The Fear of Irrelevance

Not death, but invisibility frightens us: the thought that our lives may pass unnoticed. And yet – you are enough.

If failure frightens us because it is public, irrelevance frightens us because it is silent. 

We may survive failure, but what if we vanish unnoticed? What if our days pass and leave no mark? This fear grows louder with age, but it whispers in youth too. The student who wants to “be someone.” The professional chasing promotions. The artist hoping to be remembered. All of them are, in their own way, wrestling with irrelevance. 

In India, this fear shows itself in the constant talk of legacy. Parents hope their children will carry their name forward. Families cling to status in community. Even festivals and rituals are, in part, ways to be remembered – to ensure that generations to come will speak our names at least once a year. 

In our times, irrelevance takes new forms. The empty “seen” mark on a WhatsApp message. The Instagram post no one reacts to. The speech at work that goes unheard. It is not death, but invisibility, that unsettles us: Does my life matter? Does my voice carry weight? 

Our ancestors faced this too, though in different ways. Kings built monuments to outlast them. Poets carved their words into palm leaves, hoping they would be recited long after. And even the most ordinary among us, with no throne or manuscript to our name, have sought the same comfort. A gravestone, often written into our wills, becomes our final declaration: I was here. 

Walk through any graveyard and you will see it – names etched into stone, lines of poetry, dates carefully preserved. It is not the living who need these reminders, but the dead who feared being forgotten. The graveyard is humanity’s quietest museum of fear: rows of markers resisting the great eraser of time. Gravestones do not keep us alive, but they stand as a testament to our refusal to vanish, our vain attempt at immortality. 

Hollywood gave us a striking image of this in Coco, though it told a Mexican story. The dead fade away when the living no longer remember them. That idea is not foreign to us – our own śrāddha rituals for ancestors echo the same truth. To be irrelevant is, in a sense, to die twice. 

And yet, irrelevance is not always the enemy we think it is. Most lives are not monuments. They are small acts of love, kindness, duty. A parent who works quietly for their child’s future. A teacher who plants seeds of knowledge that bloom long after they are gone. These lives may never trend, but they matter deeply. Relevance is not always measured by visibility. 

I have wondered too, whether my words will matter, whether what I create will outlast even me. 

The desire to matter is stitched into the human heart. And yet, perhaps the quiet truth is that you already do. Not because of monuments or legacies, but because you are here, you love, you live, you give what you can. 

I wrote once, in another place, that you are enough. It remains true here as well. Against the fear of irrelevance, that is the only answer strong enough to stand.