Building small monuments to our immortality

Creative people are enchanted by the possibility of building something that outlives them.

Work that exists in the world after they’re gone and touches the lives of millions and goes down in the history books.

Ah, the faint hope of artistic immortality. Sounds pretty glamorous.

And the scary part is, now that we have technology that will upload our memories to the cloud to allow us to live forever in online virtual worlds, immortality has never been more possible.

But like many things in this life, just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. Ambition is a beautiful thing, and everything wants to live a creative and meaningful life, but let’s not reject the ancient truth that we are all mortals who must one day die.

People who constantly obsess about building something that outlives them might be creative visionaries, but they’re also denying death.

Becker named this brand of transference the taming of terror. He called it an immortality formula:

And if the transference is successful, then it alleviates a substantial weight off their shoulders. They can move through their daily with a certain amount of comfort. Because when they’re gone, a piece of them will still be here.

Which doesn’t mean you should just give up and go live beneath a bridge. The fact that we’re all going to return to the dust doesn’t doom any of us to obscurity or poverty.

But if the cost of having a delusional sense of significance is our inability to grasp the moment we’re living in right now, then it’s probably not worth it.

If our quest for eternal optimization deprives us from provoking joy while we are still alive, then it’s probably not worth it.

If our goal is to accrue as many small monuments to our immortality as possible, then it’s probably not worth it.

Perhaps there is more to life than becoming the mythic man who has divinized and made immortal.

How might you be denying death?