Obliteration

I recently read The Fault in our Stars by John Greene, which is quite honestly one of the most well-written books I've read in a long time. Hazel Grace (the main character) is a girl who suffers from cancer, but always refers to it almost flippantly, as if it's just a small aspect of her life. At one point during the novel, Hazel is at a support group for kids going through similar things, and this passage comes up: 

“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.” 

This resonated with me soundly the first time I read it, because it reflects a lot of the same feelings that I have about the purpose of life. In reality, everything will be forgotten eventually, so what's the point in trying to leave a footprint on history when there will be a time when history will be completely erased? To me, this redefines the meaning of life. To me, the purpose of us being alive is to help each other out. If I were to die, I would die happy knowing that I've changed the lives of the people who know me, hopefully for the better. If all that means is that my friends have a better sense of self worth because of things I've said to them in the past, then that's good enough. What's important isn't leaving our footprints on history, it's leaving footprints on each other's souls.