Quote:
Originally Posted by GKelly
In a universal sense, we're all nobodies. We will all die one day and be nothing but ashes. People with money, fame, etc. only has it for a short time. Placing too much importance on those things will only get you down.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by statisticsnerd
100 years after you die, not a single person on the planet will know anything about you or care that you existed. Nobody will know or care about your career, what kind of car you drove, where you went on vacation, how big your house was, how many friends you had, or what you did for fun. You will just be a fading name on some headstone in a cemetery.
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Well, not quite so (i.e., as to being a "somebody"). Multitudinous counter-examples could be brought up. Years after Albert Einstein, John F. Kennedy, Charlie Chaplin, Elvis Presley, Princess Diana, Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Jimi Hendrix, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Steve Jobs, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Luciano Pavarotti, Sigmund Freud, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. . . . ad infinitum have died,
everyone remembers them and will always remember them for the rest of humanity's future existence (as well as those who were famous in an
infamous way, such as Adolf Hitler or Osama Bin Laden and so many others). 100 years after they died, people still remember or will remember them and be motivated or inspired or interested in them (or, in the case of the
infamous ones, they will be forever reviled by most of humanity) and they will be spoken of in books and other forms of media and taught in schools forevermore. Or the impact some individuals made (e.g., Albert Einstein) had a lasting impact on the whole nature of human existence and always will (i.e., he redefined our understanding of how the physical universe or the cosmos operates as to the laws which govern it). Martin Luther King Jr. died one day in April 1968 and I wouldn't say that now he is "nothing but ashes". His impact on human existence is profound and always will be. And so on and so on and so on and so on and so on for nearly innumerable others.
This doesn't mean that you or I or anyone else among us has to aspire to and work toward being as memorable and impactful as them (as though many of us could anyway? not everyone's inner content and makeup is the stuff that will make us impactful and memorable to the rest of humanity in a lasting way) but it isn't really accurate to say that being a particular kind of "somebody" is a temporal thing whereby after such a person dies, they pass on into oblivion and obscurity forevermore. All the persons mentioned above (and innumerable others) will not be unknowns and nobodies after they are gone . . . even long long long after they are gone. They will be immortalized forever. Even those from very very long ago (e.g., Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, King David of the Jews, Confucius, Alexander the Great, Gautama Buddha, and so many others) are still known and thought about by humanity-at-large and likely always will be.
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