From Here to Obscurity: in 5 generations

The other day, I updated a retirement savings spreadsheet of mine with statements through first quarter of 2015.  There's a plan, and so far, we're on target.  Depending on how frugal or prodigious we are in retirement spending, there may or may not be anything left over after our passing as a financial legacy for our heirs.  A question then naturally surfaces: do I sacrifice some pleasure during retirement by spending less, in order to pass along wealth to my heirs, or... am I generous with them now, and so save less for retirement, but then spend every dime that's left, leaving nothing behind?  I think I'd rather be generous with them now, when they most need help.

Naturally, that got me to thinking about non-financial legacies, and Stephen Covey's writings on what he thought of as important, the basic desires all humans have. He said they are: to Live, to Love, and to Leave a Legacy. So I wondered just what kind of influence I have had to date on my children, to what extent am I responsible for who they are today? And what of that will cascade down to their children (if any), and even further down than that?

Then I started thinking about my grandparents, and what lessons I may have absorbed from them (like what lasting damage a mother can do by pitting one child against another for her own amusement, like my Mom's mom did), what physical characteristics (like my maternal grandfather's wispy hair, and my paternal grandfather's box-like build), or what values & character I may now carry that were also theirs (perhaps Grandpa Bill's tendency to hum or whistle constantly - which reflected his generally happy disposition).  :-)

Of my great-grandparents I remember almost nothing, and of the previous generation only a couple of family stories... if that's even whom they were about.  I'm honestly not sure.  I never met them, and am not convinced that I ever really heard anything about them, much less retained any of their characteristics.  They are total blank spaces on a family tree, and if I am honest about it, they are so obscure they mean absolutely nothing to me at all.

What are the odds, then, that one of those great-great-grandparents has in fact had a lasting influence on me of which I am unaware? Related to that, what are the odds that I will have any influence at all on my descendants in the fifth generation down from me? Will I essentially lapse into complete obscurity in the span of 5 generations? If so, then why am I thinking about a legacy at all? Was Covey wrong on that? Did his Mormon theology bias his viewpoint? Do I also carry a bias toward the drive to leave a legacy behind?

Well, maybe I should start by quantifying what the chances are that something may have passed down to me from some ancestor 5 generations past.  Just thinking about the math of it, the chances are... not great.  It's the power of 2 in operation, to wit:

Me

2 Parents

4 Grandparents

8 Great-grandparents

16 Great-great-grandparents 

If each of these generations were 30 years apart (the Biblical age of mature adulthood), it's no wonder I never met any of my great-great-grandparents.  They would have been roughly 120 years old at my birth. In those rare photographs that very occasionally hit the newspaper showing "Five Generations of Smiths", the 5th generation is always a newborn, and may never remember meeting the oldest of the bunch.  And besides, the oldest of the bunch is only one of 16 people who could have been in the picture... had they survived.

Could any one of those 16 people from the 5th generation back have been so influential that his/her genetics, or character, or memorable response to unusual circumstances could still be reverberating down to me, today?  I highly doubt it.  One person from that 5th generation would be competing with 15 others for influence; the math alone would say that one person from that set of forebears would have only 6.25% of that generation's effect on me.  

And that generation's effect surely would not account for all of the behaviors of the next generation.  What would the decay factor be of influence from one generation to the next?  Would it even rise as high as explaining half of who the following generation was as human beings?  Even that seems a stretch, what with the influence of teachers, peers, co-workers, romances, partners, communities and large societal events all leaving an impact.  Honestly, it's probably more like you could chalk up perhaps a third of who you are today to your parents' influence, at best.  Maybe, though, by the time you are old enough to have children of your own (let's say... age 30), and you are busily forming their little psyches, it could be that half of who you are in forming your children can still be accounted for by your parents' influence.  So let's go with that.  

Then the math looks like this:  one ancestor accounts for 6.25% of the total influence from the generation 5 back from you.  But only half of that carries down to the generation 4 back, another half to generation 3, and another half to generation 2 (your parents), and half of that to you.  6.25% x 50% x 50% x 50% x 50% = 0.004 = 0.4% or four tenths of one percent.  It doesn't even round up to one percent's worth of influence; and even that is probably optimistic.

So unless you are a larger than life individual, known far and wide for something (like John D. Rockefeller, or John F. Kennedy, or Robert E. Lee, or Henry Ford), by the time the 5th generation from you reaches adulthood (~30 years)...

you are statistically irrelevant!  As far as lasting influence is concerned, you might as well not have existed at all.  

Isn't that an encouraging thought?  

So what do I do, then?  Forget about leaving any kind of lasting legacy on those who come after me?  Concentrate on getting down in print (or digital form, like here) what wisdom I might have to share with those yet unborn?  Or raise my eyes beyond this world to the next, so that when I have shuffled off this mortal coil, my soul will be glad that I have paid it forward with whatever self-less generosity and kindness I can show to others here?

In St. Matthew's Gospel, Chapter 6, Jesus lays the groundwork for that very concept: this life gives us an opportunity to pay it forward into the next life.  ("Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth; give to the poor and you will have treasures in Heaven")  The implication, then, is that I shouldn't view my legacy as being on this earth at all, where it's effects are fleeting at best, and will eventually dwindle to nothing.  Instead, I should view my legacy as in my future - in the next life, where it will be of great and permanent good.

Kinda like saving for retirement, isn't it? You direct your resources away from your immediate benefit, while you're working, in order to be able to use them to enjoy the next phase of life, when you're not. That idea I think I get.  My monthly cash flow and my retirement account balances seem to prove it.

When it comes to leaving a lasting legacy, though... the hard part is connecting giving of yourself to others in this life (showing kindness and generosity today), with giving to yourself in the next.  It's a complex calculus that requires this perspective: that the economics of Heaven are as different from earthly economics, as Quantum Physics is from arithmetic.  The proofs of it are not obvious to me; I have to trust the Expert who knows.