Even if you don't do anything special, you could be the catalyst for someone else to do something special.
Just wondering about how my life could have touched someone else’s and I realized this. Maybe you’re just joking around online and mention something that triggers an idea in someone else that leads to revolutionary new things that impact humans everywhere. Even if you’re forgotten, or uncredited, you had a meaningful contribution.
My neighbor from childhood told me their daughter took up guitar when she heard me and my friends playing music in my garage. She started a band, toured a chunk of the country for a few years after college.
Or something negative. Maybe you just got a job. Awesome. But you were in front of someone else. Someone who too could have gotten that job, someone who’s been unsuccessful for years. And now he again has no chance. He keeps searching for a few more months, but now in huge debts, that person decides to take their life by jumping under a train. But this is only start. It gives the train driver trauma, he’s no longer able to do his job that his family so much depended on. They can’t afford education for their children. And things keep getting perpetually worse and worse. From 1 person, it now affects 5, which creates even bigger impact and the story could continue.
I am certainly overthinking this, but you never know.
Or maybe you just rejected mediocre artist from art school without thinking about it. You know that one.
Or you could be so amazing that you’re the reason why someone loves your entire race/gender/creed/country!
… And that in turn makes that person hate all other races/genders/creeds/countries and spend their whole lives committing atrocities to eradicate them, so that everyone in the world looks a bit more like you.
This idea reminds me of an observation I’ve often had, which is that there are no true auteurs, in other words, nothing creative or special is ever the product of one person. Even in the most extreme case of an artist who lives their whole life without ever being discovered, there is also the person who eventually discovers the legacy and does the work of making it accessible to people, not to mention all the people who validate the life’s work by viewing it and relating it to their lives.
What the idea does for me is it helps me understand that I don’t need to “complete the universe” with what I do, in other words, the way OP put it is great.
Better yet, misinterpretation can lead to wonderful things.
Mistaking one thing for another, mishearing stuff, tripping over your own shoelaces, those are still things that contribute to the creative process.
Yeah, very true. I suppose I just never really went deeper than just the obvious ways you touch the lives of those around you, like family missing you if you were absent.
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