Ozymandias and The Near Future

“And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my Works, ye mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias, 1817

We are all fighting to be remembered in a desert of meaning. What strikes me most about Ozymandias is not the ruined monument but the confidence that built it—the certainty that a name could be hammered into eternity and made immune to forgetting. It is a familiar hunger. We, too, reach for permanence in a world that promises none. Some carve stone, some chase acclaim, some beg history to look back at them with mercy. Humanity does not live by the weight of history but with the pressure of the near future—what will inevitably outlast mere decades, not millennia.

In the aim for immortality, we achieve immediacy.

The Archetype of Failed Immortality

Ozymandias carved his triumphs into stone with the certainty that eternity would kneel before his name. He imagined a future world pausing in awe, his legacy towering unchallenged above the sands. Instead, he achieved dust. His monument stands not as proof of his greatness, but as evidence of how quickly power decays and how indifferent time is to human ambition.

Our own attempts at immortality are no less desperate, just less grand. We chase virality, applause, a flicker of attention—digital monuments that crumble even faster than marble. We perform tiny acts of self-preservation in the hope that something of us might endure. But we are not building empires; we are building instants. Moments that glow briefly, then vanish without ceremony.

Human Ambition – The Drive to Outlast Time

Human ambition is what builds pyramids, writes manifestos, and posts to social media with hope that someone, somewhere, will remember. It is the urge to reach beyond our temporal limitations, to assert significance in a world that dissolves memory faster than we can make it. Ambition drives creation but also fuels obsession—an endless desire to leave a mark, to prove that we mattered, even when the sands of time render it meaningless.

Ambition is double-edged: it produces civilization, art, and innovation, but also vanity, hubris, and frustration. Ozymandias represents ambition untempered by humility: the certainty that stone can resist the erosion of time. In contrast, recognizing the limits of permanence, as Sisyphus does, shifts ambition from external validation toward the mastery of one’s present actions.

The Myth of Sisyphus – The Futility and Freedom of Trying

Permanence is impossible even conceptually, and starving for external remembrance is inherently absurd. In the myth of Sisyphus, he endlessly pushes a rock knowing it will fall again and again, without reward or witness. The vanity of the point is precisely what reveals the truth: the meaning is in the act itself, in the strain and repetition, not in the aftermath. Ozymandias demanded eternity, and Sisyphus accepted the present.

One tried to carve himself into the far future and became a cautionary ruin; the other lived in the pulse of each moment, finding dignity in futility. We do not inhabit the deep future, that indifferent expanse where all names dissolve, but the “near now,” the slim horizon of meaning available to us in a lifetime. What matters is not how long our imprint lasts, but the radius within which it can be felt.

Nietzsche – Creating Meaning Despite Ephemerality

Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence offers a way out of Ozymandias’s trap. If you were forced to live the exact same life on repeat for eternity, with every mistake and triumph returning in an endless loop, would you affirm it? The question strips away legacy, audience, reputation —all the external scaffolding we obsess over—and leaves only the immediacy of the lived moment. Meaning is not found in being remembered but in choosing what is worth repeating.

Nietzsche shifts our attention away from the fantasy of permanence and toward the intimacy of experience: a life that is meaningful not because it is preserved in stone, but because it is lived with enough intention that you would willingly relive it. Ozymandias sought immortality through memory; Nietzsche suggests immortality is created through commitment. Legacy becomes irrelevant when your life—this one, right now—is crafted deliberately enough to withstand infinite return. What endures is not the echo you leave behind but the integrity with which you shape your days. Eternity is not achieved through memory but through intention, through the quiet decision to live a life that does not need an audience to matter.

If eternity is not measured by memory but by intention, then the question becomes: how do I live deliberately, in the time I am given?

The Architecture of My Time

I construct my days in ways that please me, unless I am infatuated, when the book or sweet I crave becomes my predominant preoccupation.

On my crafting table for a perfect day lie a few essentials: at least twenty minutes in direct sunlight, coffee after a full breakfast, oysters, a slutty filthy dirty martini, my cat purring on my lap, dates filled with butter, a fragrance laced with fig or vanilla, at least two sentences written into my journal, and gratitude. I like to imagine that I have time for all of these things each day. But I am no fool—our time is limited, and more than anything, it is coveted.

Time is not just the backdrop against which I arrange these pleasures; it is the raw material I mold, stretch, and squander. How we shape our hours, whether into cycles of ritual or a march toward achievement, reveals the story we tell ourselves about what it means to live.

I can believe that my name continuing to be whispered long beyond the mere days of my existence, like Cleopatra or Joan of Arc, would signify that I had in fact, been of importance. That people might adopt my persona as a Halloween costume hundreds of years from now, and that with any luck the masses will know my name before my passing. But Van Gogh died believing he was a loser, and Ozymandias died believing he would outlive the world. Both promises are illusions, swallowed by the same endless horizon.

Like the lone sands around Ozymandias, the moments we carve endure only in the immediacy of our living.