Why none of us will leave a legacy

Here's how to live your life when you know you won't be remembered

Almost nobody knows the full names of their great-grandparents. I certainly don’t. Photo by Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash.

My great friend

Kia Abdullah

recently wrote in her Substack:

A couple of weeks ago, I watched a TikTok video that asked, ‘How many of us know our parents’ grandparents’ names?’ – the answer likely being very few.

The point of the question really screwed with me. If we’ll all be more or less forgotten in three generations’ time, what is the point of trying to leave a mark? 

I’ll answer this question later in this blog.

Kia is a bestselling novelist and notes that her novels will be in the British Library - as will my own books. But even the British Library is running out of space. How long until new copies of books stored there start being digital rather than physical? Or, indeed, until books cease to exist at all in their physical form, due to climate change caused by production and transportation costs?

People say, ‘Oh, but you’ll leave a digital footprint instead, as will we all. Our great-grandparents won’t be remembered because there were barely no photos from that time, but there are endless photos of us all over the internet.’

But for how long?

Photos are deletable, formats are changeable

Lillabilla and me in 2011.

Here’s a sad fact: most of my baby photos and videos of Lily are lost. I took a ton of them, even though I only had an iPhone 4 so they weren’t great quality - but when I upgraded to later versions of the iPhone, they didn’t get transferred across for some reason, and I realised much later that I no longer had them. The same is true of my photos on old broken laptops - and it’s a similar story across the land. And even a lot of the photos I still have seem to have degraded in quality.

But even if I still had the photos and videos in their original crispness and clarity, formats change, and what’s the betting that JPEGs and MP4s will eventually be as obsolete as cinefilm and Betamax? Which is a huge shame, as photos of my beloved Nana have helped me come to terms with her death. Photos of loved ones are invaluable.

Beautiful Nana in her twenties at a party in the 1940s.

The internet is perishable

Most people began using the internet less than 30 years ago, and it’s evolved greatly. Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash.

Twenty years ago, in 2004, I remember sitting in bed, looking at my MySpace page and lamenting the fact that I wasn’t a beautiful MySpace celebrity called Tila Tequila. On the flip side, in the same kind of time period, I relished the schadenfreude of browsing the profiles of my former school bullies on Friends Reunited, because I was writing scripts for the BBC and they mostly had shit jobs.

Fast-forward to today and MySpace and Friends Reunited are no more, Tila Tequila has been cancelled for being a Nazi after saying Hitler was misunderstood, and I no longer write scripts for the BBC.

So a lot can happen online in 20 years. This is now my MySpace page. Not very memorable or inviting, eh?

Unlike the glamorous Tila Tequila. Photo by Toglenn on Wikimedia Commons.

You might be like, ‘Well, the internet was in its infancy! It’s advanced a lot and there are better systems for archiving pages now.’

Well, I’m not so sure. For instance, in 2008-2009 I ran a campaign called the Atheist Bus Campaign, which featured adverts on buses around the world saying ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ In the UK alone, the fundraiser raised £100,000 from public donations in its first four days and over £150,000 in total, meaning we could have 800 buses running around the country with the slogan on, along with ads in Tube trains and a large screen on Oxford Street.

The campaign became a global phenomenon and generated more international and national press than any other advertising campaign that decade. Endless think pieces were written on it, it featured on Have I Got News for You?, broke the record for most comments on a Guardian piece, memes were spawned by it, I got a two-book deal with HarperCollins for two atheist-themed books, and it generally set the internet ablaze.

In 2009, the phrase “Atheist Bus Campaign” generated over 100,000 hits on Google.

Do you know how many hits the phrase generates now? An unimpressive 185.

Similarly, in 2009, “Ariane Sherine” generated over 10,000 hits.

Now, it generates 117.

I’m not sure why, but I think Google deletes old, unvisited or abandoned links.

The Dawk and I in January 2009, in front of the Atheist Bus. Photo by Zoe Margolis.

I remember, in 2009, meeting my then-friend David Mitchell (the Peep Show actor and comedian) and walking under some scaffolding on our way to a cafe in Kentish Town. I hated walking under scaffolding - I still do - because I always fear it’s going to fall on my head and kill me.