Would Your Life Matter If No One Remembered You?  | (#104) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Welcome to the Beyond Success Podcast: Psychology and Philosophy for Achievers on the Bigger Questions Behind What You’re Building, and I’m David Tian, your host.

Suppose longevity science succeeds far beyond anything we can currently prove. You stay healthy into your 90s. Then you turn 100, then 110. At 119 years old, you’re still sharp and mobile, and curious and enjoying being alive, but then your doctor tells you that you probably only have one year left. Did living to 120 solve the problem of death?

Those extra decades mattered, of course. Take every healthy year modern medicine can give you, but moving the date of your death is not the same as changing how you feel about the fact that there even is a date. By the end of this episode, I want to give you a way to face directly the fact that you will die without needing another 20 years or an afterlife, or your children or your company, or your reputation or even your influence on other people, to make that fact less frightening for you. [00:55.8]

That doesn’t mean shrugging at death or deciding that nothing matters. It’s not nihilism. Facing death directly can instead make being alive feel more valuable. It can remove the requirement that life has to last before it can count. It can make the people and experiences already in your life a lot easier to appreciate. It can let you want another 40 years without needing those 40 years before this life feels sufficient to you.

The strangest place to see this clearly is a dying planet in Star Trek, where the comforting ending turns out not to be the answer. This matters especially if you’re good at building toward the future. You can spend decades trying to solve death without realizing that that’s what you’re doing. That effort might take the form of trying to live longer or building something that outlasts you, or having children or changing the world, or leaving a name for yourself or leaving an influence. [01:54.3]

Any of those things may be worth doing in themselves. The problem is when they also have to reassure you that you somehow don’t entirely disappear. Now they’ve taken on a job that none of them can actually finish, and the costs for that arrive before you die. You spend the life trying to make the life safe from ending.

The most tempting belief is that the problem with death is simply that human life is too short. “Give me enough healthy years,” and then the anxiety largely just takes care of itself, right? Maybe 80 becomes 100, 100 becomes 120. But if you’re healthy at 120 and someone offers you another 30 years, why wouldn’t you take them? And when those 30 years are almost gone? Look, wanting more life makes sense. Needing there to be no last year is another demand entirely, and no number of extra years removes that. [02:51.3]

Here’s a story to illustrate this. There’s a great episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called The Inner Light. Now, you don’t need to know anything about Star Trek to follow this. This is the episode that won them the Hugo Award and was the first television program to win this award in almost 30 years. I’ve used this story to illustrate these points to clients, and it’s been really effective, so maybe it will be effective for you, too.

Jean-Luc Picard is the captain of the Starship Enterprise, the flagship of Starfleet, and Jean-Luc Picard is played by Patrick Stewart. His ship encounters an old probe drifting through space. The probe sends out a beam and it hits Picard, and he collapses. Then you cut to him waking up somewhere else. He doesn’t recognize where he is. There’s a woman beside him. She calls him Kamin. She tells him she’s his wife and her name is Eline.

Picard thinks there’s been some mistake. He keeps telling her he’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard. He commands a starship. He has a crew. He needs to get back. Nobody knows what he’s talking about, and at first, Picard keeps trying to make sense of it. He remembers his life on the Enterprise. He resists. He knows who he is. He knows where he belongs, but he doesn’t get back, and no one helps him. [04:03.0]

Days pass this way, then months. Then he eventually starts to make peace with all of this, then years, and eventually, the life that he’s living there stops feeling like some strange interruption and starts becoming his life. He grows closer to Eline. They have children. He gets involved in the community.

He learns to play a small flute. His children grow up. His friends grow older. They have arguments and these are like ordinary family problems. People disappoint each other and they make up. They celebrate things. They lose people. They fall in love. People matter. They connect, and then the years pile up the way years actually do in real life—and there isn’t one grand moment when Picard suddenly becomes Kamin. He just keeps living there long enough that a whole history forms around him.

He has a wife who knows him deeply. He has children who have known him their entire lives. He has old friends now. He has memories that belong to this place that he now lives. The episode draws us in in such a way that it makes us, the viewers, care about those people and his life there. [05:07.1]

While all of that’s happening, the planet has a big problem. Kataan, the name of their planet, is suffering through a drought. At first, it looks like the kind of problem people assume will eventually pass. Maybe next year will be better. Maybe the rains will return. Maybe somebody will figure out what’s happening. Kamin starts looking into it. This is again Captain Picard, right? Eventually, he realizes the drought is only a symptom. Their sun is changing and their planet is going to die, and there’s nothing they can do about it.

They don’t have the technology to move the population to some other planet. There’s no ship coming to rescue them. There’s no hidden solution somebody will discover in the final act. The people on Kataan are going to die, and so is everyone who would have come after them. [05:55.0]

The years pass again in the episode. Eline dies. Kamin grows older. His children are all adults now, and he has a young grandson. By this point, Kamin has had a long life. He has known marriage. He has raised children. He has had friends long enough to watch them grow old. He has played music badly, and then less badly. He has had decades of ordinary days with people who mattered to him. His grandson won’t get that.

Kamin looks at this little boy and knows that the child deserves the chance to grow up, to fall in love, to make friends, to build a life, to grow old. But he won’t. That’s painful because the missing years matter. There’s no need to pretend otherwise. If this boy had another 60 years, there are things he could experience that he will now never get to experience. Kamin has had many of those things. His grandson won’t. [06:52.6]

There’s another layer to it. It isn’t only that this boy will die young. It’s that everyone will. The whole civilization will disappear, the marriages, the children, the friendships, the arguments, the music, the people who remember the people who came before them, all of it. At some point, there will be no one left on Kataan who remembers Kamin, no one who remembers Eline, no one who remembers the children they raised, and in fact, no one who remembers Kataan the planet. The entire planet is running out of time.

So, now the question gets harder: if all of this is going to disappear, does that make the life they lived pointless? That question sits very close to what renowned psychiatrist Irvin Yalom spent much of his career thinking about. Yalom’s existential psychotherapy deals directly with death, because human beings have a strange problem. [07:50.3]

We know we’re going to die, but we can’t somehow comfortably hold that fact in full awareness all the time—so, we soften it, sometimes through religion and the promise of an afterlife, but the secular versions can be just as powerful. Children can continue something of us. Achievement can continue something of us. Wealth can be passed on. A reputation can survive. A cause can continue. An institution can keep going. A contribution can still affect people after we’re gone. Fame can keep a name alive for centuries.

Ernest Becker, who won the Pulitzer Prize for this, wrote about this more broadly, and terror management theory later developed the idea in psychological terms. Human beings often attach themselves to something larger and more durable than their own individual life, which can offer them a form of literal or symbolic immortality.

That doesn’t mean that every ambitious person is secretly terrified of death. That would be merely a caricature of this position. Look, if you build a company, you may simply love building the company. If you have children, you may simply want children. If you give money to a cause, you may genuinely care about what that cause does. [09:09.0]

Okay, but a good thing can also be doing psychological work for you. You may genuinely want to build the company, and you may also need the company to outlive you, because some part of you wants to cheat death. Your physical body dies, but the company remains. Your name remains. Your influence remains. Some version of you keeps going.

Yalom offers a gentler version of this idea. He calls it “rippling.” The basic idea is simple—you affect people. They affect other people. Something you teach someone may influence how he raises a child that you’ll never meet. An act of kindness may change how another person treats someone else decades later. A way of thinking that you passed on may continue moving through people long after your name has disappeared. [10:01.0]

There’s no fame required here, no building with your name on it, no supernatural afterlife. You don’t even need anyone in the future to know where the influence came from. It can keep moving without you getting credit for it.

That makes rippling much subtler than the usual idea of legacy, and in some ways, it’s much more attractive because it seems to give us exactly what we want without requiring any grand claim about immortality or immortality vehicles. You die. Your body is gone. Eventually, your name may be gone, too, but you don’t disappear completely. Some part of you continues through other people.

That brings us back to Kataan, because the people on that dying planet found a way to do almost exactly that. Near the end of Kamin’s life, he goes outside for what looks like a rocket launch, and then something impossible happens—people he has lost are there again. They reappear. His wife Eline is there. His old friend is there. They look as they did years earlier, and Kamin finally understands what has happened. [11:07.2]

The people of Kataan knew their planet was doomed. They knew they couldn’t move the population somewhere else. They knew they couldn’t save themselves, so they built this probe. It carried an experience of their civilization. It wasn’t some kind of dry history lesson. It wasn’t just a collection of facts. It wasn’t just a recording that somebody could watch from a distance.

The probe found Picard and Picard lived decades as one of them. He knew Eline as his wife. He knew their children. He knew the community. He learned the flute, and he grew old there. What felt like a lifetime to Picard had taken only minutes aboard the Enterprise in reality. By the time the probe found him, Kataan itself had been dead for around 1,000 years. [11:55.8]

So, in one important sense, the people of Kataan succeeded. Their world disappeared. Their physical bodies disappeared. Their civilization disappeared, but now Picard remembers. He carries Kamin’s memories. He remembers his wife Eline. He remembers the children. He remembers the people Kamin loved and the life that they shared. He even gets the flute, which was carried in the probe flying through space. Their physical world is gone, but an experience of that world survives now inside another person’s brain.

If you wanted an example of Yalom’s rippling on the largest possible scale, this would be hard to beat. An entire civilization disappears, an entire planet. Yet what they were passes into someone else’s mind. There’s something kind of beautiful and poetic about that.

They couldn’t stop the sun from destroying the planet. They couldn’t save their own lives, but they found a way for somebody somewhere to know that they had been there—and if you stop the story there, it gives us exactly the comforting answer we were looking for: you die, the world you knew disappears, but something of you continues past your physical death. [13:08.5]

Okay, now let’s change one detail—the probe fails. Let’s say the probe malfunctions after launch as it’s flying through space for 1,000 years. Nobody finds it. Kataan disappears completely. Everything before that stays exactly the same. Eline still loves Kamin, and Kamin loves Eline. They still raise their children. Kamin still learns to play the flute and derives plenty of joy from it. His friend still matters to him. He still becomes a grandfather.

Eline still dies, and Kamin still grieves her. The only difference is that no one else ever finds out. No Picard, no Enterprise. No one gets to hear the flute music. No one learns their names. Eventually, there is no living being anywhere who knows that Kamin, Eline, their children, or Kataan itself ever existed. [14:04.0]

Now ask what that changes. Did Eline’s love become less good or worthwhile or valuable while she was alive, simply because nobody remembered it later? Did Kamin waste his time learning the flute because the music eventually disappeared? Did their marriage cease to have been worth having? Did their children’s lives lose their value? Does later oblivion somehow go backwards in time and alter what it was like for them to be alive?

Okay, that’s all hard to believe, of course. If Eline loved Kamin on a particular afternoon and Kamin knew that he was loved, then something happened between them on that afternoon. If Kamin enjoyed playing the flute, then he enjoyed playing the flute. If their children were glad to see them, if they laughed together, if they cared about one another, those experiences all took place. The fact that nobody remembers them 1,000 years later doesn’t change what happened while they were there. [15:08.6]

The great philosopher Thomas Nagel gets at this an award-winning essay called The Absurd. There’s a familiar argument about human life that goes something like this: “None of what we’re doing now will matter in a million years.” Nagel asks a very simple question. Why should what happens in a million years determine whether something matters now?

Suppose something you’re doing has no value while you’re doing it. Why would somebody remembering it a million years later suddenly make it valuable? And suppose something does have value while you’re doing it. Why would everybody forgetting it later remove that value?

The million-year test sounds profound because the timescale is enormous, but the size of the number doesn’t settle the argument. Okay, there’s a deeper problem here, too. At some point, our reasons for doing things have to stop pointing towards some later future reason. [16:09.0]

Suppose someone is suffering and you can help him. Why help? Because his suffering matters. He matters in that moment. You could ask what helping him produces later down the line or in the future. Maybe he goes home in a better state. Maybe he treats someone else better. Maybe something good comes from that.

Fine, but if reducing his suffering now only matters because it produces another good thing later in the future, then we have to ask why that later thing matters, and then why the next thing after that matters, and then the thing after that in the future. If every good thing needs another future good thing to justify it, then nothing ever counts on its own. The chain has to stop somewhere. [16:57.6]

The same applies to friendship. If spending time with a friend is worthwhile only because the friendship produces something later in the future, then eventually, we have to explain why that later thing matters. The same applies to love. If loving someone only becomes worthwhile when it leads to some later result, then loving itself never gets to count.

The same applies to music or dance. A piece of music doesn’t need to produce a monument before hearing it in the moment is worthwhile, and this is what the failed probe helps us to see. If the probe succeeds, Kataan is remembered. That is valuable in and of itself, but the probe cannot be what made Kamin and Eline’s life together valuable in the first place. [17:44.8]

Their marriage had already happened. Their children had already grown up. Kamin had already loved his friend. Eline had already died. Kamin had already grieved her. The probe comes afterwards. It can preserve what happened. It can pass that life into another person’s mind, but it can’t create the value of the life after the fact. The order runs the other way. The probe could preserve something valuable only because something valuable had already happened. [18:15.6]

Sometimes, the real problem isn’t more effort or more motivation. It’s knowing the right direction. A lot of people listening to this podcast are capable and driven. Things still look fine on paper, but life still feels strangely flat. When that happens, more advice usually isn’t the answer. Clarity is.

I’ve put together a short assessment that takes about two minutes. It’s simply a way to see which area deserves your attention most right now, whether that’s relationships, decision-making, or how pressure is being handled day to day. Based on your responses, you’ll be sent a short set of master classes related to that area.

If that sounds useful, you can find it at DTPhD.com/quiz. That’s “dtphd.com/quiz.”

Okay, that sounds decisive, but the modern philosopher Samuel Scheffler gives us a reason not to move on too quickly. In his book Death and the Afterlife, Scheffler asks you to imagine learning something strange about the future. Here it is: Your own lifespan will be normal. You’ll live as long as you otherwise would have lived. But shortly after you die, the entire human race will become extinct.

Now think about what the knowledge of that fact would do to some of the things you care about today. Suppose you’re a scientist working on a cure for a disease. Part of the reason the research matters is that people in the future may benefit from it. Or suppose you help build a university that you expect to educate students for generations, where you spend years protecting an environment that future people will inherit. [19:54.2]

Or you’re involved in a political project whose results may take decades to appear, or you make art partly because you hope people who aren’t even born yet will someday see it. If you knew there would be no future people, some of those projects would lose something substantial.

Scheffler’s point is that our lives depend more on a human future than we usually admit, so perhaps the failed probe matters, after all, and I think we should give him that point. The probe does matter. Preserving Kataan is another good. Future people matter. Benefiting them matters. If a scientist discovers a cure and dies before anyone uses it, the cure still becomes even more valuable when it later saves lives.

What happens after us can add significance to what we do now. So, the claim that everything after your death is completely irrelevant is clearly false. But notice what Scheffler has established—later consequences can add value. He has not established that nothing has value unless something lasts, so those are two different claims. [21:04.8]

Kamin’s marriage can be worth living, and the successful probe can make the whole story better—so, there’s no contradiction there. The probe gives Kataan one more good thing. It doesn’t have to be the thing that made all the other earlier good things count.

You can see this from the other direction too. Imagine a tyrant whose influence lasts for thousands of years. People remember his name. They study what he did. His decisions affect generations after his death. He has an enormous ripple, rippling. That does not make his life good.

So, being remembered in and of itself is not enough. Continuation by itself cannot turn a bad life into a good one—and the failed probe version of Kataan suggests the reverse as well. A good life does not automatically become worthless just because nothing from it survives. [22:00.8]

So, continuation may add value, but it is neither sufficient nor necessary for a life to be meaningful or to have been worth living. But there’s still a harder objection: even if a life can be meaningful without lasting forever, death can still take something real from you. I don’t think we should dodge that with the old Epicurean answer that once you’re dead, you’re no longer there to suffer from being dead—that’s clever, but it misses what most people are actually worried about. The stronger argument is what philosophers call the “deprivation view.”

Death can be bad because it deprives you of good things that you otherwise would have experienced. You don’t have to be conscious after death and feel upset about missing those years. The loss is that the years never got to happen. Kamin’s grandson makes this painfully clear. He’s a young boy living on a planet that’s going to die. His early death itself is tragic, and it’s not because being dead will feel terrible to him. It’s because of everything that he won’t get. [23:07.2]

He won’t get adulthood. He won’t get decades of friendships. He won’t get the chance to fall in love and build an intimate relationship. He won’t get to have children if that’s what he would have wanted. He won’t get all those ordinary years that Kamin was lucky enough to have, and those missing years matter precisely because life can contain things worth having.

So, if medicine could save that boy and give him another 60 healthy years, that would be better than watching him die young. If medicine can prevent disease in us, great. If it can help us stay healthy longer, great. If longevity research eventually gives people another decade or several decades of healthy, good life, also great—and if you love being alive and want another 10 years with the people that you love, there’s obviously nothing irrational about that. The deprivation argument gets that all correct. More good life can be better than less good life. [24:07.0]

But notice what it does not prove. It does not prove that a finite life can’t be good enough simply because it ends. Okay, those are again two different claims. Imagine Kamin lives 40 years. Another year could be good. Now imagine he lives 80 years. Another year could still be good. Imagine he reaches 120, healthy enough still to enjoy his family, his friends, his music, and his days. Another year could still be good.

Okay, there’s no contradiction here, but “another year would be good” is not the same as saying “the years I already lived were not worth having unless another year arrives.” That second claim obviously doesn’t follow from the first, and once you see that, the argument we started with begins to fall apart. [24:59.8]

The problem with death cannot simply be that life is too short, because no matter how long the life becomes, another good year could still be desirable—40 can become 80, 80 can become 120, 120 can become 150, and so on and so forth, and at every point, wanting more makes perfect sense, but the fact that more would be good doesn’t mean what you already had wasn’t good enough to have been worth living. That would be a mistake.

The mistake is in taking the reasonable desire for yet another year of a good life, and then on the sly, morphing it into some demand that life must not end in order for that life to have been good or to be good. Okay, so of course, those two are different claims. [25:52.0]

So, let’s stop asking a finite life to pass a test that no finite life could ever pass. We’ve already removed the requirements one by one. Your life does not have to go on forever before anything in it can matter, can have meaning, can have real value.

You do not have to be remembered forever. Your influence does not have to keep spreading forever, and what you do today does not have to matter to somebody 1,000 years, a million years from now, before it can be worth doing now and have value now. That doesn’t make life smaller. Instead, it removes an impossible standard, because if life has to be permanent before it can count, then no human life has ever counted. No marriage has, no friendship has, no childhood has, no song has, no civilization has. Everything ends eventually.

So, the right question is not “How do I make this permanent enough to count?” The right question is “What in this life is worth having while I’m experiencing it? [27:02.4]

Let’s go back to Kataan. Suppose the probe fails. Nobody remembers Eline, Kamin’s wife. Does that make her less precious to Kamin while she is alive? I think it makes the opposite easier to see. She is precious because he gets to be with her. His grandson is precious because the boy is there now in front of him. Their ordinary years do not become disposable just because there is no cosmic sequel waiting at the end.

An evening can matter because of what happens during that evening. A relationship can matter because two people actually lived it together. Music can matter because someone heard it and enjoyed hearing it. A child can matter without being given the job of carrying his parent forward after their death, and this is where gratitude begins to make philosophical sense. You stop requiring the present to justify itself by surviving into some endless future. [28:11.5]

You stop treating every good thing as though it were merely a down payment on some future permanence, and then you can face the seemingly harder fact directly that you will die. Even if longevity science gives you another 30 or 40 healthy years, you will die. So will I. The people you love will die. Your descendants will eventually die. Your company will eventually disappear, and humanity itself is not permanent. Our planet itself, perhaps, is not permanent.

That’s the part that we usually try to soften, but none of that means that your being here now was a mistake or meaningless, or worthless. It doesn’t mean the whole life was a mistake. It doesn’t mean the whole enterprise of living was some bad bargain because it came with an ending. That conclusion obviously does not follow. [29:11.7]

If you love someone and later lose her, the loss does not prove that loving her was a mistake or worthless or meaningless. If you hear beautiful music, and then the music ends, the silence afterward does not make hearing it pointless.

If you get a life, live it. Love people in it. Enjoy parts of it. Suffer through some other parts of it, and then die. The ending does not reach backwards and cancel out the fact that you have to live it. So, the conclusion does not have to be “Then nothing matters.” In fact, it can almost always be the reverse. [29:56.0]

If none of this lasts forever, then I should pay closer attention to what I actually get to have. And not someday and not once I’ve secured enough years or money, not once I’ve built something permanent enough to survive me after my death, but instead, what do I get to have while I’m here now?

Once permanence is no longer the price of admission, mortality stops being an argument against the value of life, and instead it becomes one more important reason to notice the life you’ve got before it’s gone. That changes the way you look at the fact that any of this happened at all.

We tend to enter life with a strange sense that existence owes us some continuation, like it owes us another year and then another, and then another, and if we get enough of them, we still want one more at least. That’s understandable, but there was never some kind of contract. There was never a promise that just because you got to be here, you would get to stay. [31:08.5]

When I call life a gift, I don’t mean you have to believe that there’s some giver. I mean something much simpler. You were not owed the fact that you got to exist at all. You could have had none of this, no consciousness, no people to know, no one to love, no music to enjoy, no laughter, no grief, no fear, no joy.

Instead, for some period of time, you were here. You became aware of a world. You encountered other conscious beings. Some of them became important to you. Some things delighted you. Some things hurt you precisely because they mattered. If you look at life that way, mortality doesn’t cancel the gift. Instead, it defines its limits. [31:59.3]

Let’s go back one last time to Kataan. Imagine again that the probe fails. There is no Picard here. No one remembers Kamin. No one remembers Eline. No one remembers their children. Now, Kamin is an old man now and Eline is dead. His grandson is nearby and Kamin knows that their son will eventually destroy everything they’ve ever known.

What should he conclude? That Eline didn’t matter because no one will remember her? That his children’s lives were worthless because they won’t continue forever? That he shouldn’t have bothered learning the flute because eventually no one will ever hear him play it again? None of those conclusions make any sense.

The wiser conclusion is almost the reverse. “How extraordinary that I got Eline at all. How extraordinary that I got to know my children, that I got to hear the flute, that I got to have friends, that I got years with people who really mattered to me.” [33:00.4]

None of this needed to last forever in order to have been worth having. The fact that it ends does not make the loss unreal. Kamin can still grieve Eline. He can still wish his grandson had more time. He can still hate what’s coming. The loss can remain sad, precisely because what is being lost was so good.

So, there’s no immortality required here, no cosmic importance required, no successful probe required. It’s just the recognition that a finite good does not become worthless just because it’s finite. Once you see that clearly, gratitude is no longer a way of looking away from death. Instead, it’s one of the most reasonable responses to having been alive at all. [33:57.3]

Where does all of this leave us? Living longer can add enormous value to a life. The deprivation argument actually explains why. If another 10 or 20 healthy years would contain people you love, experiences you value, and things you still want to do, then losing those years is a real loss. What happens after us can add value, too. Scheffler is right about that. Future people matter. What we leave behind can matter, and rippling in that Yalom sense can be beautiful.

Kataan’s probe shows us that, but Nagel and especially the failed probe version of the story I presented show us something equally important. None of those forms of continuation into the future is what made the lived part valuable in the first place.

So, you can want more life without needing it to last forever. You can face the fact that you will die without concluding that your life is therefore meaningless—and once you stop demanding permanence, the finite goods you already have become easier to see. [35:04.5]

I’ve seen this in clients when aging or death starts to feel more immediate. At first, the “I want more time” sounds like a simple statement, and part of it is simple—more healthy years would be welcome—but sometimes more time has subtly come to mean much more than that. It has come to mean I can postpone the question. I can keep assuming that enough years will eventually make my mortality easier to accept.

But more years were never going to remove your mortality. At some point, the intellectual distinction becomes clear. A finite life can be worth having, and in an important sense, its finiteness can even make meaning easier to see and find than an infinite life would, because once you stop asking life to continue forever before it can count, the life you’ve got right in front of you can finally fully count to you now. [36:05.1]

The avoidable tragedy then is not death. Death is coming either way. The avoidable tragedy is spending your healthy years extending the horizon, building what will outlast you, arranging your legacy, preserving your name, improving your biomarkers, buying more future, while missing the obvious fact underneath all of it.

The only reason you wanted more time was because being alive was supposed to be already good, and if you miss that, you can reach the last year with more years behind you and that same bargain still running—“just one more.”

But there is another way to live. You can pursue longevity enthusiastically. You can build things that survive. You can raise children. You can work towards some legacy, and you can still look death squarely in the face. You no longer need any of those things to make death feel less frightening or less devastating to you. [37:08.6]

Then you get the strange result that we’ve been working toward this whole episode: mortality stops cheapening your life, and instead, it starts making the fact that you got a life at all a lot easier to appreciate—which brings us back one last time to that episode in Star Trek: The Inner Light. In the actual story, the probe succeeds. Picard wakes up. Later, he receives Kamin’s physical flute. He remembers Kataan. He stares off into space from his room through those big windows. He carries their story forward.

That’s beautiful, but now we can see why actually it is beautiful. The life was not worth living just because somebody remembered it. It was worth remembering because it had been worth living. [38:03.0]