On impact & on what we should do with our lives

My friends often ask me: what impact has New Science had? What impact has Emergent Ventures, which I admire so much, had? What impact will [project I’m currently thinking about] have?

There’s a few universally-considered truly great men: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon. Here’s my question: did they have a positive impact on the world or negative?

I spent a lot of time studying each one of them and I have no idea.

What hope do we have to know what impact our actions, infinitesimally as meaningful as their were, will have on the course of history? There’s none. And anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

Imagine asking Martin Luther what impact translating the Bible into vernacular German would have. Or imagine trying to estimate the impact of it 50 years after the Reformation started. The main result at that point was all kinds of crazy religious sects popping up and non-stop religious wars. But in the long-term, does anyone wish there was no Reformation?

Let’s go crazier. No Black Death – no industrial revolution. No Marx – no Ayn Rand. No Hitler – no Israel. No nuclear weapons – no 70-years of global peace (or maybe: no eventual world destruction?).

I can think of exactly three people over the course of human history who I’m fairly confident had a large (the first two, positive) impact on the world: Socrates, Jesus, Marx.

Socrates was sentenced to capital punishment by the Athenians and we only know about him because of Plato.

Jesus died on the cross, with both Jews and Romans mocking him for not being able to get off it.

Marx spent the last 30 years of his life in exile, didn’t even finish writing Das Kapital, and his funeral was attended by seven people.

Truth is, nobody knows the impact of anything they do. As soon as you start thinking about impact, you either start lying to yourself or go insane.

Sometimes people try to talk about estimating probabilities, but I feel like that’s kind of dumb.

We have history. There’s no probabilities there. We simply don’t know what kind of impact anything or anyone really had in the long-term.

But I think it gets worse.

Socrates wasn’t trying to teach all of the Western Civilization how to think: he was just being annoying to everyone, asking questions.

Jesus was trying to become the king of the Jews (Matthew 2:2), but ended up being crucified as a false messiah by them, yet accepted by billions of goys.

None of Marx’s stirring up communist revolutions worked and only because of the Prussian government getting tired of him and exiling him to London was he able to start the work that actually ended up causing communist revolutions and showing to the entire world what building communism actually looks like.

Anyone who decides to do or not to do things based on their impact is bullshitting themselves; and anyone who tells you to do things because they’re high-impact or not do them because they’re low-impact is bullshitting you.

So what should we do with our lives? I wrote recently that I’m probably literally the worst person in the world to be asking this question, but my conclusion– at least for now– is pretty straightforward:

1. Do what you must (obviously).
2. Do what you love (because otherwise life’s not worth living anyway).

That’s it.