4,000 years ago, Gilgamesh asked the hardest EA question “Will anything I do actually matter?”
After my recent post and quest for doing good better, i learned that thousands of years before utilitarianism, existential risk, or GiveWell, a grieving king wandered the world asking the question we all have or will eventually face.
What’s the point of building, achieving, loving if I’m just going to die?”
The Epic of Gilgamesh, humanity’s oldest recorded story, begins with triumph and ends with a quiet, haunting failure. Gilgamesh, having lost his closest friend Enkidu, becomes obsessed with avoiding death. He travels far, seeks wisdom from immortal beings, and even reaches the edge of the world in search of eternal life. He fails. Every effort heroic, desperate, noble leads him back to the same truth. he will die, and so will everyone he loves. But then comes a twist. Gilgamesh returns to his city, Uruk, and stares at its great walls walls he helped build. For the first time, he sees them not as monuments to his greatness, but as something lasting beyond himself. The story ends not with immortality, but with legacy. “Look at the walls of Uruk… Is that not Gilgamesh?”
This hit me hard.
We often talk in EA about long termism, systemic change, preventing existential risk, or building things that outlast us. But beneath all that is a very old, very human question:
How do I make my life count, knowing I won’t be here forever?
In a way, Gilgamesh was the first longtermist. He tried personal immortality, failed, and settled for impact. And it made me wonder how many of us are trying to build our own “Uruk walls”? Institutions, AI safety protocols, global health foundations, better futures? Maybe EA isn’t just about optimizing good it’s about reckoning with mortality. Maybe it’s our way of answering Gilgamesh’s question. is this sounding similar to what @Toby_Ord unveils in the piece the precipice
Would love to hear how others in this community relate to legacy, death, and meaning. Has EA changed the way you think about your own life’s significance? And if Gilgamesh lived today would he be working on AI alignment?
I first read the Epic of Gilgamesh in campus and thought, “cool, ancient dude fights monsters.” But now, years later after a burnout, trying to do good in the world I reread it and it hit so differently.
Gilgamesh wasn’t just scared of death he was scared of insignificance. Of trying really hard and it still not mattering. Sound familiar?
That’s the part that resonates deeply with me in EA. Whether I’m donating, researching, working on a cause area there’s always this quiet background voice:
“What if none of this matters?”
“What if I’m wrong?”
“What if it’s not enough?”
But I take comfort in how Gilgamesh ended his journey. He didn’t solve death. He didn’t have perfect information. He just built something that helped others.
Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s impact.
Would love to hear how you all think about this kind of emotional side of doing good. Do you wrestle with that same existential doubt? Or do you lean into it?
More ancient existentialism: books of ecclesiastes (Koheleth) https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/r/rsv/rsv-idx?type=DIV1&byte=2559564
and Job. It really cuts. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/r/rsv/rsv-idx?type=DIV1&byte=2033202
“For there is hope for a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. Though its root grow old in the earth, and its stump die in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant. But man dies, and is laid low; man breathes his last, and where is he? As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, so man lies down and rises not again; till the heavens are no more he will not awake, or be roused out of his sleep.”