The Liberation of Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
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Highlights
- The writer of the book of Ecclesiastes, among many others, would instantly have recognized the suffering of Hollisâs patient: âThen I considered all that my hands had done, and the toil I had spent in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.â
- Itâs deeply unsettling to find yourself doubting the point of what youâre doing with your life. But it isnât actually a bad thing because it demonstrates that an inner shift has already occurred.
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To realize midway through a business trip that you hate your life is already to have taken the first step into one you donât hateâbecause it means youâve grasped the fact that these are the weeks that are going to have to be spent doing something worthwhile if your ďŹnite 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 are making it count?
- A New York writer and director named Julio Vincent Gambuto captured this sense of what I found myself starting to think of as âpossibility shockââthe startling understanding that things could be different, on a grand scale, if only we collectively wanted that enough.
- Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can. (Isnât it hilarious, in hindsight, that you ever imagined things might be otherwise?) Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isnât a matter of resolving to âdo something remarkableâ with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and over-demanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic signiďŹcance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitelyâand often enough, marvelouslyâreally is.