To be famous is to be known and recognized. More than that, it is a way of standing out, of being special, of being a ‘somebody’ rather than a ‘nobody’ like everybody else. It is also a way of perduring, a way of postponing the inevitable and living on.
Fame is not the only way of living on. A more common and ordinary way of preserving your memory is to have children and, one day hopefully, grandchildren. Compared to fame, children and grandchildren are relatively easy to achieve, but they only preserve your memory for at most three or four generations.
In contrast, leaving behind a significant artistic, intellectual, or social legacy is much harder to achieve, but can preserve your memory for far longer. Some 2,500 years after his time, the ancient philosopher Thales of Miletus continues to be studied by every student of philosophy, but no one remembers the Milesians who mocked him for his poverty.
Even so, a day will surely come when students no longer study Thales, or even Plato (who was the first to distinguish between what he called minor and major immortality)—if only because there are no students left.
For this reason, to search for happiness in immortality, even greater immortality, is never anything more than a vain attempt to delay the inevitable, a subterfuge aimed at fooling yourself that you are a ‘somebody’ rather than a ‘nobody’ like everybody else.
More fundamentally, it is to fall into the trap of searching for happiness in an idealized and hypothetical future rather than in an imperfect but actual present in which true happiness is much more likely to be found, albeit with much thought and great difficulty.
Of course, this is not to say that you should not seek out individuation and self-realization—far from it—but only that you should not do so in some vain attempt to secure immortality, or even to secure celebrity, fame, or honour within your lifetime.
This also frees you from having to rely on public recognition, which can be just as painful as it can be pleasurable, and which is neither dependable nor indispensable.
Neel Burton is author of The Meaning of Madness, The Art of Failure: The Anti Self-Help Guide, Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception, and other books.
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