Free Yourself From Worry By Realizing How Inconsequential You Are
Use the enormity of the universe to reset your perspective
Your Future Of Being Forgotten
You are not as important as you think you are.
I recently left a work team I’d been an integral part of for over five years. It took three days to complete the full handover and become surplus to ongoing requirements. Despite being excited to move on, the shocking speed of the transition still jolted me. Was all the personal meaning I constructed around the work a mirage? Yes, most likely.
Life goes on, with or without you, especially at work.
Even in a loving family context, people heal and move on. Should tragedy strike and you move on from this life, the relentlessly healing passages of time will scatter your memory like ashes in the wind. People will be sad for a while, you’d hope. Those close to you would think of you often at first. Then less so. Later, only on the anniversary of your passing. Then, in a generation or so, never again. It’s not personal - even those with the most significant impacts on humanity are typically gone from the world’s minds in three generations.
Remembering how close you are to being forgotten is a powerful tonic for making the most of your time.
You can stop worrying about:
That awkward conversation at a party last week.
The time you threw up in public last year.
Those texts that you sent to the wrong person.
The time you peed your pants in school.
Nobody remembers! Let yourself move on! Tying yourself down with the chains of the past is a big waste of time. Take control of your destiny.
Your Current Insignificance
You are an irrelevant cosmic dust speck floating through space and time with more other specks than you could ever fathom. Whenever I look up at the sky on a clear night and see the stars, I remember what each represents, which blows my mind.
Allow me to put your existence in context:
The observable Universe is about 93 billion light-years in diameter and contains at least 100 billion galaxies, each with billions of stars. Our Milky Way galaxy alone has over 100 billion stars, and our Sun is just one of them.
The average human lifespan is around 70-80 years, a blink of an eye in cosmic terms. The Universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old. You’ll be alive for a minuscule and fleeting portion of time.
There are over 7.8 billion people on Earth, so even considering only our planet in the present moment, the actions of any single individual will not significantly alter the course of humanity.
Yet still, you walk around with your main character vibes, thinking that the Sun is spinning around you. You ponder every move, worried about its ramifications on others and the ripples it will send through the Universe.
Set yourself free! It’s not just beyond your lifetime that others have limited headspace for you - it’s already true. So many of us are so consumed with ourselves that even in the present - yes, right now - it’s highly likely that nobody is thinking about you at all.
Don’t spend your life caught up in what others might be thinking. Here are some things that will instantly get easier for you.
Decision-Making: Making choices based on your values and desires becomes more accessible as the potential opinions or expectations of others do not sway you.
Pursuing Passions: Engaging in hobbies, interests, or careers that genuinely excite you becomes more accessible as you are less concerned about external validation or criticism.
Taking Risks: Embracing new opportunities, experimenting, and taking calculated risks becomes less intimidating when you're not preoccupied with others' potential reactions.
Personal Growth: Focusing on self-improvement and learning from mistakes becomes more straightforward as you are more willing to embrace failure as a natural part of growth without fear of judgment.
Social Interactions: Meeting new people and forming connections becomes more comfortable, as you are less worried about making a perfect impression.
The most important prize is authentic self-expression. You will have more genuine interactions and relationships when you can express your true thoughts, feelings, and personality without fear of judgment.
These are the significant upsides to a continuing series of small decisions to embrace the discomfort of charting your chosen path.
Reconnecting With Your Importance
So, what is the point of it all? What can you do from under that pile of evidence diminishing your significance? The answer lies in seizing control and mastery over your impact on the Universe.
We will dip a very brief and shallow toe into relativity here. Using Einstiens’ famous equation, if we accept that the speed of light [c] is a constant, then it follows that energy [E] and mass [m] are interchangeable.
Usually, you consider your body to be mass—a lump of flesh making its way around the world. If we consider ourselves energy, we can transcend the typical physical boundaries we see and consider how we can alter the energy around us, not just with our bodies but with our thoughts. After all, brain chemicals are made up of atoms, like everything else.
It’s a commonly held and noncontroversial belief that negative thought patterns can negatively impact our physical bodies. At times of great stress or anxiety, you get headaches, and your GI systems noisily protest. The same is true in reverse—the energy generated from positive beliefs can positively affect your outcomes. We can observe this in our bodies and the events we experience around us. In other words, you make your own luck.
By viewing yourself as energy rather than mass, you can think differently about how you impact all of the energy around you, in human form or otherwise. If you channel it with intentionality, this can give you an incredible sense of influence and control over your destiny. Way beyond your own body, you have the power to send waves of impact through all of existence, including the dimensions of space and time.
Perhaps you’re not so insignificant after all. With that knowledge, what energy are you putting out in the Universe today?
I would agree all you have shared here if I haven’t got to know Jesus Christ and read Bible, which totally shifted my perspective to view myself and the world around me