My friend's dad died recently. In some turn of events, I found myself acting as messenger, passing the news through a loose network of old friends, acquaintances and people who knew the family in one way or another. The responses were almost universally the same. "That's sad." "That sucks!" "Give him my condolences." And then the conversation just completely fizzled out. At first I thought it was strange. Death is supposed to be one of the great events of human existence. Entire religions have been built around this philosophy. Massive wars have been fought over a single death. Philosophers have literally dedicated their lives to understanding it. Yet when confronted with the death of an actual human being, most people acknowledged it briefly before returning to whatever they had been doing five minutes earlier. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this isn't callousness or a lack of sensitivity. It's just that people are programmed to compartmentalize that information as "something sad but not directly related to my existence" and move on. The dead man's death was only a catastrophe to his wife, his children, and his close friends. To everyone else it was just a message they received, responded to, and moved on with their day. I realised, years earlier I had experienced something similar. There was a neighbour who had lived next door to my parents for most of my life. He was one of those permanent fixtures you unconsciously assume will always be there. Whenever I returned home, I'd inevitably end up talking to him over the fence. One evening after returning from a long overseas work trip I took my parents out to dinner and I asked my father how he was doing. "Oh, he's dead," he replied. Then he carried on with the conversation about a broken headlight he had gotten on his car that week. I remember feeling shocked. Like, "wait, what? This dude is dead?" This man had occupied a small corner of my world for decades. He had a family. A career. Hobbies. Opinions. Stories etc. He had accumulated an entire lifetime of experiences. Yet his passing entered the conversation with all the gravity of someone asking about the weather. What struck me later was that my father wasn't being dismissive about him. The world had just moved on, and eventually it always does. I think most people spend their lives assuming they occupy a much larger place in reality than they actually do just by default. We're the protagonist of our own story, so naturally we assume we're a significant character in everyone else's. We imagine our death as some great event because from our perspective it is the ultimate significance. But for almost everyone else, it's not. I mean, most people can't name their great-grandparents or couldn't tell you who lives in the apartment next to them. Most of us struggle to remember details about that holiday we took to South East Asia 10 years ago, let alone all the people we ever had some sort of close relationship with. Yet somehow we imagine that strangers will carry our memory indefinitely. A lifetime of worries, ambitions, achievements, failures, routines and relationships eventually gets compressed into an off hand line of "yeh he died". The truth is that history has no interest in the overwhelming majority of human beings. The universe is indifferent to our existence. Think about it. Are people going to gather their grandchildren around a fire to tell stories of Gavin, Senior Accounts Manager, who exceeded his quarterly targets year-on-year? An uncomfortable amount of modern life consists of expending enormous effort on things that will vanish almost immediately after we're gone. We assume we will be remembered and that our actions matter. But our actions are not a metric of what other people will care about us once we're gone, but more a measure by which we mark our own progress. In reality, the heroin addict living under the bridge has about as much cosmic impact on society as we do; we just assume we matter more because we're doing what society told us mattered. This isn't supposed to be depressing. If anything, you should probably view it as liberating. Because at the end of the day, if no one remembers who you were, then it doesn't matter whether you lived up to other people's expectations. The people judging your life will eventually be forgotten just as quickly as you were. The real mistake is spending your life trying to satisfy these people whose opinions were never going to survive any longer than their Chat-GPT written obituaries.