Yo, and what remains

Most of us live as if we’ll get unlimited chances to become who we want to be. But the truth is simpler and harsher: people remember us for who we were yesterday, not who we hope to become someday.

At first, the idea of “living in a way you’d be proud to be remembered” sounds like something from a graduation speech. But the more you sit with it, the sharper it becomes. It forces you to ignore the scoreboard everyone else is watching: money, status, the little daily competitions... and instead measure your life using a metric that’s impossible to fake: the imprint you leave on other people.

This idea became real for me today. A friend is dying after six years fighting a brutal cancer. I only knew Yo for the last three years, and if someone hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have known she was sick at all. She refused to let her suffering become the headline of her life. And that’s the strange thing: I won’t remember her as someone with a disease. I’ll remember her as healthy, joyful, and lighter than the rest of us.

Seeing her made the idea suddenly practical. She had every reason to let the illness become her story. Instead she showed up with a kind of quiet strength that made other people feel more alive. Not heroic in the cinematic sense, but in the everyday one, the harder one. In the end, the only thing that stuck was how she made people feel.

It also made me notice how easy it is, when you live with something chronic, to let it take up more room than it deserves. She never did.

And it made the timeline tighter. You stop imagining some distant eulogy and start imagining how people would talk about you tomorrow. Would they say you made things better? That you were generous with your time? That you created things worth keeping? Those are the real metrics.

That’s not a bad target to live for.