i recently came across a tiktok creator, jazzy. she’s a teen who spends her time interviewing high-profile figures, hitting them with these brief, off-the-cuff questions on life. the video that actually gripped me was her exchange with mike tyson.
she asked him about legacy. you’d expect a man with his history to have a monumental take on being remembered, but mike’s response was both hysterical and deeply subversive. he was essentially repulsed by the concept. his core argument was that most people spend their entire existence optimizing for a legacy at the expense of actually living.
he wasn’t advocating for a degenerative, nihilistic spiral. his point was more intellectual. the giants we still revel today, the nietzsches, the von neumanns, the teslas, weren’t working toward a posthumous reputation. they were possessed by the work - mostly solving for their own obsessions.
i’ve rarely seen a person successfully optimize for the metaphysical while jettisoning the visceral. i use “living” in a broad sense here, because it requires a certain wildness and a total lack of self-consciousness to actually touch the essence of it. the moment you start chasing “legacy,” you’re really just chasing a curated utopia. you start believing there’s a “proper” protocol for life that ensures immortality. it devolves into what gen z calls “aura farming.”
it’s the instagram food of philosophy. it looks alluring, but it’s just semantic noise. it lacks substance. nobody actually cares about the “revolutionary” significance of your macbook sitting next to a latte. i can assure you that.
the sardonic caveat to all this curation is that it’s the first thing to be effaced once you’re gone. noise doesn’t have a half-life, on most cases, it disappears. we’ve traded the raw friction of doing things for the sanitized performance of being someone. the greats didn’t have “aesthetics.” they had grit and obsession. they were far too busy being wild and free to care about how the coffee looked on the desk.
tyson’s point is a beautiful irony. the more you optimize for how you’ll be remembered, the less there is of “you” to actually remember. you become a shell of tropes. legacy isn’t something you build - it’s merely a smoke that stays in the air after you’ve spent yourself on something that actually mattered.