We were in a medium-loud public setting at a long high-top table and I was explaining how life changed after having kids to a friend without kids. I told them I'd never cared about the idea of "legacy" but I get it now holding my children and realizing that they are the only things I've created or will ever create that will go on beyond me. I explained how I feel connected to the future of humanity in a way I'd never felt before and that helped me understand the concept of "legacy".
They decided to be a smart-ass and said something like "Oh yeah? What do you know about your great-grandparents?". I don't know much, I have a genealogy book my grandfather made. To which they said, "See? In a generation or two no one will remember you either." I could see how happy making this point made them so I let them have the moment but in my head I was like "Oh wow this person just absolutely does not get it."
That conversation came to mind recently when my wife and I were talking about the fires in LA and people scrambling to grab photo albums as they evacuated. We live in the Berkeley Hills, near a big and sometimes quite dry wildlife area, so it's easy to put ourselves in their shoes and imagine a fire coming over our hill. My wife mentioned how we have photo books that include pictures of people we don't know anything about. Someone we're related to took a photo, saved it and somehow we ended up with it and we know nothing about who they actually are. That's when the dots connected on a better way to explain my perspective to my childless friend.
Legacy is not what the world remembers about me. Legacy is what I know I gave to the world.
This gives me a lot of peace. Oddly, in particular, it gives me peace in relation to my work. I've worked at a startup for the last 7 years and seen the company grow from 30 to 1600+. During that time, every feature and framework I built has been refactored and every team I built has been reorged. My only truly lasting contribution may be a conference room named "Jorts." And even the conference room has been updated to replace the poster of my jorts with photos of other employees in their newer, snazzier jorts. However, jorts are not what give me peace.
Peace comes from knowing I helped scrabble up the down-escalator of time. The code and teams I built helped the company go from an old place to a new place. And that new place quickly became an old place again. My kids are the most tangible thing I've contributed to humanity's future simply by being people that will live in it. Even if no one knows or cares in 100 years, I helped move things forward, at least a little bit.
