How to Live Forever

Unlocking 98% of your Impact & your own Immortality

TL:DR ChatGPT Summary: The author explains how relationships, generosity, and empathy are the true legacy-builders. Rather than chasing validation, status, or transactional networking, he now sees love, contribution, and long-term human connection as the only real form of impact and immortality. Giving—whether emotionally or through ideas—ripples forward far beyond our lives in a way money, credit, or keeping score never can

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“fallecio”… I heard the word and paused. I know THAT word. It is important. It means someone died.

I get home last night and receive the news that the front desk guy at my building passed away. Just 60, heart attack out of nowhere. I had taken the time to get to know him over the past 2 years. I had every chance to avoid it… he speaks only Spanish, heavy accent, he is ‘just’ the front desk guy. But as I have grown I have become a kinder, more-loving person. I always gave him the extra 15-30 mins of convo, and not just leave once my delivery arrived. We developed a small friendship, I knew what was going on in his life and his family’s life.

After the sadness and melancholy, I realized that of all the people I have lost, this is the first death that I feel ‘at peace’ with. Often, its a moment of regretting of all the times I chose to be selfish instead of turning towards them. The feeling a door has closed I can never re-open, of all the things I still wanted to say to them but cant now. Me reflecting on the last 4-5 times we talked and realizing I was so in my head about some dumb shit I had to do that day or thinking only about myself I missed the chance to connect with a soul before it was lost forever.

At just 41, I’ve already lost many people. In the last 4 years I’ve lost my grandmother, grandfather, my father, my first cousin, and my moto racing friend. Each time, I felt that door slamming. Like the internet cutting out on a youtube video… forever. You will never know what the rest of that video will say. You’ll never see his other videos. Its just an immediate ‘stop right where you are, right now’. And an instant wave of ‘I wish I would have of while I still the chance’ thoughts.

But I have slowly learned my lesson. All those deaths changed me. Now when I talk to someone, I see them for who they are: a fleeting soul that wont last forever. A spark you have to enjoy while you can. I make sure I soak them up and connect with them, bc you never know. That’s why I am at peace in this case. He wasn’t a door that I walked past. I went in, got to know him, connected with him. Of course there’s more that I’d have loved to have known and learned from him. But given our time together and the nature of our relationship, I still made it into something 5x stronger than what it otherwise would have been destined to be. I seized the time I had with him and I don’t feel like I wasted the opportunity to know his spirit.

The Math of Vanishing Time

A sad math I do more nowadays is to realize that I may have already spend 98% of the time I ever will with someone. My brother, sister, mother. I live on the other side of the world. Most of the time I will ever spend with them is already spent. It does drive me to call and chat with them more. But there is a sad truth to knowing, face-to-face, we might only every spend one month total time together ever again.

Another way to think of that is to graph the total time we spend with ANYONE, over time. Since our childhood /early adulthood is full of supervision, siblings, school, college roommates, parties… it is not uncommon for a person at the age of 40 to have already spent 80% of the time he will ever spend interacting with humanity as a whole. He has half his life left, but only 20% of his total volume of aggregate social interactions left. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

That number correlates to selfishness. The more selfish a person is, the less of their social interactions they have left as they age. If we only think ‘whats in it for me’, we don’t build many lasting connections. The issue is, while we may not benefit NOW… as what we look for in life shifts, we may benefit later. I like to look at human connections as owning very small pieces of equity in companies. We don’t have to invest very much to keep the stock, but who knows what it can turn into one day. But if we cut people off, we lose that long-tail. By the time a person is 40, all their jobs should be gained thru their network. If you are applying online at the age of 40, it tells the world you are not a long-term giver. You have been either been taking, or too short-term focused on your ROI. By 40, you should be surrounded and protected by your long-tails.

As with many things, networking feels like work when it is viewed logically and transactionally. But when it is viewed emotionally, it becomes part of who we are. As a person who wants to connect and cherish people in this short life before they are gone, as someone who wants to be surrounded by meaningful connections and be able to have an impact with others daily later on in life, I naturally have a deep network without working to keep one. It doesn’t feel like work. It is a natural part of me trying to give into this world and love everyone before they are gone.

From Ego to Empathy

I have not always had this mindset. When I was younger (early 20s), I was a total competitive pisshead with a massive chip on my shoulder. Only thinking about myself, how to get ahead, how to achieve all the money, girls, and glory all for myself. I viewed everyone else as a threat. Trying to steal my spotlight, my opportunities, or if I am honest, to steal my inner confidence by outshining me and making doubt myself. To avoid that crisis of confidence I blocked out others and doubled down on myself bc “I am smarter than them and I am going to figure it out on my own”. Learning from others meant my ego couldn’t award me and only me my eventual victory prize. Share the celebration stage? No way.

I have out-grown that. Some of that growth has come from winning too much. Once you have it, you realize its not all its cracked up to be, or that you drastically overpaid for it. But most of that growth has come from LOSING.

Losing is an incredible teacher. Unexpected losses can show us we should have been valuing something more than what we were. For ex, losing a job can reveal we should have appreciated it more. When I lost my ex, it made me realize I should have been valuing her own emotional experience of our relationship more. I should have been thinking about her perspective, how she felt, imagining myself in her shoes. It taught me to value empathy and the high costs of egocentric focus.

Losing my family and friends to death has taught me to value the human spark. It has taught me to cherish and love it, while I can. As we get older, we realize we are just like them and could be gone at any moment. We are all in one long-line waiting to join the ranks of the millions of souls who already saw their sun set. In this line, some people are on their phone, some are answering work emails, some are stressing or worrying…. yet others are talking to the others in line and sharing some smiles. We realize that at the end of the day, that is really all we have and all that matters.

As such, in my 40s, I value far more connection, contribution, and personal impact. Much more than I value status or money. I will happily allow someone else to get credit for my idea if it creates the positive change I know needs to happen in the world. I will allow someone to feel like they ‘won’ vs me if I know that feeling is what they really need now in their growth journey. It may take them years to look back and realize ‘that fucker let me win bc he knew I needed it more than him’. And later in that moment, they feel loved. Or it may never happen. But at the end of the day it doesn’t matter because life is an emotional experience and all we can do is maximize how much we care for each other.

We are all just kids, standing in this long line, not really sure what we are doing. Each trying to do our best. Each bravely trying to act like we’ve got it figured out each day. Each wanting love. Some think they can only be loved by achieving money, status, or victory at others expense. Others think they can only be loved if they love other people more than they love them back. (When I say love here I don’t mean only romantic love, I mean a feeling of being cherished and emotionally valued by humanity, in whatever form)

Others already feel loved and can become the rare, unblocked contributors. This ‘winning’ creates a ‘now what’ moment that gives us the perspective to re-focus our goals in life. We’d been so focused on winning we never thought, whats after that? Now, we’ve already won. Now we look around can see others not as competitors for love and admiration in life, but as those unfortunate enough as to still be looking for it. We realize, “I can change your life just like my life was changed” by giving them love. Whats crazy is this costs us nothing. The selfishness of our ego wants to consider it to be a loss, but giving love doesn’t mean we are less loved. They are totally different. If we think that way, we are still in a ‘keeping-score’ mode which tells us we don’t feel truly loved yet. We don’t yet feel like we’ve ‘already won the game’ and stopped keeping score.

Love is a renewable resource. Just like hate given creates new hate in the other person, reproducing for free … so does love. This is the ultimate hack in life. We can just give others love genuinely and we will create a net positive wave that will ripple out from us. It doesn’t matter that we don’t get credit for it, because you are already loved and thus you have nothing more to gain. What matters is knowing we’re giving others the same gift that was given to us. And just like we show a funny youtube video to another person because we know it will give them joy like it gave us joy, we want to give love to others simply bc we want them to feel like us too.

The Path to Immortality

This opens up our ability to TRULY contribute in life MASSIVELY. It becomes incredibly easy to have a huge impact in life, when you aren’t trying to ‘monetize’ an eventual gain from it. Very few people are actually giving… its wild how much low-hanging fruit for profound impact is left hanging simply because a person asked ‘what does this give back to me?’ and couldn’t make the ROI work. Shifting this focus allows us to impact the world as we know it needs to be impacted. It gives us the satisfaction of knowing that we changed the world for the better. That our life had an actual consequence.

Even if we don’t gain from it, it doesn’t mean we weren’t the Godfather of it. For example when I was in Florence this month, I realized the Medici and artists like Da Vinci and Michealangelo were givers. While their acts weren’t purely selfless, much of their contributions were ‘for the public good’. This had an ENORMOUS impact. It created the Renaissance, pulling all of humanity out of the Dark Ages. The whole ‘Florence elite artistic taste’ brand has had its coattails ridden for centuries by brands such as Gucci, Ferragamo, Pucci, Cavalli, and others that position themselves as heirs of Florentine artistry. Even Starbucks alludes to it for pricing power. On top of that, the industries of Italian leather and jewelry all borrow the same perceived prestige that begins with Da Vinci & Michelangelo. Their simple acts of giving rippled thru eternity and created trillions of dollars in economic activity and branding power. I ask you, would you rather be remembered as Jeff Bezos, or Da Vinci?

The same for a man named Wes McKinney. He pain-stakingly authored the open-source library for Pandas, a data library for Python. Pandas is used heavily in nearly every data application now, and is the back-bone for the entire AI revolution. Wes built that for free, giving into a world and creating trillions of dollars of industry.

I don’t bring this up to create a backdoor ego-rationalization for why we actually gain by giving. We should give because we are already loved and want to create a positive impact in this short human experience. But I mention it to illustrate how powerful it can be. It has incredible leverage and can unlock 99% of our impact potential in life. Giving ‘open-source’ has far more explosive reach than the proprietary method of giving only if we can somehow personally ‘monetize’ it. In many ways, this is the fundamental flaw of capitalism… that the projects with stratospheric ROI for humanity as a whole are left unfunded simply bc it has low ROI for the person who actually builds it. Yet its these exact projects that echo with a personal legacy thru eternity. In a way, in a life that reminds us often just how temporary it can be, giving to others our one path to immortality.

In the end, we’re all just passing through life, together. In this line, some wait their turn with their heads down, focused in their foggy inner world, trying to win something that can’t be kept. But the only things that can possibly outlast us are what we give to others in this line while we still can. “Here you go, pass it back”. Every time that we choose connection over indifference, contribution over ego, love over transaction, we plant a seed for something that CAN keep living without us. That is the closest thing to permanence that humans can hope to achieve. Our echoes begin with the people we chose not to walk past.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Osvaldo.

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