As I scroll through my Facebook news feed, Twitter, YouTube subscriptions, and my many unmanageable number of servers on Discord I am astonished, or maybe not so astonished, to discover how alike we all really are. "We" as people, or at least the people I know, and "alike" with respect to our vain attempts to be the most popular, revered, talked about, and above all "liked" (both in terms of interpersonal perception and upvotes) for being memetically unoriginal.
Everyone tries to be noticed by the seniority above them (whether it be a response by the person(s) of fame to our comments on their video, or seeing our friend request accepted by someone "famous" so we can tell all our friends ".... yeah..... I know that guy. We're friends [on Facebook].). Of course little do you recognize that no, they do not notice "you". They noticed a clever little line of text of some faceless no-name wrote- a line of text they may like for now, but will forget as soon as they scroll to the next bit that makes them mentally chuckle for a split second).
Getting the right photograph that you waited and spent your life to get- the one you can't wait to upload to Facebook to rub into your "friends'" (friends of course only in the social media sense of the word. Most of these people, if you are like me, you will awkwardly walk past in the real world- knowing their name and recognizing their face but instinctively knowing you really have nothing friendly to say to them and wonder if they even recognize or have anything friendly to think or say about you.). Or maybe it's not only friends you are trying to impress, but, yet again, those in seniority whom this time you actually have the chance to meet and benefit from as they may be your future employer or reference to your future employer (however, note that this person, like you, is too preoccupied with their own public image (How else did they get where they're at?) that they haven't the slightest amount of brain power or time left to appreciate the perfection of your latest profile picture. So they scroll, look, and scroll to the next tab their high time preference brain- thanks to hours an hours of high speed internet usage- allows them to devote an equally minuscule amount of time to.).
While I'm on the topic, consider the phenomenon of the autograph, or as I like to call it, the marker scribble. Why do you (I'd say we, but I can proudly say I do not succumb to this farm animal-like behavior) wait in 2 hour lines just to meet some famous guy who does not and will not know you and get him to draw on some expensive paraphernalia you will, from that moment forth, spend too much of your limited time on Earth keeping after (making sure not a speck of dust contaminates or smears your precious conversation starter piece)? I have some possible diagnoses, but I will leave them unwritten for now.
No matter who you are you will never be liked enough. So you have 50 million subscribers? That is 0.7 percent of the world population. 99.3 percent of the world doesn't even know who you are. By the time you die not only will your audience grow up and likely forget you, each subsequent child born every passing second will grow up watching and reading (assuming hieroglyphics don't supersede alphabetical language by then in the reincarnated combination of emojis and memes) their respective contemporary entertainer. You will forever be relegated to the proverbial trash bin of history (except in the unlikely case of enduring nostalgic value you may have for a brief period of time 10 years after your death).
All ambitious men, all men, desperately desire to be remembered well after their deaths, however all too many will be forgotten well before. Fewer will be remembered and recalled by the immediate trailing generation. Fewer still will be worth writing as a few footnotes in some history books. Even fewer will earn a 60 Minutes television special in the wake of their death.
The truly great men of history-- the Napoleons, Shakespeares, and Caesars-- were likely ordained by the almighty and may, I'm afraid, themselves be forgotten when and if human kind fades or explodes into oblivion.
If you want your name to truly endure my suggestion is become a vehement anti-Semite with a military industrial complex at your disposal, get in a war, lose, and let the Jews lie about how you came this close to wiping them off the face of the Earth. Maybe then you will be immortalized for all time.
