I have occasionally found myself wondering whether journaling and posting as frequently as I have been is good. Doing so requires time and attention that I could deploy toward other, more directly interpersonal matters. And it’s probably sometimes a neurotic response to the fear of death. But the fact is I do feel more fully alive when I have been writing. And just now, as I was grabbing a late-morning protein snack from the kitchen, it occurred that I would pay a non-significant sum to have access to the collected written output of my parents, my grandparents, or my great-grandparents. The more voluminous and representative of their psyches I knew their output to be, the higher sum I would pay. I want to know them. It would be good for me to know them. It would be good in the way similar to how reading a great novel is good: You get to know your fellow humans, you cultivate sympathy, and you get to know yourself, all of which foster loving, harmonious, sympathetic, self-controlled interactions with others.
If I can provide my descendants with a thick account of who I was, I find myself suddenly quite confident they will be the better for it. And not because I’m a paragon. No, even if I were a scoundrel, I think they’d be the better for it.