What does it mean to be a good ancestor to the people, places, and things we care about?

The Nature of Cities Global Roundtable
By Xavier Cortada
December 16, 2025

The best gift an ancestor can provide is to serve as a bridge. That is what we are, bridges carrying humanity across time. Biologically, we are part of an evolutionary process, a chain of nucleotides moving from one generation to the next. But the real movement, the movement that shapes lives long after ours, comes from something beyond the evolutionary chronicles of those four DNA molecules. It comes from the ideas we generate and advance through the lives we live, becoming the conduits through which meaning travels.

Ideas are the structure that lets us leapfrog the slow and random evolutionary process that mutations give us. They allow us to take our moment, make sense of it, refine it through experience, and offer it forward in a form others can use. Not only now, but in a way that transforms them so they, in turn, can give presence to those who follow. That, to me, is the work of ancestry: teaching future generations how to be more human and strengthening their capacity to extend that humanity.

A good ancestor gathers what they have learned and prepares it to survive uncertainty, whether it is an early death, a misunderstanding, a conflict, or a collapse. They act knowing that what we pass on is not just knowledge but a way of living that helps others carry meaning across time.

Throughout human history, we have relied on the same mechanism to do this: culture. Culture is how we embed meaning in forms that endure. Our deep ancestors understood this intuitively.

Sixty thousand years ago, as they moved across the African continent and beyond, they hunted, gathered, settled, and adapted. Yet, everywhere they went, they made meaning together. They formed language, ritual, and custom. They carved, painted, and sang. They took what the land offered them, whether it was pattern, danger, beauty, or sustenance, and transformed it into something they could share and something they could teach. Through art, they became a community, and in that shared act of making meaning, they became more interconnected, more interdependent, and more human.

Sometimes we forget that culture is not a product but a process, and its true resource is not the idea itself but the people willing to carry it. Art becomes real only when it is shared, when it passes from one life into another and inhabits them both, reshaping each in accumulating, unexpected ways. That exchange generates the momentum that keeps meaning alive — the quiet but insistent impulse to continue moving it forward so others can build on it. When someone steps into that work, feeling both the responsibility and the privilege of advancing it, that is ancestry in action. The ancestor’s life bends toward a future they will never see, and the recipient is shaped not only by the idea they inherit but by the generosity and intention carried within it.

We are not just creators of new ideas but curators of previous ones. Each of us takes in what earlier lives struggled to understand, makes sense of it in our own time, and sends it onward to people we will never meet. If we do not move those insights from past to future, they disappear. The line breaks. What survives is whatever we choose to receive, refine, and pass along. That is what makes us more than descendants. It makes us the living conduit through which meaning continues its journey.

Being a good ancestor is not caring only for the people who share our bloodline. It is about caring for the people who share our time, our place, our challenges, and our hopes. It also reaches the more-than-human world that will inherit our decisions: the coastlines, the wetlands, and the species navigating a century shaped by climate. What we pass on includes both the ideas we believe are worth carrying and the world required to carry them.

An ancestor’s purpose is not rooted in the present. It is rooted in the future — in a world they will never enter but are nonetheless shaping with every choice they make. We live our lives carrying forward what was handed to us so that those who follow can begin a little farther along the path. That is the work: to place our ideas, and the responsibilities they demand, into the vehicle that has always carried us: art, culture, and community, and to offer them in a way that keeps the cycle alive. To be an ancestor now is to labor for a future we will never inhabit, and to live as though its well-being matters more than our own moment — because that is how we move humanity forward.

LINK TO ORIGINAL ARTICLE: https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/2025/12/16/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-good-ancestor-to-the-people-places-and-things-we-care-about/