[wayoutthere]

Most of us are nobody. I’ve never heard of Aleksey Kladov myself — he is simply nobody to me. So are most of the people you’re probably comparing yourself against.

What you’re encountering is existential angst; we live in a world with over 7 billion people and the reality is that for 99.9999% of us, our existence will be forgotten entirely within a hundred years of our death. The only people we tend to remember culturally are the horrible ones. At best, you are a cog in a machine and at worst, you give in to the nihilism.

For me, the solution to this was not to focus pouring more of myself into work, but to focus on surrounding myself with people who make the day to day more bearable. The project of my life is not to produce more economic output, but to build the connections with the people I share my life with.

Life is long, and most of us are nobody. The people who can help make your life more bearable are probably also nobody. Surround yourself with family / community and don’t focus so much on “legacy”. Nobody is gonna build a statue of you.