How frequently do you think about that fact that, in the context of an almost-infinite universe, the span of all time, and all the humanity that has ever existed and will exist, you are so close to nothing that you might as well be nothing?
very frequently
not much, though i often think it about other people
The universe is the Total Perspective Vortex and I just try and act like Zaphod Beeblebrox as I can.
Any time I think about dying from accident or disease.
It doesn’t even have to be such a macro-view...as long as I out-live my parents, there’s no one else that won’t get over my absence/demise.
it’s one of the most comforting and liberating thoughts there is
I agree. It tends to have the effect of making my problems seem small.
I think about most often to calm my anxiety. For instance I was on a flight recently and I started to get really nervous. I’m not the greatest flyer. Then I started thinking about how not everything is about me and how insignificant I am and how unlikely it was that the plane would crash just because I was on it. It helped. So did the benzos.
yeah i started this because i don’t really think about it that often because i am pretty wrapped up in my own little world but there is something comforting about it
There really is.
how unlikely it was that the plane would crash just because I was on it
More like how the plane wasn’t going to crash just because I was on it.
for me this is a very positive thing, not a negative “waah no one cares about me” thing
people care about me in spite of the fact that i am insignificant in the universe, not to save me from being insignificant
^^^ otm
I have been thinking about the three deaths concept a lot recently, and how the third death is the moment when your name is spoken for the last time. I guess I’m just in a morbid state of mind.
i’m immortal
bbl
All I have to say is to embrace who you are, use your god-given talents to the fullest, and enjoy your time on Spaceship Earth!
Todd
Todd, you are a terrible sock. Are you Jesse?
No, just Todd!
Todd
it’s freaking me out but on another message board I used to post on there was a guy named Todd and he posted in the exact same way that this Todd sock posts in, down to ending all his posts w/ ‘Todd’
guess that’s pretty insignificant
he is but a wisp of vapor
dust in the wind
What happened to that squirrel’s eyes? I like that dog’s glasses, though!
Todd
that’s a cat, todd
it’s one of the most comforting and liberating thoughts there is
fuck off Todd
Tim
Though I prefer to be addressed as ‘Your Benign Insignificance’.
That’s the great thing about cartoonists. They don’t have to be based in reality!
Todd
I think about it fairly regularly when I’m stressed
like ‘oh, you didn’t get that job, well...everyone is gonna die one day and every shred of evidence of our existence will prob disappear eventually, so, really who cares, also there’s prob a multiverse thing going on so in another universe you did get that job but that guy will also die, so he shouldn’t be *that* happy’
lol Todd B&B clip
Todd:
Plus—Stems from an old word for ‘fox’
Minus—Originally a surname
do I dare
do I dare
do I dare disturb the universe?
Can one disturb the universe?
The universe doesn’t give a shit about you or your minor disturbance.
I know somebody who would beg to differ
“Yes, I’d like to make a collect call to the universe at dinner-time local-time (for the universe).”
so you’re saying, sb’s are really no big deal
“OK. Can you hold for 4,678,241,532 years and 5 minutes and 41 seconds.” xp
the universe is a Synecdoche in that poem you clods—not the real universe.
sb’s are probably the only thing that truly matter in the context of the universe
that’s still people caring, not the universe itself
w/ a multiverse system there actually is a universe that gives a shit about you
potentially we are in that one
I think god cares, but the universe he created won’t let him get through. I’m kind of a gnostic deist! But whether or not God cares, Todd cares.
Todd
the people are the universe—what is wrong with you people
I don’t need to think of it in the context of an almost-infinite universe or the span of time. I can think of how insignificant I am in relation to my tiny flat or the next five people I might possibly meet. Works just as well, is probably even more depressing.
when we post to ILX are we really just farting into the universe
If Todd Wilkins was real, this is how he would post.
im gonna take this thread as an opportunity to post my favorite passage from Moby Dick:
“The sea had leeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”
and he never played the tambourine the same way again
Nowadays I think God uses a lathe or one of those 3D ‘printers’.
I think about this every time I think I’m about to get fired.
Before you condemn yourself to insignifigance, first, you have to figure out what creates signifigance. Certainly, it isn’t a matter of mass, temperature, velocity, or the wave-length of one’s radio emissions. In fact, the more you query what signifigance consists of, the more I think you’ll be inclined to credit yourself with a goodly amount of it.
In the meantime, until you know more about the nature of signifigance, it would be logical to make an initial assumption that every object in the universe is endowed with precisely the same signifigance as any other object, since you cannot as yet detect or measure any differences between them. This equality can be summed in two perfectly logical ways: that everything is entirely insignifigant, or everything is entirely signifigant. So long as you are hypothesizing that signifigance exists, the second formulation appears more apt.
Significant alterity
Well, I don’t really think that the end can be assessed as of itself as being the end because what does the end feel like? It’s like saying when you try to extrapolate the end of the universe, you say, if the universe is indeed infinite, then how — what does that mean? How far is all the way, and then if it stops, what’s stopping it, and what’s behind what’s stopping it? So, what’s the end, you know, is my question to you.
omg
ty mookie
I’m going to be bold and eat a peach (out of season)!
Who greenlit the universe and can we get them fired?
I am glad that there is a lot of stuff out there
When the universe gives you maya, make mayannaise
I get where Aimless is coming from, but I don’t think my insignificance is all that significant.
M. White, you are a beacon light of astounding brilliance and have always been good to your mother. What more could we ask?
“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
How many universes does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
This equality can be summed in two perfectly logical ways: that everything is entirely insignifigant, or everything is entirely signifigant. So long as you are hypothesizing that signifigance exists, the second formulation appears more apt.
^^^OTM. significance is a value judgment that requires a subject to assign value.
xp
ah, but can significance that is self-assigned really be significance? I think therefore i am significant!
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
^^ the brahmins disagree; the sixth patriarch agrees
my real take is that significance and insignificance are mutually dependent. significance, if it means anything, only means in contrast to the insignificant, and vice versa. my own insignificance/significance, then, walks that fine line, right down the middle.
What man can’t talk about, man should be silent about? (man should not talk about?)
Something to that effect?
x-post—I am assuming this is a famous quote I just don’t know but want to test my comprehension.
It is Wittgenstein. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
You know where Bierce writes, “MAUSOLEUM, n. The final and funniest folly of the rich”?
I think the desire for significance, like the desire for immortality is equally funny. Life is too important to take that seriously.
ok so not too bad, I guess
man = one/people in general gets me all the time
My retort to Ludwig would be, “But Lou, metaphysics is fun!”
(Ludwig W. sputters) Aber! Aber! Ich bin todt!
i read a book recently that hypothesized that primitive people probably had no sense of time as chronology. everything was the same 10,000 years before and would be the same 10,000 years later. so, in a sense, they lived in eternity. i wonder if death/insignificance would matter as much to us if we didn’t view ourselves along a timeline in that way.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind?
no, but that’s a good one too! it was a more dusty old academic title “The Invention of the Self”-not as fun as the title makes it sound. mostly about 17th century biographies and such.
How frequently do you think about that fact that, in the context of an almost-infinite universe, the span of all time, and all the humanity that has ever existed and will exist, you are so close to nothing that you might as well be nothing?
a lot.
whats that calvin and hobbes strip where calvin is thinking abt the black vastness of space and his insiginificance in the face of the infinite and then just decides ‘let’s go home and turn on all the lights’
Insignificance is an album by American musician Jim O’Rourke. It was released on Drag City in 2001.
in answer to the original thread question, i do this quite often, but it’s pretty much a coping mechanism for anxiety. maybe more of a Buddhist version than a nihilistic one, then.
i do find this, like others here, p comforting. i don’t think about it a lot tho.
i also find the non-existence of god comforting. being raised catholic it’s nice to know that im not tainted by original sin or that someone is watching and judging everything i do. in fact no one gives a shit about what i do, and as long as im happy with my actions, and i don’t by my actions create difficult circumstances for myself, then im cool.
thanks m.white!
when i used to read science fiction as a kid i wld get an intense vertigo from thinking abt like, the fact that in time even the sun will die and burn out or that the earth is actually millions of years old or w/e... just this sense of the weight and sheer accumulation of years. ive never been entirely comfortable w/it tbh
Q: how many universes does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: We’re all screwed!
None, universes screw in black holes
I kind of had a funny feeling of insignificance this week when the news came out about Kepler 22b, the possibly habitable planet that’s “only” 600 light-years away. Kind of makes you realize the tininess of human scale—since 1 light-year is about 6 trillion miles. It’s hard to imagine that any human being could ever travel there. Although I guess if there was intelligent life there and we sent them a message, we’d get a reply in only 1200 years.
Bender: You can’t count on god for jack, he basically told me that himself!
I think about this all the time.
yr basic logarithmic scale map of insignificance:
you don’t have to think about this, nobody exists on a universal scale in any meaningful way, most of us probably exist at building level, street level at best. Our target horizon of significance should probably be set at the next town over, and we should strive to matter that much, at most.
one comforting thing is that no matter how much we fuck up the world, life’ll go on even if it’s not human
unless idk we blow the earth up into smithereens
‘the world’ != ‘life’ tbf
Tho i’d argue that there’s nothing partic comforting in the sentiment
statistically life is probably gonna go on somewhere
ps multiverse
the multiverse is like religion for atheist nerds
is multiverse = many-worlds theory?
Insignificance can be a comfort, the way sleep can
I wouldn’t want to be awake ALL the time!
xp yeah
it makes sense as a nerd religion cause you can declare that the star wars universe actually exists somewhere (including one w/o the prequels)
it is comforting knowing that in some alternate universe I am having sex with princess leia at this very moment
also an alternate universe where you’re having sex w/ jar jar binks