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I have never really thought much about what I’ll leave behind, maybe because legacy has never interested me all that much. I don’t keep a list of things I want to accomplish so that someone can look back one day and say he did this. Most of what I’ve done, the work, the travel, building teams, starting things, writing, has come from whatever interested me at the time. I wanted to experience it, learn from it, or just see what happened if I tried.

Even this blog isn’t really about leaving something behind. I’ve spent more than twenty years working across fairly different worlds, from law and investment banking to retail and business development, and along the way there have been enough experiences, mistakes, conversations and observations that have stayed with me. Writing is just a way of putting some of that out into the open. Someone might find it useful, someone might disagree with all of it, and someone else might read half a paragraph and move on to the next page. Any of those outcomes is fine by me.

What interests me more is the bigger question sitting underneath all this. Why do human beings care so much about being remembered? Why do we want our names to outlast us? Why do we build things, write books, start companies, accumulate possessions, and talk endlessly about legacy? The cultural theorist Ernest Becker spent a whole book arguing that most of civilisation runs on exactly this fear, that religion, art, empires and even having children are what he called immortality projects, ways of convincing ourselves some part of us survives the fact of dying. Reading him made me wonder whether contribution is really the point, or whether it’s mostly just our discomfort with the idea of ending, dressed up to look like something nobler.

We tend to talk about legacy as though it’s the natural conclusion of a meaningful life. Build something that lasts. Write something people will still read. Start a business that carries your name. Leave something behind for the next generation. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, building something useful can be genuinely satisfying, and creating something that outlives you can matter. I just sometimes wonder whether we load too much meaning onto what happens after we’re gone, rather than what’s happening while we’re still here for it.

What if nobody remembers us at all? A hundred years from now, most of us will be names nobody recognises. Even people who mattered enormously in their own time eventually shrink down to a paragraph in a book, a photograph in an archive, or a name on a building that people walk past without knowing the story behind it. Marcus Aurelius, of all people, was writing about this from inside the job of running an empire. In his private notebooks he kept reminding himself that Alexander the Great and his own stable boy ended up reduced to the same handful of dust, and that whoever remembers either of them will be dust themselves soon enough. He wasn’t writing that to depress himself. He used it to argue for paying closer attention to what he was actually doing that day, since the far future clearly wasn’t going to hold his name for very long either way. And yet, while we’re alive, the need to be remembered can occupy an outsized share of our thinking. Maybe that’s simply because the idea of disappearing entirely is uncomfortable to sit with.

I don’t believe there’s something waiting for us after death. I don’t believe in rebirth, or in the idea that there’s another life somewhere in which everything eventually balances out. That doesn’t mean I think this life has no meaning, though. If anything I find the opposite far more interesting: if this is the life we get, then this life is the one that matters.

I’ve never found much comfort in karma, at least not the version of it used to explain why someone is suffering or why inequality persists the way it does. If a person’s circumstances are difficult, telling them it’s the result of something they did in another life can become a convenient way of accepting the world as it is rather than questioning why it’s that way. It makes suffering easier to explain without making it any less real. I’d rather look at what’s actually happening here, in this life, while there’s still something we can do about it.

Death itself, though, doesn’t necessarily mean everything simply disappears. A person dies, but what they did can carry on in other forms. Their actions ripple into other people. Their ideas influence someone they never met. Things they built get used by people who never knew their name. Even the body becomes something else eventually. Nothing really needs to remain exactly as it was for it to have mattered. Maybe that’s what impermanence actually points at: things change, they become something else, and so do we.

Thich Nhat Hanh used to reach for the example of a cloud when he talked about death. A cloud doesn’t simply vanish. It becomes rain. The rain becomes water, feeds the earth, rises back into the sky, and turns into part of something else again. I find that idea more useful than any version of an afterlife, not because it promises continuation exactly, but because it quietly removes the need for continuation in the way we usually picture it. We don’t have to remain ourselves forever to have counted. We can just become something else, and there’s something genuinely freeing in that.

I don’t particularly want to be remembered, which might sound strange given how much of what any of us does seems tied to the idea of leaving something behind. We work hard, build careers, start companies, make money, write books, build houses, collect achievements the way other people collect stamps. But I don’t think I did any of it because I wanted it to become my legacy one day. I did it because I wanted to live it, and that’s a different thing entirely. I wanted to see what I could build. I wanted to work with people who were interesting to be around. I wanted to travel, learn, try things that might not work. Some of it did work. Some of it mattered for years, some only mattered for a season, and either way, that was enough at the time.

This blog isn’t an attempt at legacy either. It’s simply somewhere to put down some of what I’ve been turning over in my head. Maybe someone reads it and finds a sentence useful. Maybe someone disagrees with most of it. Maybe someone reads a single line, thinks about it for five minutes, and then goes back to their day. I don’t especially need to know which one happens, or what, if anything, remains of it afterward.

If I don’t believe in an afterlife, I think that puts a certain obligation on this one, though not in the usual sense of achievement or ambition. Quite the opposite, really. It means taking the ordinary parts of life seriously instead. A morning with nowhere in particular to be. A long walk. A conversation that wasn’t planned. A book, a decent cup of tea, a bicycle ride, sitting somewhere quietly and doing very little. Travelling without knowing exactly what I’ll find when I get there. Building something purely to see whether I can. None of that needs to lead anywhere else to count.

For a long time I was fairly comfortable turning almost everything into a goal. Work had targets, travel had destinations, time had a schedule, and there was always something to finish or somewhere to get to next. I’m a lot less interested in living that way now. I’d rather have the luxury of time than the appearance of achievement, and maybe that’s another way of measuring a life well spent: not by how much you accumulated, or how many people recognise your name, or even how much you achieved, but by how much of your own life you actually experienced while you had it.

I do care whether the people around me end up slightly better off for having known me, but I don’t think of that as a legacy project, it’s a much smaller and more immediate thing than that. If I can make someone’s work a bit easier, help someone see a problem differently, build something genuinely useful, hand someone an opportunity they wouldn’t otherwise have had, or just treat someone decently on an ordinary day, that matters to me regardless of whether it survives me by a single week. A good thing doesn’t become less good simply because nobody remembers who started it. That’s probably the part of contribution that actually interests me, the effect it has, not the credit attached to it.

We rarely get to see the full downstream effect of the things we do. A conversation can quietly change how someone thinks years after you’ve forgotten having it. Someone you once mentored ends up helping somebody else entirely. Something you built gets improved by people you’ll never meet and never hear from. You don’t have to own the outcome to have been part of it. You just have to have shown up for your part of it.

I’ve always liked questioning things rather than simply accepting them because they were handed down to me. Religion, success, ambition, money, morality, death, purpose, all of these ideas are shaped heavily by the society we happen to grow up in, and most of us inherit our answers long before we’re old enough to actually ask the questions ourselves. Maybe growing older is partly just getting comfortable saying I don’t know out loud. I don’t know what happens after death. I don’t know whether existence has some larger purpose sitting behind it. I don’t know whether anyone will remember me, and I’ve come to think that not knowing doesn’t make any of this less meaningful. If anything, it makes the present a good deal more interesting, because there’s still so much left to experience and understand. Life gets to stay an experiment for a while longer. You get to keep changing your mind. You can learn something today that quietly undoes something you were sure of yesterday, and none of that requires you to ever arrive at a final answer.

So why do we want to be remembered? Maybe it’s the ego. Maybe it’s discomfort with the idea of ending. Maybe it’s just part of being human, and there’s no real need to settle the question either way. What seems far more interesting to me is what happens before that point ever arrives. There’s a life to actually experience, things to learn, people worth meeting, places worth seeing, work worth doing, ideas worth questioning, and a handful of small chances along the way to make something a little better for someone else. None of that needs an afterlife behind it, and none of it needs a name that survives to still have counted.

That’s really what matters to me these days. Not what remains once I’m gone, but what I do with the time I actually have while I’m still here for it: experiencing things, learning where I can, building what I care about, travelling without always knowing where I’m headed, writing because I still have something worth saying, sitting quietly some days and doing nothing much at all, and making a few things a little better along the way wherever that’s possible. We probably spend too much of life thinking about what comes next, what we’re supposed to achieve, what people will think, or what we’ll leave behind once we’re not around to see it. I’ve done plenty of that myself over the years. But the longer I sit with it, the less I believe there’s some great destination waiting at the far end that makes the getting there beside the point.

There’s just this one life, whatever I happen to be doing with it right now, and as far as I can tell, that’s the only chance I’m actually going to get at it.

Related reading: If this resonated, you might also like The Trouble With Always Looking for Meaning.