The Doings of the Doomed

One of the uplifting messages I heard today came from a Trope Talk YouTube video about doomed heroes. In the outro, the speaker, Red, shared her thoughts about how a story about a doomed protagonist can still be more inspiring than depressing:

There is an odd, heartbreaking, satisfying grief in bearing witness to the heroics of a protagonist who's been dead from the beginning, who cannot possibly save themselves and is no longer trying, who is instead using every second they have left in the narrative to make the story a better place for everyone who will outlive them, because while we spend most of our lives caring for ourselves and driving our own narratives, at the end of the day, no matter what the night holds and what secret tragedies may be lurking for us, we can always choose to be kind, and that will always matter.

I find this relatable because, whether we know it or not, we're all doomed to die eventually, and when the inevitable happens, one of the few things that'll matter is whether and how much we made life better for everyone else. And if that's one of the few things that'll matter at the end of our lives, shouldn't that also be one of the only things that matter during it? When faced with mortality, people tend to pay a lot of attention to the choices they make and how they spend what little time they have left. But whether we face it or not, we're all mortal. All our days are numbered, whether the number is great or small, known or unknown. But the number of days we have left shouldn't matter to us, when one of the few things that really matter is how we spend them.

Personally, I'm going to try to use every day I have left, be they few, hundreds, or tens of thousands, to try to make life better for other people. I won't always succeed. I won't always succeed in trying. But if I have to die eventually, I hope I'll leave this place a little better than I found it.