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warner25 | on: I've acquired a new superpower
Totally indulging in this side discussion: I remember thinking in high school and college that fame was the end-all of life, telling people that my goal was to have my own Wikipedia page. I saw it as something like the combination of being a "cool kid" (but for, you know, the whole of society instead of just one's school) and a sort of immortality.

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.

Gollapalli | parent | next
I think the desire for fame isn't an inherently bad thing.

> 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."

ctchocula | root | parent
"True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, in writing what deserves to be read, and in so living as to make the world happier and better for our living in it."
telchior | parent | next
Length of remembrance aside, the idea of fame as immortality has always confused me on different grounds. It's not how fame works: we remember factoids, not people. It's a bit different if the fame is a work of art, but then the thing with immortality (sort of) is the art, not the person that made it. I might remember 7 things about Teddy Roosevelt, which are admittedly very cool and impressive things, but those things do nothing to represent the complex individual he actually was.

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."

itissid | root | parent | next
You are deacribing here are kinds of thoughts and how they manifest in generations. one is that brings things into physical existence(fame via achievement, children).

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.

warner25 | root | parent
You make good points. When I looked up the word "immortality" in Merriam Webster while writing my first comment, I found it interesting that one of the definitions was actually "lasting fame."

> 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.

telchior | root | parent
My grandfather wrote a short autobiography, just for his immediate family. It's a really nice thing to have.
Lio | parent | next
We are all doomed to be forgotten.

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

marginalien | root | parent
Absolutely not, at least if you don’t think in terms of personal fame but impact you have on the people you live with. It’s something that becomes super apparent when you have kids. You pass on so much and that will live on forever, in a million remixes. I love that idea as it gives a lot of meaning and purpose even on the small little moments and things in life.
8bitbeep | parent | next
It’s a know phenomenon. A friend of mine had a reasonably important public office position. Always on the phone, constantly demanded, giving interviews, etc. The first few months after a change in administration were a great relief. A year after being let go and he was devastated. No one called, knew or cared who he was. There’s probably a name for this syndrome.
dielll | root | parent
A kenyan politician once wrote about it. They even thought their phone had an issue because when they were in office they would receive an average of 30 phone calls an hour, once they left it was zero in a day till they though the phone had gotten spoilt

https://nation.africa/kenya/blogs-opinion/blogs/dot9/ndemo/t...

anigbrowl | parent | next
Except that if you become curious about, say, Benjamin Harrison you can go look up his Wikipedia page and I presume find one or more books about him. The person who is just listed somewhere such as a genealogy database is just a name, unless you choose to do an elaborate and expensive research project on them to figure out who they were and what they did.
Snoozus | parent | next
That's just because US presidents are not very important.

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.

Bang2Bay | root | parent | next
We do not know who invented zero. Or who identified earth to be a sphere. Or who wrote the sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 ... . We just pick a name and associate them to our liking.

So when another colonizer comes up, we will have newer people associated with these. Hope it does not happen. But history does say so.

ben_w | root | parent | next
Humanity as a whole, perhaps not; but that is not the same as what cultures within do, and cultures have many ways to erase or diminish outsiders — and everyone's an outsider to some group.

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.

warner25 | root | parent
I'll be honest: I didn't know who Crick was. Now that you've associated Crick and Watson, I was able to find the appropriate Wikipedia page. And yeah, this is not the Watson that I was expecting.

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.

warner25 | root | parent
To your point, I was thinking that this might only be stunning for someone with a modern view of the US Presidency. I understand that the powers of the office and the election campaigns for it were quite different in earlier eras.

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.

econ | parent | next
IMHO one should only desire to become Confucius level famous. The kind where you don't need validation to know you've done something interesting.
MarcusE1W | parent
I think it depends a bit more on what you do, than your role. As you mentioned, being President of the USA is not even enough.

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.

warner25 | root | parent
I suspect that Washington might still be a household name 2,000 years from now like that. Other past US Presidents, I agree, no.

As an aside, I'm really hoping that Trump doesn't do anything notable enough to somehow be like that. I fear that he might be more driven to do so than any past US President.