The Living Years

Someday (as far as is currently known), life will be over for everyone. Therefore, so long as I’m alive, I want to contribute positively to human history. I want to help make life easier for people in the future, just as people in the past made life easier for me.

Right now, people are concerned with material rewards, and don’t get me wrong, material rewards certainly have their place. However, I read that Isaac Newton lost substantial money in a poor investment. But who cares? We typically associate Newton with the discovery of gravity. Perhaps he didn’t pass along generational wealth to heirs, but he passed along an awareness of a key physical force to all of humanity.

For many people, the tendency to get wrapped up in fleeting pursuits is strong. However, most of those pursuits are very small. I do not intend to dismiss the significance of humanity among humans, but to quote a No Fear shirt from the 1990s, “He who dies with the most toys……still dies.” So true.

In my opinion, it is misguided to live as if material wealth is a worthy pursuit. When we look back at history, we only even know the names of people with a lot of money if they had a big effect on society. For large swaths of my life, Bill Gates was the wealthiest American, However, that time passed, as times do. Today, there is a new richest guy. Meanwhile, who was the richest American in 1900? 1800? No clue. However, Ford’s name is still getting put on cars. Moreover, governments spend lots of money on roads each year.

Here we are, on our big space rock, floating in circles around a star, and people are blithely attempting to get to the top of the mountain. But then what? That mountain’s peak is not even very high on earth. Not very long ago, airplanes didn’t exist, cars didn’t exist, and humans had never traveled to the moon. In that context, our species has accomplished a lot. However, in the context of that which is knowable, it seems like there is far more that remains.