I (we) have a burning desire to be significant as a human. Maybe not everyone has it, I do.
By time I’ve realized this pleasure is pretty hard to achieve. The bar is too high.

  • can you be happy if you’re significant? we know a lot of people who were so significant to society but not happy.
    Tesla struggled with business acumen and was often outmaneuvered by profit-driven contemporaries. He spent his final decades living in a series of New York hotels, steadily running out of money while working on increasingly eccentric, unfunded projects. He died practically penniless and alone in his room at the New Yorker Hotel in 1943.
    Van Gogh is one of the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. His expressive use of color and bold brushwork profoundly impacted expressionism and the trajectory of modern art.
    His life was filled with severe poverty, malnutrition, and worsening mental health crises. He sold only one painting during his lifetime and spent his final years considering himself an absolute failure. He died by suicide at the age of 37 in 1890, entirely unaware of the immense legacy he would leave behind.
    there’s one more:
    The theoretical father of computer science and artificial intelligence, Turing’s work in cracking the Enigma code during World War II arguably shortened the conflict by years and saved millions of lives. His concept of the “Universal Turing Machine” laid the foundation for all modern computing. In 1952, Turing was prosecuted by the British government for homosexual acts. To avoid prison, he accepted chemical castration, which severely impacted his physical and mental health. Stripped of his security clearance and treated as a criminal by the country he helped save, Turing died in 1954 from cyanide poisoning. An inquest ruled it a suicide.

All of these “significant” people died, a catastrophic death. They didn’t know what they “left” behind.

I gave examples of people who were so significant that without them, we’d not be living the lives we are (although that’s also arguable but that’s not the point) and yet, Nature made them miserable. For some, society was the enemy, for some their mental health, for some physical health etc. some were born during world wars. I’d argue if Ramanujan didn’t leave Madras, he’d not be known today. Its the probabilities, the unknown Nature, that made the letter be seen by Hardy.

There are also stories where siginificant people also had a good life.
Claude Shannon, Benjamin Franklin etc. These peeps had good physical health, mental health, were famous for different things during their lifetimes, had good marriages and lived a long healthy life.

So as we can see, its looking a little out of our control .

Humans don’t remember “good”. They sometimes remember “great”.

So maybe its not worth it to strive for significance?

I have this very weird theory. If you focus on anything other than the thing in the present, the work you’re doing, and doing that ONE thing with intention, intensity, love, you’re doing a mistake. Because I’d argue that’s the ONLY thing we should strive for. Because its totally in our control, nothing else is. Being significant has a lot of variables. Luck, the place you’re born, your context vector etc.

If you look closely, a VERY few things actually are - in your control.

I challenge you to ask your favourite LLM (GPT) this: “if there was one thing a person should focus on, at any given moment, what should that be?”

I hate that LLMs are non-deterministic but I bet there’ll be a piece of token there saying, “do whats in your control” or “focus on the action”. you can try it. (yes, i tried it on incognito mode before making this claim)

I have no idea why i wrote this article. Every philosophical argument I have ends with Stoics. They really figured out the absolute pragmatic philosophy didn’t they?

Thanks for reading
~ Aayushya