Immortality? Sorry

I’ve recently been reading The Empire of Pain, The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.  This family owned and marketed Oxycontin,   even after its harmful and addictive properties were well known.  The Sackler family was also philanthropic. They donated millions upon millions of dollars to artistic, academic, medical and cultural programs, and their name was on many prestigious art galleries throughout the world.

The book offers one interesting reason, among others, for their apparent generosity.  A quest for immortality.  While they might have been creating an Empire of Pain, they wanted to be known for having done extraordinarily good for the world.

Sorry, Sacklers.  There is no such thing as immortality here on earth.  Though it seems your legacy might be a little different than you had planned, five hundred years from now I doubt anyone will know your story.  And even if they did, it would make no difference to you at all.

We should have no illusions here.  Who were your ancestors and where were they living in 1623 (the year Shakespeare’s First Folio was published – seven years after his death)?  With the help of genealogy, you might trace your family tree back several centuries, but even that wouldn’t reveal anything about who they really were.  How they earned a living.  What they were really like.

Even Shakespeare, who left a legacy of more than thirty plays and hundreds of sonnets and has been called the greatest writer in the English language is not immortal.  We all know his name, most of us have read at least one of his plays and can recite one or two lines from memory (“To be or not to be, that is the question…”).  But even if school children throughout the world pledged allegiance to Shakespeare every morning, what good would it do him?  It’s not as if today he is enjoying his fame.

This leads me to an inescapable conclusion – enjoy each moment.  And if aiming for immortality is important to you, then by all means go for it.  But I suggest you employ acts of actual kindness.  If you change one other person’s life for the better, you have created an enduring legacy.

Recently I read one author’s suggestions for a happy life.  His fifth and final idea was to enjoy each moment as it comes. I remind myself of that regularly.

It seems to me that if we help others and savor each moment, our lives will be both happy and meaningful.

Alan