Memes

A meme is a thought, conceptualized as an organism. Its world is your mind, and it reproduces through your mouth, when you whistle that television jingle on the elevator or quote M Doughty to a friend. The thought will affect your other thoughts. A thought that is more infectious, for whatever reason, will propagate more, and spread like a flu. Like hula hoops and monotheism.

I was discussing immortality with a friend of mine a long time ago. At the time, I felt that I never wanted kids. My position, as I related it that night, was this: Kids are an attempt at immortality, a genetic permanence that will resonate after your death. Everyone came from someone, and we are all the standard bearers of our ancestors — our eyes, our smile, our cancer are all echoes of ancient patterns set a long time ago. This is a way to live forever. Children.

If this is an acceptable assertion, then there are other ways of achieving permanence. Memes. Thought ancestors. Someone thought of the wheel. That person lives forever. Someone painted "Starry Night." He lives forever. Concepts that propagate, live on in others minds, passing down into new generations, mutating into contact lenses, orthodontics and cancer medicine, all echoes of ancient patterns set a long time ago. This is a way to live forever.

And in our species, is not the world of the mind more potent, more important than our strands of adenine and thymine, our fragile couplings of cytosine and guanine dancing in their coded, looping elegance? Our species prides itself on the overcome of instinct, the rising above of our genetic disposition. The kamikaze pilot, the hunger strike, turning the other cheek; all instances of our world of the mind ruling over our dirty, grunting mammalian past, staring at the world with a will. A will to have a will.

So, my friend seemed to enjoy my idea. She also never intended to have kids.

A year later, she told me about some new work she had been doing, a new novel she had been hammering out, piece by piece. She then casually began explaining to me the entire theory that I had laid out to her a year prior, slightly adjusted over time, but absolutely the same concept. Her work as a substitute for children. Her immortality, her permanence.

She had forgotten I told her.

— Dan Norton)