Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

Cosmic insignificance therapy finds empowerment in our smallness.

It allows for bold choices and broadens our definition of a meaningful life.

Transcript:

Michael Maddaus

Thing here, and this is brilliant, at least from my perspective, and that is the notion of cosmic insignificance therapy.

Oliver Burkeman

What is cosmic insignificance therapy? This is just my admittedly slightly facetious terminology for something that I think is very important and useful, and I'm not the first to observe it. Certainly it goes all the way back to the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics, at least. And that is just that there is something empowering and meaning giving, much as you wouldn't expect it, in seeing the truth about how insignificant our tiny little lives are in the broad Span of human history, or let alone, you know, the history of the planet or the universe, that becomes totally absurd to think about how how minuscule the flicker of time that a single Human life is obviously that has sent a number of philosophers through the centuries into sort of nihilism and into the idea that nothing matters and it's all pointless because we can't Ever make enough of a difference I think there's another way of looking at it, which is, well, firstly, two things, I guess. Firstly, for a certain kind of person, I include myself, maybe not everyone's like this, you can get really paralyzed with indecision about certain life choices or directions in work Because of what ultimately amounts to a sort of absurd grandiosity that says like, oh, I've got to get this right because the stakes are so high, it will be so bad if I messed this up and Made a poor decision. And so there's something very, very liberating in that old idea of like, 100 years now is anyone going to care you know it actually is like to me that's a reason to say well you might as well Take a bold choice or make a courageous um decision uh because actually the stakes are a bit lower and it isn't quite the sort of you know the future of the cosmos does not depend on what You chose and that I think, can be liberating. And then secondly, borrowing, as I do in the book from the work of the philosopher Ido Landau, there is this sense that when we think of ourselves as very, very significant, like the whole Of history was leading up to us, when we have this kind of grandiose notion of our significance in the cosmos, leads us to use a definition of a meaningful life of what it what counts as Spending a life meaningfully that sets the bar incredibly high and makes it very hard to sort of it leads to most people's lives not qualifying as meaningful at all if you've got to you Know as Steve Jobs put it, you know, put a dent in the universe, if you've got to change the world, like every Silicon Valley startup wants to do, if you've got to sort of be an extraordinary Person, be a celebrity, be famous, you know, suddenly that rules out all sorts of activities that surely we want to say are meaningful like um you know working in a job where maybe no one Ever knows your name and that you only ever affect the lives of a small number of people but you make a positive difference to their lives like do we want to say that's not meaningful do We want to say that um joining an association that is helping restore some wetlands in your community is meaningless because you're not saving the planet on a sort of grand scale? You're just doing it in this small and local way. I don't think we do. Lives or their jobs to lack meaning is not because they're doing work that doesn't speak to them, but because they have this kind of unnecessarily exacting definition of what a meaningful Life would be. And so I think that's useful sometimes because it enables you to look at your life and be like, oh, you know, I do this and I do this. And, you know, these things can matter, even if they're not going to matter in a millennium.

Michael Maddaus

You know, it's beautiful. You know, on that note, I'm going to just read a small passage from your book that really just nails that on the head. The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn't a reason for unremitting despair or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It is a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible, the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you're officially Supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what is gloriously possible instead. So any other final thoughts, Oliver, before we wrap up here?

Oliver Burkeman

I'm tempted to say I couldn't have put it better myself. I mean, and actually, you know, I can't put it better myself in an impromptu conversation than in the paragraphs that I sort of sweated the blood over. But I think it's just that it's just that idea comes back to it again and again. Right. It's great to have big ambitions for your life. It's great to want to try to do the sort of nearly impossible things if that's your bag. But but to be on this treadmill of trying to do an impossible thing to try to be something impossible with regard to time it's such a huge distraction from being able to turn to what's yeah What's right in front of us and what we can do and i think there's just so much more peace of mind in dropping that particular kind of impossible quest dropping back down to the ground, Because it's once you're on the ground that you can put, you know, one foot in front of the other and actually go places.

Surgical Hot Topics • The Resilient Surgeon: Oliver Burkeman