Last Words: Immortality As A Motivation To Write

If I were to die at midnight, what’s one thing I could write that could make the world a better place?

That’s the question I like to ask myself when I run out of things to write about. I like it so much I scribbled it on a post-it and hung it on my laptop.

Confronting ourselves to the inevitability of death is a great way to cut through the ambient noise. What matters most to us is evident, we just need a way to remember it.

It’s not eyes, but words, that are the mirror of the soul. The content we publish will survive us and become the closest thing we have to immortality. 

Every day, we can choose to leave a legacy. Compounded, we enter the legend.

Nothing is meaningless if it can live somewhere: companies collapse, time erodes statues, and every living being eventually dies, but the things we record are eternal. And if these things can help someone or something, in a near or distant future, then it was worth the time spent doing it.

Github’s Archive Program will preserve open source software for a thousand years by storing every public repository in an arctic vault located in Norway. If you were to push your writings to a public project hosted on Github, your content would literally be available for at least a millennia after your death.

Every day, we can write. Every day, we are free to choose our last words.