On Loss, Legacy, and the Rage to Remember

by David Gallaher

The Library of Alexandria didn’t die in one night. It smoldered. It collapsed in phases—set aflame by invaders, strangled by neglect, and finally reduced to rubble by indifference. Somewhere between the fires and the forgetting, hundreds of thousands of pages—stories, discoveries, experiments, lives—vanished without a sound.

Nobody wrote them down.

And that’s how the world loses knowledge: not in a blaze of glory, but in the silence that follows when no one bothers to remember.

Now look around you. Layoffs sweep across industries like a slow-moving firestorm. Whole departments—gone. Entire workflows—dismantled. Source files deleted. Internal wikis locked. And worst of all? That crushing moment when you're updating your resume and can’t finish the sentence: "Contributed to…"

It’s not because you didn’t contribute. It’s because you forgot—or were never told—that the work wasn’t finished until the story of the work was told.

We Are the Last Historians of Our Own Labor

It’s been 26 years since I worked at Marvel. You think I remember everything we did? Hell no. A lot of it was “write this thing,” “scan this thing,” “carry these proofs over here.” But I remember enough. Enough to know that each moment added up to something larger. Enough to know the difference between a blur of tasks and a tapestry of contribution is just one thing: recording it.

Because memories fade. Hard drives get wiped. Team leads move on. And what you poured yourself into—what you gave nights, weekends, heartbeats to—becomes a line item, or worse: a question mark.

And here’s the truth nobody tells you when you start in this business:

If you don’t document your legacy, the world will forget you were ever there.

Burnout is Real, But Oblivion is Worse

You’re exhausted. You were just laid off, or you’re drowning in sprint cycles, or your manager just moved the goalposts for the fourth time this quarter. The last thing you want to do is write a doc nobody asked for.

But that doc? That postmortem, that “Lessons Learned” slide deck, that messy personal repo with actual commit history—that’s what survives. That’s what someone finds three years from now when the system breaks and they need to know why this mess was held together with spit, hope, and deprecated APIs.

You’re not writing it for them, though. You’re writing it for you. For the version of you sitting in front of a blank resume, struggling to remember what the hell "Project Blackbird" even was.

We All Die Twice

Once when we stop breathing. And once when our name is spoken for the last time.

Don’t let your work die that second death in the backlogs of dead companies. Don’t let your best ideas become corporate compost. Don’t let the brilliance of your problem-solving be lost just because nobody filed it under the correct Confluence tag.

You built something. You carried something. You fixed something no one else could. You know you did.

So write it down.

Let your story outlive your login credentials.

Make Yourself Unforgettable

There is fire in your work. There is passion in your problem-solving. You are not some replaceable cog—they just want you to believe that so they don’t have to pay you what you’re worth. But your knowledge? That is sacred. That is hard-earned. That is something an AI can’t replicate and a manager can’t explain once you’re gone.

You are a Library.

Of failures, fixes, genius, grit, and hard-won insights.

So, what do you do when the flames come?

You don’t beg to be remembered. You write it yourself. You tell the story. You become the scrolls. And you pass them on.

Because when the next fire comes—and it always does—you won’t be ashes.

You’ll be a blueprint.