I was scrolling through my Instagram reels the other day when I stumbled upon one that put me in a rather existential mood. It spoke about how, 100 years from now, we’ll be practically unknown, and everything we own will be passed along to someone else or, more than likely nowadays, rotting in a dump somewhere, and that will be that. In the movie Troy, Agamemnon angrily declares that “history remembers kings,” but not the soldiers. Not most people, in other words; and so, for the majority of us whose stories will be unremembered in the pages of history, our greatest lasting accomplishment will be our descendants, who will hardly even know us. After all, “How many of us know our grandfather’s father?” Our legacies, then, will blend into the mix of legacies that the vast majority of people will have, essentially amounting to no legacy at all. If you want to know what happens after you die, that’s probably as certain an answer that you can get.

Now, there are a couple ways that people can react to this, perhaps the most common being a feeling of dread. On the reel, I remember seeing one comment about how someone didn’t want to be forgotten, and I can understand this as an impulse. After all, we generally consider it rude if someone forgets us; or we feel unseen, unbecoming of the dignity that we bestow upon human beings and the importance that we give to our own lives and stories. Consider: if life for us is difficult then the idea that such a struggle will be forgotten would seem to diminish the significance it had for us. That is why, for example, we commemorate the suffering and sacrifices of others on days like Remembrance Day or Holocaust Remembrance Day: they stand as an eternal affirmation of the horrors those individuals went through, particularly as we remember stories of their experiences.

But on the other hand, I thought the idea of no legacy at all was rather freeing. There’s no pressure to come up with witty last words, invent something life-changing, or be the perfect role model. I can settle for being just who I am and trying to make the world a better place during the time in which I lived. It’s not the most memorable life, but it is a good enough life. After all, how many people do you suppose die happy with the knowledge that they’ll be remembered for hundreds if not thousands of years? Is that really what matters to them in the end? That they people-pleased future-people who they’ll never even live to meet? Surely not! We don’t write our own histories.

No, they’re more likely to reflect on what they did do with the time they had, not how they’ll be remembered centuries later. They may think that they should have spent more time with so-and-so, or that they should’ve taken that risk on such-and-such. If they care about how they’re remembered, it is a care limited to those who they remember, not strangers—not unless they’re somewhat vain, in which case perhaps they’d best not wish to be remembered at all.

And this is something that should in fact make us feel immensely privileged: that we are here living amongst many other people who will also be forgotten much like ourselves, and so we have the exclusive access to get to know them. Maybe there was someone alive hundreds of years ago who would have related to you in a way no one today would. (I doubt it, but I digress.) Maybe you only hate 19th century British literature because all the authors you would have liked were forgotten as the age passed? Maybe you only think ancient Rome was cool because it wasn’t any of your brothers or sons or cousins who were thrown in the gladiator’s pit?

We are prisoners of the ages we live in, and we will die in our cell; but at the same time, that affords us an uncommonly close relationship with our cellmates, and with it an understanding that no one else would have. It is actually not so bad to be lost to time, so long as we are remembered by those who matter to us.