Our Need For Relevance
Our need for relevance is so potent that our deepest desire is to be remembered forever. That is why we build legacies. That is why we write memoirs and biographies. That is why we build reputations. All so that we may be remembered by others.
And yet, we are forgotten. All the rigmarole of building a reputation, helping people, being kind to them, suffering internally, only to be forgotten the moment we walk away. To be forgotten is perhaps the harshest punishment for someone who has done everything to be remembered.
We are blessed with a memory system that is constantly evolving. From childhood to adulthood, we have been to countless places, met many people, and lived through innumerable moments. Yet we remember only a handful of them.
Those few memories are all we possess to distinguish the past from the present. Our understanding of time itself is possible only because of memory. An Alzheimer’s patient has no sense of time. The past and present collapse into one because the very faculty that once separated them, memory, has eroded.
Memories are meant to evolve with time and experience. That is why people say time heals grief. Our memories are not fixed or permanent.
But it is not only memory that shifts. Material conditions do as well. Colleagues forget you because the bond existed largely due to a shared environment. The same is true of school and college friendships.
However, we do not move on from everyone. Not everyone forgets us. Some friendships begin with a casual meeting and quietly become lifelong. Long-term relationships like these demand sustained effort, both within the environment where they are formed and outside it. The latter matters most, because that is when a person stops being part of an environment and starts becoming part of your world.
All effort, however, is driven by incentives. You do not bond with someone unless there is an incentive to do so. These incentives need not be material. They can be emotional. That is why some people stay in touch even after leaving the environment where the relationship began. They continue to nourish the incentives that sustain the effort.
Long-term relationships survive on consistency. Yet consistency itself is not powered by effort alone but by incentive. Incentives are inherently unstable. They shift as our needs shift, and our needs change as life moves forward.
Time, in this sense, is not merely something we pass through. It is something we remember. Relationships endure or decay depending on how those remembered incentives align with who we have become.
And so, our need for relevance ultimately comes down to who we are and who we are becoming. If you remain unchanged while the other person evolves, you will eventually be forgotten. You will become irrelevant.
If you evolve and the other person does not, you are likely to move on to someone more aligned with your current incentives, and your effort will flow there instead. That is also why many love marriages turn sour after a few years.
If we accept that we will have different people across different phases of life, and that it is impossible to carry everyone with us forever, we may learn to embrace ourselves more fully. We may learn to enjoy the present more deeply, knowing it will pass. Tomorrow will bring different challenges and different incentives.
Your heart will be broken. You will lose people with whom you once shared the most beautiful bonds. You will struggle to recreate the same depth of conversation later, even if you try.
The wiser response, then, is to accept the evolving nature of relationships and the constantly shifting dynamics of our incentives. Love people in the present, because that is the only moment within your control. In that moment, everything is aligned.
And be prepared to have your heart broken when it is time to leave some friends behind, or when some friends leave you behind.