Cosmic Irrelevance school of thought
Setting the perspective straight post pandemic
A psychotherapist recalls the experience of one of his patients, a successful vice president of a medical instruments company who was flying over the American Midwest on a business trip, reading a book when she was accosted by a thought — I hate my life. A malaise that had been growing in her for years had crystallized in the understanding that she was spending her days in a way that no longer felt as if it had any meaning. The relish she’d had for her work had drained away. The rewards she’d been pursuing seemed worthless. And now life was a matter of going through the motions in the feeding hope that it’s somehow all might yet pay off in future happiness.
Perhaps we all know how she felt. Not everyone has this kind of sudden epiphany. But many of us know what it is to suspect that there might be richer, fuller juicy things we could be doing with our 4000 weeks (The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over 4000 W!), even when what we’re currently doing with them looks from the outside like the definition of success. Or maybe you’re familiar with the experience of returning to your daily routines following an unusually satisfying weekend in nature or with old friends and being struck by the thought that more of life should feel that way. But it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect the deeply engrossing parts to be more than rare exceptions.
The modern world is especially lacking in good responses to such feelings. Religion no longer provides the universal ready made sense of purpose it wants did well consumerism misleads us into seeking meaning where it can’t be found, but the sentiment itself is an ancient one.
Then I considered all that my hands had done, and the toil I had spent in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and the striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. It’s deeply unsettling to find yourself doubting the point of what you’re doing with your life. But it isn’t actually a bad thing, because it demonstrates that an inner shift has already occurred. You couldn’t entertain such doubts in the first place. You’ve grasped the fact that these are the weeks that are going to have to be spent doing something worthwhile. If your finite life is to mean anything at all. This is a perspective from which you can finally ask the most fundamental question of time management. What would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you’re making it count?
Post lockdown, for example, we realized that many people could perform their jobs adequately without an hour long commute to a dreary office or remaining at a desk until 6:30pm solely in order to appear hard working it also turned out but most of the restaurant meals and takeout coffees I’d grown accustomed to consuming presumably on the grounds that they enhanced my life could be given up with no feeling of loss, a double edged revelation, given how many jobs depended on providing them and it became clear from the ritual applauding of emergency workers, grocery runs undertaken for house bound neighbors, and many other acts of generosity, that people cared about one another far more than we assumed. It was just that before the virus apparently, we hadn’t had the time to show it.
During Covid, a careless Los Angeles had clear blue skies as pollution has simply stopped. In a quiet New York you can hear the birds chirping in the middle of Madison Avenue. Coyotes have been spotted on the Golden Gate Bridge. These are the postcard images of what the world might be like if we could find a way to have a less deadly effect on the planet.
The late British philosopher Brian McGee made the following a resting point. Human civilization is about 6000 years old, and we’re in the habit of thinking of this as a staggeringly long time. In every generation, even back when life expectancy was much shorter than it is today. There were always at least a few people who lived to the age of 100 or 5200 weeks away each of those people was born. There must have been a few other people alive at the time who’d already reached the age of 100 themselves. So it’s possible to visualize a chain of centenarian lifespans stretching all the way back through history with no spaces in between them, specific people who really lived and each of whom we could name if only the historical record were good enough. By this measure, the golden age of the Egyptian pharaohs, an era that strikes most of us as impossibly remote from our own, took place a scant 35 lifetimes ago. Jesus was born about 20 lifetimes ago, and the Renaissance happened seven lifetimes back.
Anyone who thinks the US has been around a long time or some things were “so long ago”: this entire country’s history is covered by just THREE overlapping lifetimes.
Thomas Jefferson 1743–1826
Harriet Tubman 1822–1913
Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
From this perspective, human history hasn’t unfolded peacefully, but in the blink of an eye, and it follows of course for your own life will have been a minuscule little flicker of near nothingness in the scheme of things. The mirror is pinpoint, with two incomprehensibly vast tracts of time, the past and future of the cosmos as a whole stretching off into the distance on either side.
It’s natural to find such thoughts terrifying to contemplate the massive indifference of the universe, it can feel as disorienting as being lost in a dense wood, or as frightening as falling overboard into the sea with no one to know we have gone. Looking at this differently, when things all seem too much or better solace than a reminder that they are provided you’re willing to zoom out a bit indistinguishable from nothing at all. The anxieties that clutter the average life, relationship troubles, status rivalries, money, worries, shrink instantly down to irrelevance. So do pandemics and presidencies for that matter. The cosmos carries on regardless calm and imperturbable or to quote the title of a book I once reviewed the universe doesn’t give a flying fuck about you. To remember how little you matter on a cosmic timescale can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realize we were carrying in the first place.
This sense of relief is worth examining a little more closely though, because it draws attention to the fact that the rest of the time most of us do go around thinking of ourselves as fairly central to the unfolding of the universe. If we didn’t, it wouldn’t be any relief to be reminded that in reality, this isn’t the case. Nor is this a phenomenon confined to megalomaniacs or pathological narcissist, but something much more fundamental to being human. It’s the understandable tendency to judge everything from the perspective you occupy, so that the few 1000 weeks for which you happen to be around inevitably come to feel like the linchpin of history to which all prior time was always leading up. These self centered judgments are part of what psychologists call the egocentricity bias. And they make good sense from an evolutionary standpoint. If you had a more realistic sense of your own sheer irrelevance considered on the timescale of the universe, you’d probably be less motivated to struggle to survive, and thereby to propagate your genes. You might imagine, moreover, that living with such an unrealistic sense of your own historical importance would make life feel more meaningful by investing your every action with a feeling of cosmic significance, however unwarranted but what actually happens is that this overvaluing of your existence gives rise to an unrealistic definition of what it would mean to use your finite time well, it sets the bar much too high. It suggests that in order to count as having been well spent, your life needs to involve deeply impressive accomplishments, or that it should have a lasting impact on future generations, or at the very least, that it must, transcend the common and the mundane clinic. It can’t just be ordinary. After all, if your life is a significant in the scheme of things as you tend to believe. How could you not feel obliged? To do something truly remarkable with it?
No wonder it comes as a relief to be reminded of your insignificance. It’s the feeling of realizing that you’ve been holding yourself all this time. To standards you couldn’t reasonably be expected to meet. This realization isn’t merely calming, but liberating. Because once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a life well spent, you’re free to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify.
This is an invitation to face the truth about all our irrelevance in the grand scheme of things, to embrace it, to whatever extent you can. Isn’t it hilarious in hindsight that you ever imagined things might be otherwise?
