This is probably my favourite piece I’ve ever written.
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Not trying to be punny, but it’s a significant piece. As an only child with no children of my own, my life will fade into insignificance not long after my demise. This is something I’ve thought about for years, and come to terms with only in recent times. Your essay gives additional framework to that acceptance. I’ll be saving and re-reading it more deeply in the coming days. To use a perhaps over-used term, currently, it really helps focus on the present moment.
My only quibble? Some of us were born mid-20th century, certainly not “late” 
.
Thank you!
I genuinely loved writing this piece.
Which worried me at first. That’s often a sign I’m too close to it…
Hey, I also enjoyed this piece. I think it was Oliver Burkeman who first made me stumble upon the term “Cosmic Insignificance Therapy” and I’ve tried to remind myself of this cosmic insignificance repeatedly. It really helps a lot to put things into perspective.
Eg.g. when I’m stuck with work, going for a run in the woods helps me to remind myself just how insignificant my current problems are on a much larger scale.
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A superb piece indeed. I’ve pondered this off-and-on for years in three contexts.
Firstly professional – I’m a retired geology professor, so thinking in billions of years is baked-in, set in stone (if puns are allowed); cosmic distances a little less so, but still a comfortable concept numerically. But if that’s (1), then (1a) would be what I call the-name-in-lights syndrome. Most academic researchers want to be right; or if we’re wrong it’s a wonderful chance to cherish learning something new. But we also want to be right first. Priority matters. Peer recognition matters. The reality, of course, is that virtually none of us will win Nobel Prizes (or disciplinary equivalents – Turing, Fields, Vetlesen, etc.). Instead, we and our work will fade into obscurity a few generations of new Ph.D. recipients later. So why do it? Why be obsessed with both the work and the priority? For me, it was just wonderful to be paid to do something that was so much fun! And on a very few occasions there was the incredible rush of realizing, in the moment of discovery, that I was the only person in the world who knew the particular thing I had just unearthed, a thing that could (and in some cases did) turn out to have wider applicability than the immediate context. I’m fine, however, if those ideas are remembered and I’m soon forgotten.
Secondly familial – One of my aunts was the family genealogy buff. She traced people back seven or eight generations, five in North America, two or three more in Europe before the threads vanished. Mostly farmers, a couple of clergy, a grocer, and a blacksmith (occupations only for the men of course). Beyond my grandparents and a hazy sense of one great-grandfather, however, they are just names on a piece of paper. Insignificant, as Joan’s post says. And as I expect to be in a few more generations to those who come after me. It’s a sliding window, in which we contribute to a metaphorical moving average and then vanish into the long tail.
Thirdly visual – This may seem like a reprise of the first, but it feels very different. I was struck by that image of the Andromeda galaxy in Joan’s post, the iconic “Islands in the Sky” of Arthur C. Clarke or the much earlier “island universe” of Immanuel Kant. That image is majestic in its isolation; but to me, it emphasizes the galaxy as a whole, not the individual stars. Here are two other astronomical views that strike me in an opposite way, showing uncountable individual constituents that make me feel personally “uncountable,” literally unable to be counted. And if I’m being totally honest, sometimes terrified by how the isolation evokes desolation.
The Messier 80 globular star cluster…
(NASA/Hubble via Wikipedia)
Utopia Planitia on Mars (with a few human artifacts in the foreground)…
(NASA/Viking Project via Astronomy Picture of the Day)
So yes, Joan said it succinctly: “We can care about each other instead.” Because whether it’s the end of the day or the end of the Universe, Zen teacher John Tarrant summarized it clearly: “When you… get to the bottom of things, you find love."
Continuing the discussion from You Are Insignificant. That’s a Good Thing:
@joanwestenberg writes:
You can care deeply about your life and work and relationships without needing them to echo through eternity. […]
Whether your work lasts or vanishes, whether you’re remembered or forgotten, none of it changes the basic fact of your existence: you are here now, alive and conscious, able to experience the world and other people and double cheeseburgers and your own mind.
And able to involve yourself in the experiences of others. To lasting effect.
I used to think that my actions were mostly effervescent, existing in the moment but evaporating quickly as the memory of them faded. Then I thought more about how the actions of others had affected me over the years, and I realized that the ones that connected were still right there, embedded within me. Those taken together are what make up the other self as I experienced it.
I lost my wife of 37 years … but I didn’t lose her at all, she just stopped adding to my experience of her, an experience which is going nowhere. My grown kids are living their own lives, lives I barely factor into at this point (in a good way!), but they carry with them 20+ years of living together with me, and that experience will always live on in them. And some of it they will pass on to others.
This is eternal life.
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