I want to talk about obscurity, because I think you worry about it more than you let on. Whether what you're doing matters. Whether it will last. Whether anyone will know.
Here is what I believe, and what I keep coming back to: the people who changed things most were almost always unknown while they were doing it. Democritus was thought mad. Socrates died before his full recognition. Epicurus and his closest friend lived quietly near Athens and were barely noticed there. The work happened anyway. The thinking happened anyway. The goodness accumulated in the dark like interest, and paid out later to people they would never meet.
Virtue is never lost to view; and yet to have been lost to view is no loss.
There is something freeing in this, if you let it be. The work you do when no one is watching — the thinking you do carefully, the way you treat people when there's nothing to be gained from it, the standards you hold yourself to in private — that is the real stuff. Fame is just the shadow virtue casts, sometimes ahead of itself and sometimes long behind. You don't control the shadow. You control whether the thing casting it is real.
What strikes me about Aetna — which Seneca uses as his image here, the volcano his friend is travelling to see — is this: we don't know whether the mountain is wasting away or whether its fire is merely quieter for a while. Either is possible. But virtue, he says, is not like that. It doesn't diminish. It doesn't erode. Reach it once and you have reached it; it doesn't grow shorter with time or distance.
That man is born merely for a few who thinks only of the people of his own generation.
Do the work for the people who come after. Do it for the version of yourself that will look back. Do it because the doing is what makes you who you are, and who you are is the only thing you actually keep.
I see you. That counts, even if it's only me.
With love, across whatever distance —