michael-dean-k/

My great grandmother was born in 1918; I was born in the 1990s; let's say I live until 2080. But forget about my death, when will my great grandchildren die? If my daughter was born in the 2020s, her grandkids might be born in the 2070s, meaning I could know my great grandkids in the first 10 years of their life. Assuming there is no raical life-extending technology (big assumption), they could live until 2172. That's a 254-year span!

Why am I calculating this? Well, I suppose I was reflecting on how my great grandmother would say the same aphorism to me every time I left her house: "be your own person, choose your friends wisely." It etched into my head, and I don't think I processed it at the time, and now wonder if that fundamentally wired me—or at least, it laid some seed that wouldn't germinate until after she passed (in fact, I'd say I become "independent" in the exact year she died.)

So there's a world where I can say that same saying to my kids, grandkids, and great grandkids. And so that changes the scope of my life; I am not merely limited to be a 100-year old mayflay ("Funny—to be a Century"), but I sit at the center of a 250-year transmission of knowledge, the crux of my own semiquincentennial.

**Don't forget the sun moves.** A galactic year is 225-250 million years (the time it takes for the sun to orbit the center of the Milky Way). Our sun is 18 galactic years old, and will only live until 40. For context, the aeon of time between the dinosaurs and ChatGPT is .28 galactic years, effectively, a single galactic season. Worth noting though, it took 3 billion years for multi-cellular life to emerge. So if life on Earth gets completely nuked, it could take 12 galactic years to re-emerge from scratch. We’ll be 30. Interesting to think—we have 3 shots to escape space-time.

All mythologies erode. A hope to be Helen of Troy is a hope that doesn’t see the nature of time. A second is a life, a life is a millennium, a millennium an aeon. Antiquity blinked and here we are. In the next blink, all of our greats will be flattened too, with only a misunderstood bust who wishes to be forgotten.

To yearn to be a historical icon worshipped by your grandchildren’s acquaintances is to inflate your ego with puss. It is a corruption of intent, a romantic taste-blindness, like designing your own ocean home on the ground floor of a beach. Beauty is not in the body, but in a soul that aligns with the creative engine from which it emerged. Beauty need not be tangled with admiration. That is vanity, a devil that fills you with confidence for one night before it strips from you everything that you thought mattered. Pair this was fame, and it’s hard to recover. This is why Virginia Woolf walked into a lake with cinderblock shoes. ¹

I write this to remind myself that I can chase beauty in obscurity. I can see nature in the dark with my eyes closed. I can hide in the suburbs and appear painfully ordinary and even pitied by those who live lives of high literature, and that would all be great. It doesn’t matter if my face becomes known or if my words are spread out over untraceable pseudonyms or if a super-intelligence eclipses all future generations of writers, what matters is that I personally pierce through the veils of heaven. It’s an extremely private experience. It’s enough to know that I’ve navigated my life in a way so that, through my own hands, I can produce things of escalating beauty. It is a privilege. I won’t hoard what I make, nor will I parade it.

Attention makes me uneasy, not because I’m weak, but because fame is an abominable condition. I write not to become more known each day, but to see deeper into our circumstance. If it’s legacy you seek, don’t hand down éclat, hand down linguistic viruses that bloom fresh lenses.

When people or pets die, we feel the sadness that they no longer get to experience our year-to-year reality. Our day-to-day seems totally stable. We feel pain that our dying father-in-law will never meet our unborn kids.

Of course this pace of life is experientially real, but in times of pain it helps to remember that life itself is actually the exception. For most of existence you’ll be unborn or dead. At the cosmic scale, it’s as if a whole person’s life is just a day. Have you had a good one?

Your grandparents died yesterday, your parents died today, you die tomorrow, and your thrice great grandkids die by the end of the week. This mindshift helps. I am not owed 100 years, I was granted today. It becomes less about you and more about the unbroken chain.

Each soul birthed from a star, in the sense that radiation from the sun, on a particular day, at a particular angle, heated a puddle, and that spawned a chain of bacteria that led to you to become literate. We all spawned from distant lights of extreme temperatures, making us popped kernels of a cosmic microwave.