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.