Cosmic Insignificance Theory: A Simple Idea That Will Change Your Life Forever

Do you want to become the best version of yourself? Do you want to achieve all your goals and acquire all the things you want in life? For most people, the answer here is a pretty straightforward yes. But so many of us are going about it wrong, and it's not really our fault. Nearly every self-improvement-oriented book, podcast, social media content, well-intentioned friend or family member, and society at large all tell us the same fundamental thing. Strive to become the best version of yourself. On the face of it, this is good advice, but that's where the good advice can often end. When trying to determine the hows and the whats related to going about this, problems and detrimental advice can quickly begin to show up. What do we really mean when we say the best version of ourselves? Have we confused the best version of ourselves with constantly dissatisfied versions? Have we confused wanting things with wanting wanting itself? After all, what good is being the so-called best version of yourself if it feels terrible a lot of the time? If the best version of you is the never-enough, always-needing-to-do-and-prove-and-have-more version of yourself? The best kitchen ever made was terrible. In the early 1900s, there was an Austrian architect by the name Margarethe Schütte-Lihotzky. She primarily designed homes, schools, and community buildings. While working on these spaces, she noticed something weird about kitchens. At the time, they were designed terribly for efficiency. They were typically collections of disjointed surfaces, with cabinets, counters, and tables all spread out, requiring constant and significant movement while cooking, repairing, and cleaning. Also around this time, kitchen work was primarily viewed as work that women did. And so, Schütte-Lihotzky wanted to design kitchens in a way that would reduce the amount of domestic labor women needed to do so as to provide them with more free time. In 1926, she created a kitchen layout that would come to be known as the Frankfurt kitchen, one of the first kitchens designed intentionally around the user's workflow. The position of things were determined based on what allowed for the minimal amount of unneeded movement. The kitchen suddenly became a workspace, and cooking and cleaning suddenly became meaningfully more efficient. Since then, this design has gone on to shape and inspire the layout of essentially all modern kitchens. Though Schütte-Lihotzky achieved her goal in the design, the outcome was not what she intended. By the mid to late 1900s, it became increasingly apparent that the Frankfurt kitchen did in fact save time, but it did not provide women, or anyone, with more leisure time. Instead, it mostly increased the expectations around housekeeping and cooking. That is, the expectations around the quantity and quality of output rose alongside the increase in efficiency. And so, the time saved was essentially forced into being reinvested into more housekeeping and cooking, keeping the total time spent on average largely unchanged. When was the last time you felt like you were enough? Have you ever, at least in recent memory or for more than brief moments? As humans, we have never been more optimized than any other time in history. We have never been more capable and more efficient. We are constantly striving to be more and do more. And we are succeeding. And yet, we appear to be the most anxious and lonely we've ever been. In 2023, the former U.S. Surgeon General reported that about one in two American adults experience loneliness. Recent, decades-long national surveys conducted by psychology researcher Jean Twenge show that anxiety and psychological distress have risen dramatically over the past two decades, especially among younger people. This tension reveals that at least on some level, though we often think that through greater efficiency, ability, and achievement, we are optimizing for an increase in our quality of life, we're instead optimizing for more efficiency and achievement for their own sake. Like the Frankfurt kitchen, we're optimizing to be used more. We aren't creating more leisure time or relaxation or opportunity to connect, we're creating more time and abilities to be further Extracted from. Among the near infinite platitudes of general life advice, perhaps another one of the most prominent is the notion that life is what you make it. In some meaningful sense, this is also probably true. Life is what you make it, but what you make it largely depends on what you can make it. That is, what ingredients you have access to. We tend to feel as though we are the sole bearers of responsibility over the conditions and outcomes of our lives. And modern western society is happy to constantly and heavily reinforce this belief, working to absolve itself from as many obligations to the individual as it can. There's of course nothing wrong with taking responsibility and ownership over one's life and circumstances. On one hand, this is likely a necessary mental framework for one to do the best they can. One needs to believe or at least feel as though everything they do matters, and anything they want is possible, in order to change and achieve the things that are possible. After all, you only find out what is possible, what ingredients you have access to, by exploring and trying all the possibilities as best you can. But on the other hand, it is important to also recognize that no matter what you try and do, you can only try and do what you can. There is an upper limit to what you can and can't control. What is possible for you is ultimately determined in the end by your biological, psychological, environmental, social, economic, and other arbitrary conditions of time and space of which you did not determine or control. You've likely heard the phrase, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. In the modern world, this phrase is used colloquially as a call to personal responsibility. to improve one's situation entirely by their own efforts and actions. Entrepreneurs, influencers, and parents around the world love to bumper sticker this phrase onto every surface of unusable insight. It's supposed to be motivational and endearing. Ironically, however, the phrase's origins were entirely sarcastic. In the 1800s, when it originally formed, it was used as a mocking phrase to describe an absurd impossibility, since, of course, pulling up on one's own bootstraps does not and cannot lift oneself up off the ground. You need other people or other things in order to be lifted off the ground. This phrase's distortion over time is a fairly perfect representation of the state of affairs we have come to find ourselves in. The modern world takes absurd impossibilities And makes it our collective goal. This is, on one hand, almost kind of inspiring and endearing. Perhaps we can and should try to do everything we can in our power to achieve what we want, even if it seems impossible. But on the other hand, this kind of mentality is filled with hubris, masochistic indulgence, and a disregard for reality. So much is beyond our power and control, both individually and collectively. We all know this. Even putting aside any arguments regarding free will or the lack thereof, we know we will not all end up exactly where we want with all the achievements and things and feelings we desire. We don't control the conditions of the human experience, of nature, of the cosmos, and of the chaoticism of reality. And moreover, we will especially not end up where we want if what we want is what society and our base desires tell us we want. Broadly speaking, Meaning society wants us to never be satisfied, to never feel like enough. And so, if part of our goal is a kind of well-being or peace or satisfaction in life, even if we do get what we want and set out for in terms of societal achievement, status, objects, and wealth, we nonetheless still won't necessarily get what we want in terms of a better experience of ourselves and our lives. We will remain relatively as unsatisfied as when we started. Consider just the micro-level of a day or week. What happens when you clear a to-do list or respond to all your emails? Typically, this doesn't equate to an empty to-do list or a final email sent. It doesn't equate to any ultimate relief. Instead, it often equates to more space to fill with more to-dos, emails, or feelings of not enough. Even if you don't personally feel the compulsion to fill in the space with more of the same hurried dissatisfaction, external expectations likely begin to catch up to you. Bosses notice your abilities and reward you with more requests. Colleagues notice your prompt emailing and reward you with more emails. Romantic partners, family members, and friends notice your efficiency in certain areas and increase their expectations of you. This is what Oliver Berkman refers to as the efficiency trap. Becoming more efficient often doesn't provide more free time or relief, but rather it simply equates to getting more done in the same amount of time. Our expectations of ourselves and others simply rise alongside. Like with the Frankfurt kitchen, the freed up time is reinvested and reconsumed by the same system. If you enjoy getting the stuff done that you're constantly doing, then all is well. But if you don't, at least not at the scale or pace you are, then perhaps there's a flaw in the system. Berkman writes, Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control, when the flood of emails has been contained, when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer, when you're meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life. When nobody's angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball. And when the fully optimized person you've become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Before we get more into the implications of all this hyper self-optimization, as well as some unusual but profound ways to break-check the whole system and find opportunities for greater personal solace, I want to quickly talk about something that does an amazing job embodying this sort of counter-movement against the constant organization and optimization of everything. 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You can control everything from a sleek, user-friendly dashboard, allowing you to gain control over how your Mac performs without adding more work for you. Get tidy today and try CleanMyMac for free for 7 days and use my code PURSUITOFWONDER to get 20% off. You're a star and you're burning out. There's another problem. The inherent nature of all this self-improvement and self-optimization is obviously very focused on the self. That is, to constantly improve oneself toward becoming more productive and efficient, is to essentially work toward creating a surplus of time and resources to be reinvested into becoming more productive and efficient in a feedback loop with the center always being you. A black hole of self-indulgence disguised as growth. This kind of self-obsession or almost narcissism is not only sanctioned by society, but encouraged. Psychoanalyst Steven Reisner says, It's flat out wrong to think in 21st century America that narcissism and sociopathy are illnesses. In today's America, narcissism and sociopathy are strategies, and they're very successful strategies, especially in business and politics and entertainment. Even if we are not narcissistic or sociopathic in any real sense of the terms, by virtue of any level of self-fixation, we can experience a kind of alienation and lack of connection with others. We can become increasingly isolated as our focus narrows more and more on ourselves. There's a kind of distance or divide that forms between oneself and others as others become used as either means toward self-optimization or as evaluation apparatuses to assess and calibrate one's level of achievement. As physician and author Gabor Maté writes, alienation is inevitable when our inner sense of value becomes status-driven, hinging on externally imposed standards of competitive achievement and acquisition, and a highly conditional acceptance. I should say, acceptability in others' eyes. Moreover, this can all lead to burnout. According to the American Psychological Association's Dictionary of Psychology, burnout can be described as physical, emotional, or mental exhaustion accompanied by decreased motivation, lower performance, and negative attitudes toward oneself and others. In a 2024 survey by the professional services network Deloitte, 77% of respondents said they felt burned out in their jobs. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that this wide-scale experience of individual burnout is in large part the result of the self-focused, hyper-productive conditions of the modern world, which he refers to as the Achievement Society. He writes, Depression, which often culminates in burnout, follows from overexcited, overdriven, excessive self-reference that has assumed destructive traits. The exhausted, depressive achievement subject grinds itself down, so to speak. It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears itself out in a rat race it runs against itself. In such a society, the self becomes like an entrepreneurial project, and we begin to see ourselves and others not as individuals with inherent value, but as things that must accrue and prove their value through status, achievement, and marketability. This process being impossible to ever win or satisfy, since the goalposts are always shifting and the world is always looking for more shots on goal, individuals find themselves pushing and operating like machines Until the metal grinds all the way down. Perhaps the worst part, Han points out, is that we are encouraged by society and each other to be positive about it all, to be optimistic and inspirational in relation to our engagement. After all, if one is optimistic about things, then one is much more likely to keep going in service of the way things are. If, rather, one stopped and questioned what they were doing and if it has any real value to the world or themselves, the components of the machine could begin to slow down. Though it is of course extremely difficult to create this kind of friction against the constant and heavy machinery of modern culture, it is possible on at least some level, and it is perhaps what we should try to do whenever appropriate. We don't need to slow down permanently or even significantly to make a difference in our lives, but we do likely need to slow down in certain ways at least on occasion, if we can. Doing so across various stages of life can provide us with opportunities for a better sense of what we are doing, and most importantly, why. Like a kind of breath at the surface of everything, to better see what everything really is. Oliver Berkman argues that our constant need to do more and perfect more, and become the sort of optimized winners of the productivity arms race, is a consequence of something existential. An effort to avoid the simple silence of the present moment. To avoid ourselves, the reality of reality, and the consequences of considering whether what we're doing matters to anything in this finite existence. There's a sort of ironic paradox here. We continue to do things that potentially don't matter to us or the world, and that aren't congenial with what we actually want, in order to avoid ever recognizing this fact and having the chance to change it. Berkman writes, The more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you'll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time. As a method of forcing a kind of brake check, Berkman suggests that we consider and embrace our cosmic insignificance. In this, we can add a kind of counterweight to the cheery positivity that society and self-improvement often yank us forward with. Suddenly, we can slow down a bit and look up at the night sky with honest eyes, and we can see the beauty of the absurd nothingness from which we all came and to which we will all return. At the very least, we can see the vast unending uncertainty of everything. We don't know why we are here, what we are doing, how long we'll be here, and where anything is going. And in this, it becomes clear that we don't need to run faster and faster at this nothingness to arrive at nowhere. Berkman writes, It comes as a relief to be reminded of your insignificance. It's the feeling of realizing that you've been holding yourself all this time to standards you couldn't reasonably be expected to meet. And this realization isn't merely calming, but liberating. Because once you're no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a life well spent, you're free to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time. Being productive, working hard, trying one's best, and caring about what one cares about are of course not bad things. They're very good things. Beautiful and healthy things. One's work and one's sense of being productive or useful, one's sense of achievement, can all be sources of meaning and orientation in life. And there's nothing wrong with those things involving status, wealth, or societally relevant and encouraged goals. None of these How do these things create issues on their own? The issues emerge when what we do is rarely for its own sake, and one does almost everything for extrinsic reasons. That is, one's entire life becomes filled with tasks that feel insignificant or alienating, and one's actions are never, or rarely, a matter of genuine interest, curiosity, responsibility, goodness, or personal preference. Striving to be a better person or more successful in life is great until it turns into an infinite cycle of self-obsession and exhaustion with no end in sight and no real personal values or meaningful output in mind. It should also be explicitly stated here that of course not everyone is going to be in a position where this delineation is readily accessible. That is, much of the choices around slowing down, contemplating the nature of oneself and society, or determining if productivity has reached a point of diminishing returns, is a matter of already being in a fortunate enough position where these things can be asked and considered. In many cases, productivity and speed are a literal means of survival. But even here, the point remains. If hyper-optimization is necessary for survival for many people in an otherwise abundant world, why is this the case? Should it be? Does it need to be? Why must so many of us kill ourselves to survive, only to survive inside a kind of productive zombie? Cooking can be fun. Referring back to the Frankfurt kitchen, what's interesting about it is that the problem wasn't really that individuals continue to spend time in the kitchen, but that individuals continue to spend too much time, past the point of enjoyment or preference. For many people, both past and present, cooking is fun and enriching. It can be a beautiful part of home life, whether cooking for oneself, with or for friends, roommates, or family. It can be a means of expressing love, creativity, and taste. It can provide experiences of flavor and connection that remind you what the stars taste like. We don't need to strive to spend no time, or even less time, in the figurative kitchens of the world. We just need to recognize how much time we personally need and want to, and recognize that optimizing our spaces and technologies and mindsets for greater efficiency will almost always result in solely more efficiency, not in a better ability to determine and draw the lines around our time and priorities. If we aren't hungry and our loved ones aren't hungry and we don't want to cook, we can consider simply stepping out into another room for a time. Perhaps go outside, take a walk, and look up at the night sky, and remember that no matter how much we make and eat and keep going, we will all end up there, in that big final empty room of the universe.