Member-only story
You Are What Survives You
The greatest use of life.
“The purpose of life is to be useful,” notes Ralph Waldo Emerson. Most of what we obsess over doesn’t survive us. The emails, the meetings, the little power plays, things we pretend makes us happy. They all have little impact on what survives us. But how you made people feel. The beliefs and values you held onto. The standards you refused to lower. Those are what survive. We define ourselves not by what we have, but by what endures when we’re done. That’s why what prominent psychologist Erik Erikson, known for his work on identity, said makes a lot of sense.
He notes, “I am what survives me.”
What will survive you?
I’ve seen people live like they’re trying to win an award for existing. You are remembered for what you made or broke. Or dared to question. The ideas your entire life was built on. The ones who survive themselves are the ones who did something that made people stop and think, even if it pissed them off first. Who survives in you? For me, it’s my grandfather’s sense of humour. I got his perfectly timed, witty jokes. That part of him survived his death. It’s in the way I make the people I care about laugh, even when things are falling apart.
What survives you are the conversations you started.
