Take a walk with me. We’re strolling eastbound down Wacker Street in the heart of Chicago’s River North area, alongside the aesthetically gorgeous polluted river. On almost every corner we pass a statue, typically of a man. Sometimes it depicts a full body, sometimes just a face. Occasionally I stop to view the brief description of the stone man. If my phone doesn’t beckon for my attention, I may even read its full paragraph. I don’t remember any of their names. Neither do you.
All Statues Fall
We pretend that they don’t, or won’t, so we build them nonetheless. Using the strongest known materials of our day, we plop them down on eroding lands and engrave our names into them. Physically, examples such as the pyramids of Egypt have impressively stood for thousands of years. This strikes our numerically limited minds as a massive period, while it’s merely a blip in the grand scheme of time. Mentally, statues now crumble at an ever-faster rate under our daily barrage of new noise. The irony of our current state of technology is that it simultaneously grants us the unlimited collective capacity not to forget, accompanied by an ever-diminishing personal ability to remember.
So why do we keep striving for statues? We’re bombarded daily with messaging about the glories of “leaving a legacy”, “building a dynasty”, “going down in history”, etc. etc. Kobe Bryant recently proclaimed, “Friends come and go, but banners hang forever” (referring to his five cloth NBA Championship banners strung from the ceiling of the 15 year old Staples Center building). Fall Out Boy rang through 2015 airwaves declaring “you will remember me for centuries”. And every winter another four-year-old kid learns the words to a cheery song wherein the newly peer-accepted red-nosed-reindeer is rewarded for his work with the proclamation that “you’ll go down in history!”
It’s all incredibly misguided. The fear of one’s life being irrelevant is natural, as it implies waste. If waste is evil, and life is the most precious commodity, then a wasted life is tragedy. But the perception that relevance is measured in public remembrance is a dangerous fallacy.
The issue isn’t even that it’s vain or narcissistic to have this type of goal. To each her own moral code and “long live” the competitive human spirit. The problem is that the reality of a lasting legacy simply doesn’t exist. “Nobody remembers second place” is a commonly utilized statement to fuel competitiveness. What’s naively misunderstood is that eventually nobody remembers first place either.
What if we’ve been untrue, and legacies’ll decease
Can we move the world by treating people decent at least?
Disease is a beast, what if we work to see one be ceased,
Might your children live a little more in ease and at peace?
Complete with the keys, to everything they’re striving for
Might the goal at that point be a goodbye to war
Or higher more, a plan to food supply the poor
Or will it still be cutthroat to run the cyber store?
Fortune for fortune’s sake is none the more fruitful. After a certain level of financial stability, amassing fortune is too often just another enabler for building [often falsified] statues. While there is good intent in leaving behind a fortune to provide for a multitude of family generations to come, the track record on that notion shows as many or more pitfalls than benefits ~~inherent materialism, tamed ambition, greed-enticed family feuds.
What if in fact he’s acting? Would that be backward traction?
What if appearances are all that keep a statue standing?
As a species it’s important to remember the mistakes that we’ve made and the time-refined values it took to reach present progress. To that note the statues themselves, as historical artifacts, do serve a healthy temporary purpose. The realizable value, however, serves the public as opposed to the individual seeking the statue. So for the most ambitious among us, thoughtfully figuring out the right goal to climb towards while we’re here is a critical undertaking.
Impact over Legacy
Impact is everything. No matter how presently massive or minute, a positive impact compounds infinitely. All we have at the end of the day is the nameless impact we’ve made on the world, and the comfort of knowing it contributed to a short page in an endlessly evolving book. If we do it right, that book’s narrative can take a turn towards the direction we believe is worthy. Somebody else with a different name and face will then pick up the next page. It will eventually be forgotten who exactly got them to the page, but that’s irrelevant.
Ambition meets purpose when striving for positive impact. For example:
Sport: Michael Jordan raised the bar on competitiveness in the game of basketball. This inspired Kobe Bryant’s dedication and so on and so forth. The game of basketball is better off after the impact made by both men. Of course, their names, banners, sneakers, and quite possibly the game itself will eventually be forgotten entirely. The impact of years of refining teamwork, competitiveness, and sportsmanship, however, will lay the groundwork for the next future sport and other tangential endeavors that benefit from sport’s behavioral foundation.
Fortune: If I plant a seed on bare land, I can grow a new tree. Had I bought the forest, I could have prevented it from being torn down in the first place. Fortune’s most powerful utility comes in providing leverage to magnify the immediate impact of any effort.
Technology: Look to your left, and look to your right; both of those people don’t remember who invented the Walkman. With technological endeavors, the thing you make today is routinely old news by next year, if not by tomorrow. The impact of building that now obsolete technology, however, is likely huge. If you’re able to contribute even one building block today towards tomorrow’s innovation, your impact sets off on the trajectory to compound infinitely & exponentially.
But I set out to rise above man standing tall! …Don’t you know all statues fall?
…We turn onto State Street and walk across the plaza of the AMA building. We’re looking forward at Trump Tower, namesake to perhaps the most avid statue-builder of our day. Before we arrive at Trump, however, we pass a shorter set of statues. This one depicts businesspeople of the early 1900s. They carry umbrellas, briefcases, and don ties with their suites. Faceless. Nameless. It’s a fitting statue temporarily remembering yesterday’s statues-seekers while they stood.
Thanks for accompanying me on the walk. Now let’s plug in our headphones and be on our separate way. (LISTEN: “All Statues Fall”)
[Photo by Morgan Micensky]