"Assuming 128 grams a day and a lifetime in the vicinity of seventy-five years, you’ll leave behind around three and a half metric tons of feces when you die. The volume of your urine will be closer to thirty-eight thousand liters, a bit larger than a standard twenty-foot shipping container and about double the accumulated volume of your flatulence. You’ll have made hundreds of liters of tears, though even for the most emotive of individuals, the portion derived from feelings will represent a minuscule fraction of that number. For all the hullabaloo surrounding ejaculation, the total semen production of even the most alacritous masturbator could be contained handily by a shelf of two-liter soda bottles, and though a period sometimes seems as though it will never end, you could only barely paint a closet with the three or so liters of menses produced during a lifetime. You’ll have made a great deal of mucus, though, close to a hundred thousand liters. And when Atropos snips the thread of your life, the hair from your head, measured as a single strand, will stretch more than three and a half million feet. This is what you will leave behind.Of course, you’ll leave behind another thing: your body itself. It’s uncomfortable to think of the body in this way, in the same category as feces and hair, but despite the desires of countless theologians, the trajectory of your body’s final journey will be less like the fiery passages of the stars and more akin to those meandering pilgrimages taken by your feces and urine, your blood and vomit and tears. It will become something that must be dealt with, something that must be disposed of. We may disagree over the existence and nature of an afterlife, but not about the stench of rotting flesh...What, if anything, remains? In the most purely physical sense, your body contains about five hundred megajoules of energy, enough to run a sixty-watt light bulb for one hundred days or to drive a midsize sedan a mile, or, to put things in dietary terms, roughly 120,000 calories, the equivalent of a hundred Big Mac combos. This energy, stored in the form of chemical bonds—namely as molecules of glucose, protein, and fatty acids—will remain intact after you die. It needs only to be converted into adenosine triphosphate to continue its chemical journey in the shape of another. Since no single creature will be capable of digesting your body in its entirety, the scavenging of this energy will take the form of a vast buffet. The glucose in your thigh muscle might be catabolized via glycolysis by a rat while a fungus might hydrolyze the proteins in your skin. The real prize at this feast, however, will be those molecules that most efficiently store energy, your fatty acids, so that the caloric orgy reaches its apotheosis in that fattiest of all your organs, that thing which seemed most you: your brain..."
Excerpts from "Mortal Coils," in turn excerpted from Earthly Materials by Cutter Wood, via the April 2025 issue of Harper's Magazine. Posted for me for future reference re the meaning of life and humankind's role in the cosmos.
Of course the real impact you leave behind is the results of your behavior, which is something really hard to quantify.
ReplyDeleteKinda hard disagree. When a whale dies it leaves behind a carcass that feeds a substantial number of flora and fauna for weeks, if not months if not years.
DeleteWhen one person dies, unless they are extraordinarily powerful, rich or culturally significant (which is not to say either good or evil), they have very little impact on the world outside their friends and family circle, for a while. Most human behaviour is only significant in aggregate, and thus individual behaviour is generally unimpactful.
I'd also side-eye the idea that our physical remains are any kind of legacy, rather we borrow from what came before to give to what comes after. Hmm. Perhaps that is the legacy we inherit.
When one person dies, unless they are extraordinarily powerful, rich or culturally significant (which is not to say either good or evil), they have very little impact on the world outside their friends and family circle, for a while.
DeleteYou underestimate the impact that people have on other people's lives.
Parents raise their children. Teachers teach us. Medical professionals keep us alive. Construction workers keep us housed and moving around. Farmers keep us fed. Artists and sports folks inspire us. Politicians mess with our lives. Business leaders people keep us employed. Criminals terrorize us.
All those little bits matter.
You do not have to be a megalomaniac to influence the world.
Not to mention organ donation.
DeleteSandra
Due my "behavior," to the extent I'm an average American, I'll be leaving 17.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tC02e) per year; or, to date, about a thousand tonnes of GHG. I doubt any of my other behaviors, no matter how wonderful, will matter as much in the future.
DeleteWell, here's an easy one: Do you have kids?
DeleteIf so, you created more pollution. If not, the pollution stops with you.
(unpopular, but true nevertheless)
Childless blogger here. But I've saved lives (extended lives) and some of those extended lives will have resulted in children/grandchildren, so exiting childless doesn't mean my contribution is ending.
DeleteNot only do our descendants, and those we save, go on polluting, but they also go on suffering. This is a heavy weight to bear. Whether existence is a net good or not has long been debated. I believe this was debated in ancient times by a body of Jewish elders, for years. If I recall correctly, they decided life was a net negative. But even as much as I lean toward misanthropy, I'm not a fully convinced antinatalist. I can't overcome a romantic strain in my being, which has me always hoping humanity will "get a clue." Fatuous, but inescapable.
DeleteFrom A.I.:
DeleteYes, Jewish elders debated whether existence is worthwhile, specifically in the context of the creation of humanity.
The Debate in the Talmud:
This discussion is recorded in the Talmud, in Tractate Eruvin 13b.
It involved the Schools of Shammai and Hillel, who debated for two-and-a-half years.
The School of Shammai argued that it would have been better for man not to have been created than to have been created.
The School of Hillel countered that it was better for man to have been created.
The Outcome:
Ultimately, the Schools of Shammai and Hillel agreed that it would have been better had humanity not been created.
However, they qualified this conclusion by stating that now that humanity exists, people should "examine their actions" or "interrogate their deeds".
Wow. This info wasn't on my Wednesday night bingo card, but it's strangely fascinating.
ReplyDeleteAs King David wrote in Psalm 8:45, "What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that Thou visitest him? For Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, And hast crowned him with glory and honour."
ReplyDeleteUltimately, we are dust. (Oddly enough, I have heard sermons where the minister claimed that if you sold all the various precious minerals in our bodies, we'd be worth millions. Not sure whose right, but when you die, your body isn't going to be worth much in today's world. But a soul? More precious than the earth itself.)