The afterlife as legacy and its increasing role in the digital world
I was driving back to the hospital after grabbing some lunch today when I heard a rebroadcast of Terry Gross's interview of British historian Tony Judt. Judt died last week from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (what we in the States call Lou Gehrig's disease).
I had never heard of Tony Judt before but from the interview, recorded just this past March, he seemed like he had his shit together. There was one particular section that really caught my attention:
GROSS: You know, many people, when afflicted with a disabling disease, turn away from God. You were brought up in a secular Jewish home.
Mr. JUDT: That's right.
GROSS: And you remained secular. So has being sick changed any of your personal views about religion?
Mr. JUDT: No, but the no is very straightforward. I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or indeed multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself. But there's a big but which enters in here.
I am much more conscious than I ever was, for obvious reasons, of what it will mean to people left behind once I'm dead. It won't mean anything to me. But it will mean a lot to them. And it's important for them, by which I mean my children or my wife or very close friends, that some spirit of me is in a positive way present in their lives, in their heads, in their imaginings and so on.
So in one curious way I've come to believe in the afterlife as a place where I still have moral responsibilities, just as I do in this life, except that I can only exercise them before I get there. Once I'm there, it'll be too late. So no god, no organized religion, but a developing sense that there's something bigger than the world we live in, including after we die, and that we have responsibilities in that world.
I really liked the idea of your legacy, how you are remembered by the ones you leave behind, as your afterlife. You own that legacy and it is your responsibility, and (as awful as this sounds) this life is the only time allotted to build positive personal brand management.
Certainly this idea is elegantly expressed in the final moments of The Sonosopher when Alex Caldiero remembers the final words of his dying mother, "Remember me...and pass me on." Caldiero goes on on to say that memory is immortality, "Immortality doesn't exist in freaking heaven; immortality exists in the human mind and the human soul."
I would add that immortality also endures via the artifacts we left behind, certainly the physical objects we used but also the writing and art we managed to produce. As an ethnic Mormon I have inherited a strong cultural legacy of journaling, but I dare say no other generation has more extensively chronicled their lives than the social media generation. And I don't see a decline in the curve toward self reporting coming any time soon. The twin factors of our self-obsession and the eternal nature of digital information on the internet will provide our descendents with reams of material that will make the pioneers look like camera-shy wallflowers in comparison.
The big question that Judt and Caldiero bring up is will our successors benefit from us? Will our pursuit of a noble and moral life be recognized? Will we be featured on My Parents Were Awesome? I really appreciate Judt's notion that legacy management is not for the edification of the individual who dies. "It won't mean anything to me. But it will mean a lot to them. And it's important for them..." Living my life for someone else...just one of the things that I am just beginning to ponder during my first 24 hours of being a dad.
