Thirteen point eight billion years ago, there was nothing, and then there was everything.

The universe exploded into existence in a roiling chaos of energy that gradually cooled into quarks, then protons, then hydrogen atoms. For about 380,000 years, the cosmos was an opaque fog of matter and radiation so dense that light couldn't travel through it. Then the fog cleared, and the universe became transparent.

For millions of years after that, there were no stars. Just hydrogen and helium drifting in the dark, pulled together by gravity into increasingly dense clouds. Eventually, around 100 million years after the fact, those clouds collapsed enough to ignite the first fusion reactions. Stars lit up across the universe like someone had turned on a vast chandelier. They burned, fused heavier elements in their cores, exploded as supernovae, and seeded the cosmos with carbon, oxygen, iron, everything that would later become planets and people.

About 4.5 billion years ago, in an meaningless corner of an unremarkable galaxy, a cloud of gas and dust collapsed to form our sun and its retinue of planets. Earth coalesced from the debris, a molten ball that slowly cooled and developed a crust. Asteroids and comets bombarded the surface. Somehow, in ways we still don't fully understand, chemistry became biology. Single-celled organisms emerged around 3.5 billion years ago, and for the next three billion years, they had the planet to themselves.

Then came the Cambrian explosion, and suddenly (in geological terms) there were trilobites and strange worms and the ancestors of everything that would follow. Fish developed jaws, some crawled onto land, dinosaurs ruled for 165 million years and then abruptly vanished. Mammals diversified in the aftermath, primates emerged, and around 300,000 years ago, in Africa, anatomically modern humans appeared.

For most of human history, we lived in small bands, hunting and gathering. We figured out fire, language, tools, art. Around 10,000 years ago, we started farming, and everything accelerated. Civilizations rose and fell, writing was invented, empires sprawled across continents. The Bronze Age collapsed, the Iron Age began, religions spread, the printing press changed everything, the scientific revolution transformed our understanding of reality, the industrial revolution transformed how we lived, and through it all, millions upon millions of the critters who now identify as human were born and died and were entirely forgotten.

And then, at some point in the late 20th or early 21st century, you were born. Your parents met through some improbable chain of circumstances. Your father's particular sperm cell, out of millions, happened to fertilize your mother's particular egg. If anything had gone slightly differently, someone else would exist instead of you, or nobody at all.

You spent your childhood learning to navigate the world. You went to school, made friends, had your heart broken a few times. You chose a career, or had one choose you. You experienced joy and boredom and anxiety and wonder. You tried to make sense of things. You worried about whether you were doing enough, being enough, mattering enough.

And now you're here.

You're here, and you're probably not going to be a billionaire.

You may (or may not) start a company that changes the world or write a novel that gets taught in schools for generations or discover a new law of physics.

You're probably not going to be a rock star or a movie star or any kind of star at all.

Your Wikipedia page may never exist.

The history books will not mention you.

You will never give a TED talk that goes viral, never have a biopic made about your life, never have buildings or scholarships or awards named after you. When you were a kid, maybe you thought you'd be exceptional, that you'd be one of the rare ones who breaks through, who matters on a grand scale. And then you grew up and realized you're smart enough to understand probability, which means you're smart enough to understand that you're almost certainly going to be ordinary.

You look at your life and you see the ceiling approaching. You see roughly how far you can rise in your career, roughly how much money you'll make, roughly what your legacy will be (small, or more likely, nonexistent). You scroll through social media and see people your age founding companies and publishing books and winning awards and collecting impressive titles, and you feel that familiar tightness in your chest.

The sense that you're falling behind, that you've missed your window, that you're wasting the one life you get. You're here, right now, in this present moment, and you're worried that being here isn't enough. That simply existing and working and loving people and having hobbies and being generally decent isn't enough, that you need to be extraordinary to justify the improbable fact of your existence.

You're here, and you're anxious about it.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately: the sheer statistical improbability of your existence should be crushing, but somehow it's the opposite. You are the product of an almost inconceivable number of contingencies, a soap bubble floating on an ocean of chance. And yet you lie awake at night worrying about whether you're successful enough, whether you've made the right career choices, whether people respect you, whether you'll be remembered.

And by you, I mean you.

And by you, I also mean me.

I used to find this overwhelming. The universe is so vast and old, and I am so small and brief. There are more stars in the observable universe than grains of sand on all of Earth's beaches, and most of them have planets, and the whole thing has been running for billions of years before I showed up and will continue for billions or trillions after I'm gone.

So, what's the point?

Of anything?

But lately I've been coming around to a different view.

The insignificance isn't the problem. It's the solution.

Think about the pressure we put on ourselves to matter, to make a mark, to be significant. We choose careers based partly on how impressive they sound at dinner parties or on imagine appearances on imagined talk shows. We agonize over decisions as if the fate of the world hangs on them. We compare ourselves to the most successful people in history and feel inadequate. The burden of significance is exhausting.

What if you just... didn't matter that much?

What if your choices and achievements and failures were basically rounding errors in the grand scheme of things?

Would that be so bad?

I spend a lot of time writing, and I have this recurring anxiety about whether anyone will read what I write, whether it will have any impact, whether I'll be forgotten immediately or maybe remembered for a while. But when I really sit with the cosmological perspective, when I imagine the trillions of years stretching out ahead after I’ve kicked the bucket // bought the farm // gone for a Burton, the whole question starts to seem sort of quaint.

Of course I'll be forgotten.

Everyone will be forgotten.

The sun will expand into a red giant and engulf the Earth, and every trace of human civilization will be vaporized. All the books and buildings and great works of art, gone. Every reputation carefully cultivated, every legacy anxiously protected will be erased.

At some point, even MC Hammer will be forgotten.

And you know what? That's okay. Better than okay. It's actually kind of freeing.

If nothing you do has permanent cosmic significance, then you can stop trying to achieve permanent cosmic significance. You can do things because they're interesting or fun or helpful to people right now, without needing them to echo through eternity. You can take risks, try things that might fail, pursue projects that won't make you famous or rich or immortal.

The stakes are lower than you think.

I see people paralyzed by the fear of making the wrong choice, as if there's an ageless scorekeeper tallying up their decisions. Should I take this job or that job? Should I move to this city or stay in that one? Should I date this person or wait for someone better? They treat these choices as if they're carving their decisions into a permanent record that will be judged by future generations.

But future generations won't care.

Our generation barely gives a shit about the Great War, about the Model T Ford, or about the life and times of billions of lifeforms who are long gone. We don’t remember the 30 Years War. The vast majority of the human race doesn’t commemorate Culloden.

Future generations will have their own concerns, and then they'll die too, and eventually there won't be any future generations at all. The sun will burn out, the stars will wink out one by one, and the universe will grow cold and dark.

This sounds depressing when I write it out like that, but I promise I'm going somewhere with this.

The liberation of insignificance: it lets you focus on what actually matters to you, right now, without the weight of cosmic importance crushing you. You can be kind to people because kindness feels good, without trying to tip the scales of history. You can create art because creation is satisfying, without competing for immortality. You can love people fully, knowing that love will end (one way or another)and that's fine.

There's something deeply wrong with how we've constructed meaning in the modern world. We've lost most of the traditional sources of significance (religion, community, duty) but kept the anxious feeling that we need to justify our existence. So we've turned to careers and achievements and metrics and status, trying to prove our worth to the horizon. We're all performing significance, trying to matter, desperate not to be forgotten.

But what if being forgotten is the natural state of things? What if almost everyone who has ever lived is already forgotten, and that's just how it works? There are about 100 billion humans who have lived and died, and you can probably name a few hundred of them. The rest have vanished into history, and the world keeps turning.

Call me a sociopath, but I find this comforting. The pressure is off. I don't have to be one of the 0.001% of humans who gets remembered. I can just be one of the 99.999% who lives, does their best, tries to be decent to the people around them, and then peacefully vanishes into oblivion. There's no shame in that. It's what happens to almost everyone, including literally every single one of the people you consider either successful or immortal.

Things still matter, life still matters - just locally and temporarily instead of cosmically and eternally. The meal you cook tonight matters to the people who eat it. The conversation you have with a friend matters to both of you, in that moment. The work you do matters to your colleagues and clients and the people affected by it. But in five hundred years, none of it will matter at all, and that's absolutely fine.

I think we'd be happier if we could internalize this. Not in a nihilistic way, where nothing matters so why bother, but in a liberating way, where things matter in proportion to their actual impact on actual people, not in proportion to how much astral significance we imagine them having. You can care deeply about your life and work and relationships without needing them to echo through eternity.

Once you stop trying so hard to be significant, you often end up doing better work anyway. You're not paralyzed by the fear of failure or the need to prove yourself. You can experiment, play, explore. You can do things for their own sake rather than for external validation. The people who actually do end up making lasting contributions are often the ones who were just deeply engaged with something they found fascinating, not the folks trying to cement their legacy.

But even that shouldn't matter to you.

Whether your work lasts or vanishes, whether you're remembered or forgotten, none of it changes the basic fact of your existence: you are here now, alive and conscious, able to experience the world and other people and double cheeseburgers and your own mind.

That's enough.

That's more than enough.

It's miraculous, actually, that you exist at all.

So here's happens next; here’s what’s coming.

Eventually, inevitably, no matter how much money you raise, no matter if your tweets go viral or you change careers, or we get AGI, or you eat chicken fingers for lunch, or you bio-hack another handful of years together via plasma transplants and longevity podcasts, you’ll die (bad luck).

At first, people remember you. Your family talks about you at gatherings. Your friends tell stories. Maybe there are photos on social media, posts that get surfaced in "memories" features for a while. But gradually, people move on. They have to. They have their own lives to live.

A generation passes, and you're a story told by people who knew you, if that. Another generation, and you're a name on a family tree. A few more generations and you're gone completely. Your great-great-great-grandchildren won't know your name unless you were unusually famous // infamous or kept unusually detailed records, and even then, well…

Humans are forgetful.

The world keeps changing. New technologies emerge, old ones become obsolete. Political systems rise and fall. Mick Jagger eventually succumbs (more bad luck). The climate shifts, coastlines change, cities are built and abandoned. Humanity continues, facing new challenges, solving old problems, creating new ones. Thousands of years pass. Civilizations you can't imagine come and go. Wars are fought, peace accords signed, treaties broken. The pace of change accelerates or slows, nobody knows.

Eventually, if we don't destroy ourselves first, humans might spread beyond Earth. We might colonize Mars, build habitats in the asteroid belt, send generation ships to other star systems. Or maybe we stay on Earth and figure out some kind of sustainable equilibrium. Or maybe something entirely different happens, something we can't currently imagine.

Millions of years from now, if anything descended from humanity still exists, it probably won't remember you. It might not even remember that individual humans once existed. The whole sweep of recorded history might be compressed into a single footnote in some vast database nobody bothers to access.

The sun continues burning through its hydrogen, gradually heating up. In about a billion years, Earth becomes uninhabitable as the oceans boil away. In five billion years, the sun expands into a red giant and likely engulfs the inner planets entirely. Everything humanity ever built, every trace of your existence, vaporized.

But even that isn't the end. Other stars continue burning, new ones form from gas clouds, galaxies merge and separate. The universe expands, accelerating outward, carrying galaxies away from each other faster than light can travel between them. Star formation slows as hydrogen runs out. One by one, the stars burn out. Red dwarfs last the longest, but even they eventually exhaust their fuel.

In perhaps 100 trillion years, the last star flickers out. The universe is dark now, filled with black holes and dead stellar remnants. The black holes gradually evaporate through Hawking radiation over the course of googol years, unimaginable spans of time. Eventually, even protons decay (probably), and the universe consists of nothing but a thin soup of elementary particles and radiation, spreading ever farther apart.

Heat death. Maximum entropy. No more structure, no more complexity, no more life or thought or experience. Just an endless dark expanse, everything that ever happened forgotten completely, with no one left to remember.

And somehow, knowing all this, I feel okay. The heat death of the universe doesn't diminish my lunch today (Salmon Sashimi) or the book I'm reading (In Cold Blood by Truman Capote and the Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weiss and Tracey Hickman) or the conversation I had yesterday that made me laugh. Those things happened, they were real, and they mattered in the only way things can matter: they were experienced by conscious beings who cared about them.

You are insignificant.

So am I.

So is everyone.

And that's a good thing, because it means we can stop trying so hard to be significant and just focus on being alive, right now, in this improbable moment we've been given.

The universe doesn't care about us, and that's okay.

We can care about each other instead.