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You’re Cosmically Insignificant, Impermanent, and Arbitrary—and That’s Okay

“Our century’s revelations of unthinkable largeness and unimaginable smallness, of abysmal stretches of geological time when we were nothing, of supernumerary galaxies and indeterminate subatomic behavior, of a kind of mad mathematical violence at the heart of matter have scorched us deeper than we know.”

—JOHN UPDIKE, Critical Essay on Evolution, 1985

The absurd, as noted, refers to how the Universe doesn’t yield the kind of meaningfulness you seek from it. A pattern of thought starts innocently enough then digs too deep, rips open the curtains of existence, and you’re standing suddenly face-to-face with the absurdity of life. You typically brush up against the absurd via three potential avenues: you come to the realization that life seems (1) insignificant, (2) impermanent, or that (3) all values and goals within it feel arbitrary.¹⁷ Let’s look at these three riders of absurdity more closely because a healthy stare at the abyss is necessary to identify the path to the other side of it.

ON INSIGNIFICANCE

If the age of the Universe—some fourteen billion years—was counted in twenty-four hours, it would be fifteen seconds before midnight by the time our species started its evolutionary crawl. Your own life would be over in a fraction of a second. The question of what’s significant from the point of view of the Universe can be downright bracing let alone existentially confusing: How are you supposed to figure out what value the cosmos—the planets and the galaxies, filled with their countless twinkling stars and impressive solar systems—assigns anything, never mind your life. As American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson writes, “The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you,”¹⁸ a sentiment that would be humorous if it weren’t so true.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives . . . on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

—CARL SAGAN, 1994, on the last photograph of Earth taken by Voyager 1 before it left the solar system

It didn’t used to be this way: Our ancestors believed Earth was the center of everything. Man was a focal point of God’s attention and vice versa. In the creation myths of most cultures, man has had a leading role in the cosmic play of existence. The curse of living in the twenty-first century with an awareness of astrophysics, cosmology, and other sciences is that we know too much. Today, we possess hard, fact-based, scientific knowledge about cosmic proportions and the vast spans of history that predate our own existence that inevitably lead to the conclusion articulated by philosopher Thomas Nagel: “We are tiny specks in the infinite vastness of the Universe.”¹⁹

ON IMPERMANENCE

“Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them.”

—PAULO COELHO, Eleven Minutes, 2005

As a temporal being, you inhabit a body that ages, gets sick, and will eventually die and disintegrate. Death isn’t the sole purview of impermanence, however. The very nature of life itself—our physical, emotional, and intellectual well-being—is temporal. Everything changes and shifts from one moment to the next. Buddhists are especially attuned to the idea of impermanence, anicca, which they see as one of the three basic characteristics of existence whereby it’s acknowledged that all life is evanescent, in a constant state of flux, and eventually dissolves. You don’t have to be Buddhist, however, to grapple with thoughts of impermanence. They are the wormhole of the absurd; it’s tempting to conclude nothing’s worth the ride if the ride itself is sure to vanish.

ON ARBITRARINESS

“Be just and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary.”

—WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS, Naked Lunch, 1959

The arbitrariness of life revolves around the idea that our aims, goals, and values lack any final justification.²⁰ We take some life principles and values very seriously—to the degree of letting them guide our choices and actions in life. But are these grand values ultimately justified or mere preferences we’ve arbitrarily come to endorse? Although we’d much prefer for our values to be somehow grounded in the Universe, we’ve become increasingly aware that the Universe as such contains no values and has no opinion on ours. Einstein’s theory of relativity has nothing to say about why something should have meaning or value. The physical Universe is indifferent.

Life, as a peculiar assemblage of matter capable of self-replicating its form, arbitrarily emerged on the cosmic stage at one point in the history of the Universe. But it generated no objective values. Values are an inherently human invention, and, in fact, the only thing separating human values from animal preferences is that the former are more reflective and can be expressed in language. When you look at ink on paper, you automatically see letters and words. But ink is just ink. The letters exist only in your mind, through your interpretation. It’s the same with values. There’s nothing behind your values per se. They exist because you and the people around you have endorsed them as such.

More and more people see their life goals and values as something that everyone is free to choose for oneself. But this is worrisome because if all your goals and values are up to you individually, then nothing seems to be ultimately more worth doing than anything else. If a permanent and final justification is needed for your actions to matter, we, as a society, seem to have lost contact with it.

THE POINT OF NO RETURN

Facing the possibility that you are an insignificant, impermanent, and arbitrary being afloat on a pale blue dot in the Universe might sound like a gloomy vision of existence. While you probably don’t walk around contemplating the absurd on a daily basis, it’s safe to say that thinking about it leaves a lasting impression. As Leo Tolstoy wrote in Confession, “We cannot cease to know what we know.”²¹ Once you’ve awakened yourself to the possibility that there’s no inherent, cosmic value in human life, you can never totally forget it. As there’s no going back, the only way is forward. Luckily, there is a way to strive, create, and live joyfully in spite of this knowledge. You have tools at your disposal to create a more meaningful life right here, right now, as the rest of this book will show.

Rather than confront the situation head-on, however, most people choose a work-around and indulge in highly sophisticated methods of distraction. Whole industries have sprung from this well: if you don’t want to deal with the absurd, there are a million different ways to entertain and indulge your denial—from selfies and Facebook likes to instantly downloadable entertainment and retail therapy. Accordingly, living with the nagging awareness that life could be cosmically meaningless doesn’t often directly translate into an explicit denial of meaningfulness, but more commonly leads to vague feelings of discomfort, defensiveness, and insecurity surrounding your life and your personal goals and values. As long as things are going well in life you might be able to suppress your existential doubts. But when things fall apart—relationships, personal health, or your career—and you would most benefit from having a stable, supportive framework that gives meaning to your suffering, you might become acutely aware of the instability and dimness of your values. This is why distraction is not a good long-term strategy to existential questions.

Of the many distractions our culture has generated to fill the void, perhaps the most prevalent ideology is that you need to be happy. But pursuing happiness contains a paradox, as we’ll discover in the next chapter.