Which is why I am disappointed with this game and utterly false “wisdom” it's trying to convey.
I'm all for feeling good about what you've done in the world, but for most of us whose names aren't going to be repeated for centuries it's a drop in the ocean and only becomes less relevant over time.
Even something like parenting, which I don't think any of us will argue is not important. Each generation that goes by, your relative contribution is halved. I'll bet most of us can't tell very many stories about great-grandparents, for example. And we have twice as many great-great-grandparents, etc., which even fewer of us will be able to keep track of. So even as a father, while I try to do the best job I can, I have to admit that's going to happen to me too, and any impact I can have through parenting is going to be blended with an exponentially growing set of people. That's not bad, that's just how it works.
I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy life or be ambitious or do a good job in the things that you do, or that helping people and doing big things is not worth it, but at some point we'll all likely have to humbly admit it: we aren't as important on the individual scale as some would like or expect.
I prefer a different way of measuring contribution: suppose that (for simplicity) the checkpoints on the progress of humanity are fixed and the only difference you can make is to delay or accelerate reaching the next checkpoint. Your contribution is how much time you've won or lost for humanity. Then contribution stops being relative – if you've made future happen five years earlier, this is permanent, period. Your children and grand-children will arrive into their respective futures five years earlier, too, because of you.
> that too is usually a rounding error.
There are no rounding errors! Why do you think that just because you can see how much you've influenced one person thru parenting, but can't see how you influenced the entire world thru your actions, the first influence is somehow “bigger”? Yes, it's epsilon, but it's epsilon × world. And the world is big.
(By the by, the same logic applies to voting – yes, your contribution to the final decision is small, but since the decision itself is so important, in the end your contribution doesn't turn out to be less than contributions from your other decisions.)
Take a long enough view and maybe humanity meets some crisis and gets set back or stops altogether - is that 5 years going to matter then? It sounds defeatist and negative but IMO a valid question.
I'm not going to fault you or anyone for trying to be in that category that sets the world ahead N years, but there is also no shame in being part of the much larger group who lives and dies without accomplishing it, or in admitting that it's very rare to get there.
Think about it. Most people don't have any effect on that whatsoever, but there are many publicly visible people in medicine, politics, tech, research and finance that do have a much larger impact on it than 5 minutes.
And cancer is just one tiny part of it all. I believe that at some point in future we might reach an event where we eliminate almost all death as such; or an event where we destroy ourselves completely. A somewhat cynical implication of this could be, playing the devils advocate, that there are exactly two kinds of actions (and people?) - those that change some +/- epsilon to one of these two events, and those that are irrelevant.
I was with you until somewhere around here. As I said I don't see any shame that one might be in the "irrelevant" group. Maybe you tried and failed. Maybe something else prevented you from doing that. Maybe you just didn't have it in you. It seems wrong get judgmental on that.
It's perfectly understandable that most (perhaps even 99+%?) of the global population won't have any non-local influence, and that's okay, it can't reasonably be much different. However, there are things that scale, and they have a disproportionally large effect. For example, politicians are a particular group who can have huge long-term impact even as unintentional side effects; so are public NGOs. And many of them are intentionally doing things that cause delay in much-needed technologies or increase risk of us killing ourselves - I'd say that this is equivalent to [mass-]murder, even if the deaths are not specific, named individuals but "just a statistic"; and not today but a bit in the future. Perhaps we should be more judgemental about that, instead of agreeing to disagree.
I'm not saying I can't understand the human desire to be liked, or adored, or remembered after your death, or considered to be the Best Human to Ever Live on This Planet. I can. But what I can't understand is why so many people try to justify such feelings.