done if one still wants to be for as long as possible?
One obvious approach people take for self-preservation is, to get registered in the history books, by doing something that may impact all the coming generation for a long time or by living a life that benefits the social structure in some way, so that coming generations will remember you for a long time, basically the theme here is to be remembered by your work, and if it’s not you who would be remembered then at least by your work some part of you should be.
It gives us a purpose to be here, it makes us believe that we are here as a part of a grander set of scheme, gives us a belief that we are not random, we are not here just by chance, our existence has a meaning and because we have a meaning our existence has to be everlasting or permanent, it gives us a hope that we are not going to get swept away by the winds of time and death, and turned into dust or forgotten into nothingness, we are going to stay because we are necessary.
Will it even matter to you?
Actually, I don’t think we want our names or even our memories to take our place. Instead, we deceive our rational side, that through our work or memories we OURSELVES will LIVE indefinitely and when I say LIVE, I mean quite in literal sense. It feels like, with this there will be a concrete presence of ours in the world, so we will still be here even after dying and we want to be here as long as possible. If we leave all the sentiments aside, thing is, no one can live through their names and memories in any way.
More importantly what does it matter to a person how and if they are even being remembered when that person doesn’t exist anymore. Oh, maybe it matters to their soul but if that’s the case, soul is going to suffer and be disappointed utterly. I don’t want a fate for me in which I am hanging in between the worlds to watch all the eternity just to see, what others are doing with my legacy.
We humans are not ideal bearers to carry any kind of legacy. People don’t remember you for what you were; people only remember you through their perspective. As the time passes, because of the immense distance and innumerable happenings between your existence and the present time, this perspective becomes more and more distorted to the point it becomes unrecognizable to the real.
Living through your work
Even if you think, at least you would be remembered through your contribution and work for society, the harsh reality is, mostly your work will get remembered not you. You can put any ABC name behind that work, if someone else would have managed to do that work before you. Nobody would have cared about you, even if you still had the same capabilities, it’s the work that matters, not you. The contribution won’t be remembered because of you instead a little of you will be remembered because of the contribution.
You will be remembered as some abc person, who managed to do THIS INCREDIBLE THING, furthermore, what people will do with your work, how they will treat it, how will they modify it, none of that is in your hands. What you wanted to do with your work, what direction you wanted it to go, will be none of coming generations’ concern.
You wouldn’t want it to be your fate either, but even after all this I would not say that it’s completely absurd to think to continue living after you are dead. I wouldn’t say that, though I would say it’s completely futile for sure.
Someone’s memories
Banksy said that people die twice, once when they stop breathing and second time when someone say their name for the last time, I beg to differ, for what you are, you only die once. You are not someone else’s memories; you are not any of it. It humors me that people stop existing even when they fall asleep, but they have their different hopes and ideas of existing after death.
Maybe there is reincarnation, but reincarnation of whom? John may get reincarnated as Clair after dying, but then, Clair is not John, John died the day John died, Clair is someone else, a new individual, John is nowhere in existence anymore.
Or let’s go even further, maybe there are people who can actually remember past lives, however, it’s not like remembering your past time; it’s more like someone remembering someone else’s memories. As a matter of fact, I can always throw these beliefs to the butcher named delusion.
I can always call them unscientific, but then, that doesn’t even matter, what you are, as you are, you are only going to live this one existence, no matter what. I don’t even believe that a person, who lost all their memory and personality in an accident, is the same exact person as before.
We are just a continuity of our experiences. At any moment you are an experience, which is a sum total conclusion of all the previous experiences, once this chain breaks off completely, you simply cease. All of us need this continuity, to continue being us.
The way we are, we have only one chance of printing our stories in the history books. John has only one opportunity to put his stamp on the paper of time, as John.
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In the remembrance
Although, even if you are not a famous person few people will still remember you for a while, but the question is, what are they even remembering? Is it something that you should be concerned about, right now? Someone who is talking about you after you are gone is not talking about you; they are talking about their own thoughts.
It may matter to them, it may matter to the other people, it may matter to the coming generations, and it may even change something in the coming world and future, but the only person it won’t matter and will never matter at all, is YOU. You won’t be there to care about it, and you will never be there to care about it.
Actually, it may seem weird, but you will be same as all the people that came before you and died, and you will be same as all the people that will come after you and will die, you AS John, Clair, Ramesh, Rahul, Parul, Gandhi or Einstein will be nothing, and there is no individuality in nothing.
Most people in this world will hardly be remembered beyond two more generations, though this can be challenged with the introduction of video, audio and digital images in new age, but still to the Banksy’s credit the true kind of memories of person fades away after the people who personally knew him or her, dies or forgets them. Pictures, videos and images can be utterly meaningless without anyone, who can put meaning in them.
But I am still going to say that as far as memories of people who personally knew you go, well again memories can’t keep you alive either.
Game of time.
Having said all that, people who are known by their work will take a lot of time to fade away, you can even say they are never going to fade away, but more accurately I will say at most, they will be known till the last day of humanity itself. That is a lot of time to be remembered.
Now, the notion of being remembered after death makes a lot of sense in regard to the way we see time when we are alive. The years pass by with some recognition of inherit value of time, this makes us feel like time objectively drags slowly when it comes to the long passages, like decades are longer and centuries are even longer, the value feels immense in between two points of starting and ending.
Many known personalities are quite ancient in this respect; some are so ancient that they give an impression of being immortal, like some prophets and philosophers.
We know what time means for a living person because we are living persons, but what does it mean to a dead one? For a dead person time is like, what they themselves is…….non existential. No matter the amount of time, thousand years, million years or billion years, it amounts to nothing for a non-existential person, just like billions of years of universe said to occur before you came into existence are nothing for you, they are not even a second, they are not even a miniscule amount of time, they are purely nothing.
Imagine, John dies and then somehow again comes into existence after a trillion years, the amount of time passed for John in between though, is nothing. For him it’s just continuity from the moment he died, like someone edited time and attached two pieces of it together as one.
Words leads to illusions..
I said that you may be remembered till the end of human existence, but to be remembered is not a right way to put it, because when you say to be remembered, it again gives a false impression that, the one you are remembering still exists in some way. Once someone is gone what people remember of them is a shadow. And the fun thing is, this shadow does not belong to the person they are remembering, this shadow belongs to the person who is remembering it.
Mahatma Gandhi is not known, assumptions about him are known, you can never know what had gone through his mind at what moment, you have only heard someone’s interpretation about it, and then you further interpreted that according to your own interpretation. This matters, because Gandhi is a recent happening, think about what we may have done with personalities came far before that.
What I am writing right now, can be read even after thousands of years, however, that doesn’t mean I am being remembered by someone, it only means that someone is assuming about a writer by their writing, if they are at all.
Assumptions can never be absolutely right, because assumptions will always carry a perspective, and perspective always carries the part of one who is assuming, and if someone is assuming about you, they are definitely not right because they are not you, they can only be relative, as assumptions can only be relative. If you ask me, even if it would be authentic to exist in this way after death, it would still be a really pitiful way of existing.
