I was just looking through a series of photos of couples. It started with one couple, then showed each of their two sons with their wives, and finally showed the two sons of one of these last couples. Apparently the other pair had no kids. All of the photos showed people in old age. Did the last two brothers never marry? Who knows.

It got me thinking though. The last of those photos looks like it was taken in the early 1900s. The only value in the clothes that they are wearing is that it helps us to estimate the period that they were alive. What did these people think? What was important to them? They lived lives and we know nothing about them.

Should we? At the times that they were alive people knew them, they were important, their opinions mattered. They got angry about things, and wrote to papers, fought people, or argued with their partners about things that seemed important at the time.

Are these same issues important to us now? Probably not. In these peoples day, they were really invested in the problems of their time. They may have been convinced that the issues that they cared about would change the world. But did they? Probably not. We see things in the world that seem really important to us now. Things worth arguing with people about, protesting. But I think that there are very few things that we battle about now that will matter to anyone in a hundred years.

I would love to think that people in the future will look back on me and say “Oh yeah, that was the guy that …”. But probably, the most that I can expect is that maybe someone will come across a photo of me and wonder about what I cared about?

What is important when you’re alive? Each of these people affected their family and their community, but when they were gone they were briefly a memory, and then nothing.