You Are Insignificant. That's a Good Thing.
JA Westenberg
The universe is vast and everyone is ultimately forgotten. That insignificance frees you from needing cosmic importance. So focus on living, loving, and enjoying this brief, unlikely life.
20 Oct 2025
You're here, right now, in this present moment, and you're worried that being here isn't enough. That simply existing and working and loving people and having hobbies and being generally decent isn't enough, that you need to be extraordinary to justify the improbable fact of your existence.
You're here, and you're anxious about it.
The insignificance isn't the problem. It's the solution.
Think about the pressure we put on ourselves to matter, to make a mark, to be significant. We choose careers based partly on how impressive they sound at dinner parties or on imagine appearances on imagined talk shows. We agonize over decisions as if the fate of the world hangs on them. We compare ourselves to the most successful people in history and feel inadequate. The burden of significance is exhausting.
What if you just... didn't matter that much?
What if your choices and achievements and failures were basically rounding errors in the grand scheme of things?
Would that be so bad?
Of course I'll be forgotten.
Everyone will be forgotten.
The sun will expand into a red giant and engulf the Earth, and every trace of human civilization will be vaporized. All the books and buildings and great works of art, gone. Every reputation carefully cultivated, every legacy anxiously protected will be erased.