Your only duty in this lifetime is to be magnificent.

That's from a recap of doctor who series 4 by Jacob over at TWoP.

What is magnificence? Does it include an element of presentation or is it wholy internal? Or maybe one follows the other. If you live magnificently, do you shine so brightly that you show up without trying?

Who hides? Why? What is the point of it? If you feel you're of no interest to anyone, of no threat to anyone, not significant, what's the point? You could leap up and down on top of the Earth and no one would take note for longer than 15 seconds. Is that the point? As long as you don't take a chance on being seen, you can't be dismissed as nothing. You can continue to think that maybe there's something about you that can't be ignored, that would be valued outside of yourself.

The importance of that slim possibility vs the almost certain feeling that there truly is nothing drives your every action. What would happen if you were seen and dismissed, ignored, belittled, scorned? What does that matter? The views of others, who inevitably see you as Other, do not make you Other to yourself, do they? Are you already?

...It's not fear of being misunderstood; it's fear of being understood. Understood in all your mediocrity. Understood in your place in the world, which is paramount only to you and meaningless to everyone else. That's truth, and it's easy enough to accept that as an intellectual exercise, but what does it mean in relation to the importance of your existence to you? When nothing you think matters, all that matters is what you think, because that's all there is. What the fuck do you do with that?

Your only duty in this life is to whom? Is it all about what you owe yourself? And what does it mean to be magnificent? To fulfill your potential, to live life to the fullest, to not waste the existence you have -- what relation does that bear to the world. In chaos theory, the smallest thing can affect the whole in unimaginable ways. So it follows that your life affects the world to some degree, but how does that work? I don't understand how that works.

You would think that if you're more visible, if you leave a bigger footprint, you'll have a more significant effect -- that seems to be the way western society lives. That's why environmentalism is so hard to impress upon people. What's the point of leaving the earth for your grandchildren if that means they never knew you were there? It's all about being remembered, even though most of us won't. I won't, and I don't care that much, but I worry that that means I didn't fulfill whatever potential I had.

It's all so simple when it's just about physical posterity and DNA and evolution. When it's ideas and culture and all that messy human stuff, it gets really warped. I don't know if anyone has figured it out. We've only been leaving a written record of our thoughts for a few thousand years. And now we get the books about race memory and cultural memes and evolution through indirect knowledge and not learned experiences. So now the pressure is not just to produce offspring to carry on your genes, but to produce writings, or theories, or art, or discoveries, or other intellectual legacies to carry on your ideas to the next generations.

What are you if you do neither? If you don't breed and you don't create, if your physical traits and your thoughts never leave your body. You don't build anything, you don't write down anything, you don't even really impact other people in any significant way. It would be like you never existed. And you certainly don't care about that when you're dead, so it doesn't necessarily matter to you. But what does it mean about you? Obviously it must matter to some degree or you wouldn't worry about it at all.

I guess I don't care if the world at large thinks I'm good or bad, smart or dumb, a success or a failure; but I care what I think about myself. And I have to use other people as some kind of gauge of myself: test subjects, baselines, comparison studies. And I have to think that some part of the achievement of myself is related to myself as a social being and part of society. Yet I've never really wanted to be a big part of society, never wanted to leave a footprint. My question is: Am I right or wrong to feel that way? And I mean right or wrong not according to a set external code, but right or wrong according to being the best I can be. So as not to miss out on being magnificent and knowing it. For whatever impact that has on me in the here and now.