My son and I always make jokes about everyone's 5 minutes of fame. Some random person on the jumbotron at a sporting event "Yup, there's his moment, it's over now."
At least yours got you something ;)
Sadly no one saw this 'feet'.
Unfortunately, in the next game I made them watch the credits[1] for my son's name in Production Babies. It is right at the end and the wait was embarrassingly long.
[0] https://www.mobygames.com/game/75645/need-for-speed/credits/... [1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/98129/need-for-speed-payback/...
The guy famously trained for months for the fight scene and a tired Harrison Ford just pulled out the gun and shot him. Everybody thought it was hilarious and that became the scene.
https://screenrant.com/indiana-jones-swordsman-shoot-raiders...
"It sounds wrong to say one should thank Ford’s sickness for one of the most iconic scenes, but Raiders of the Lost Ark is definitely better off for it."
https://screenrant.com/indiana-jones-raiders-lost-ark-gun-kn...
"A much more elaborate fight scene was planned, but Ford developed dysentery while filming in Morocco..."
Anyway, over the last couple of decades as an adult, besides realizing the obvious - how terribly shallow that is, and missing so much of what's really good in life - I've realized how fleeting fame seems to be even for the truly famous. Even looking over the list of US Presidents (never mind lesser political figures like VPs, cabinet members, congressmen, etc.) as someone who has always been interested in history, I look at some names and think, "who?" or "I've heard the name, but know nothing about him." I mean, of course you can still read about them, but that even a US President can be largely forgotten as a household name within 250 years is really a stunning thing to think about; they are ultimately no more immortal than someone who only has their name in a genealogy database or on a grave marker.
> He was the man most gracious and fair-minded, > Kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.
Those are the last lines of Beowulf. A man who won great fame among his people by slaying monsters and dragons. It's telling that the final line of the poem ends with his most dominant trait, "and keenest to win fame." Wanting fame is not wrong, and is far from shallow. The question is, "fame for what?" Regardless of whether you think Beowulf existed or not, it's telling that for a whole culture that the most important characteristic of a great man in one of their great poemsis "keenness to win fame," almost as a wink, with the bard saying "and if you want to be sung like this hero, you must desire fame just as keenly, and so do great deeds."
This may be something I'm making up, but I have the feeling that the fame = immortality concept came out of legacy: people wanting to create a family that continues on after themselves (and is rich, powerful, etc). Which makes sense, because then we're talking about a logical extension of the reproductive instinct. But in the modern world even that seems unreachable to me: we're so utterly different from our grandparents that we might as well be aliens, and the same will probably hold true for our own grandchildren.
I guess all that puts me in the Mike Tyson school of thought on legacy: "We're just dead. We're dust. We're absolutely nothing."
Another is that which is kind of intangible and describes the person(again not personal details but what they think about the self and ideas), like an autobiography, but still is very hard to get at: it's like they say Being in someones shoes.
It's impossible to understand both of the above kinds of thoughts, in general, because conscious thought is utterly temporary and highly subjective. And more so for the second kind of thought above for most people it is true that, their complex self is meaningless to others.
It's likely why you mentioned you feel disassociated from what your parents/grandparents thought.
> we remember factoids... I might remember 7 things about Teddy Roosevelt... but those things do nothing to represent the complex individual he actually was.
I've thought this before when looking at Wikipedia pages. Especially for less famous people with thin pages, they'll cite just a handful of news articles or press releases in which the person appeared. If there were a page like that for me, or the people that I know best, the collection of factoids would be a laughably inaccurate reflection of who we really are. Someone told me that it's important to write an autobiography for this reason.
Even if you are remembered briefly, what’s remembered isn’t you it’s just some vague representation of you that will fade over time.
Some famous Roman emperor might have said something similar 2000 years ago for all I know but I forget his name. :P
Humanity will not forget Newton, Einstein, Shannon and Crick. And up to a point, trying to do what they did, discover new things about the universe is not an unhealthy goal.
So when another colonizer comes up, we will have newer people associated with these. Hope it does not happen. But history does say so.
Newton, Leibniz; Einstein, Lorenz and Riemann; Shannon, Kolmogorov; Crick, Franklin.
When the context is, to quote the parent comment:
> I look at some names and think, "who?" or "I've heard the name, but know nothing about him." I mean, of course you can still read about them, but that even a US President can be largely forgotten as a household name within 250 years is really a stunning thing to think about
I suspect only Newton and Einstein are even household names. I'd be very surprised if the average person has heard of even one of Lorenz, Riemann, Shannon, Kolmogorov, or Crick, even today, and my guess is that Franklin would probably be assumed to be an associate of either Roosevelt or Benjamin, given the widely claimed but inconsistently cited survey that 12% of Americans think Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.
And Crick's other famous research associate was Watson; I wonder how many times people got him mixed up with the fictional character, or briefly for the IBM computer.
Regarding Shannon, I've read one of his biographies (A Mind at Play), but outside of my circle of friends with CS degrees I don't think anyone I know would know his name.
However, I remember someone who went to MIT observing the same thing about the names of the great scientists and philosophers etched onto the buildings. He noted that he only knew what a few of them did.
And yet you might be able to list some Roman Emperors, for good or bad (Cesar, Augustus) or even politicians (Cicero, may e Seneca) after 2000 years.