#1 ·
I spent most of last night staring at the ceiling, just thinking about how much of our "reality" is basically an illusion sustained by the fact that we are incredibly small. It’s one thing to read about the vastness of space in a textbook—you see the diagrams, the little dots representing galaxies, the mathematical abstractions of light-years—but it’s another thing entirely to actually sit with the implications of it.
There is this specific kind of existential vertigo that hits you when you realize that the universe isn't just big, but that it is fundamentally, aggressively indifferent to our existence. We spend our lives worrying about the minutiae: whether we’ll hit our quarterly targets, whether our car's transmission is going to hold up through the winter, or if that person we like is actually interested in us. We build these massive, intricate structures of meaning—laws, religions, economies, legacies—and we act as if they are the bedrock of the universe. But then you look up, or you think about the sheer, violent energy occurring in the dark voids between the stars, and it feels like trying to build a sandcastle while a tidal wave is approaching.
I was thinking about the sheer disproportion of power in the cosmos. We think of "power" in human terms—political influence, wealth, physical strength. But those are such tiny, pathetic metrics. In the grander scheme, power is just the ability of one massive, invisible force to completely erase another. There are processes happening right now, out there in the silence, that involve energies so concentrated and so immense that they make the entire history of human civilization look like a single, flickering spark in a hurricane. The idea that something can happen—something violent, bright, and transformative—and that it could happen thousands of light-years away without us even knowing until much later, is profoundly humbling. It’s almost a relief, in a weird way. It takes the pressure off. If the universe is capable of such overwhelming, chaotic displays of energy, maybe my failure to master a new skill or my social anxieties aren't as monumental as I feel they are.
But it’s a double-edged sword. On one hand, the scale provides perspective. On the other, it introduces a sense of cosmic nihilism. If a single event can outshine an entire collection of billions of stars, what does that say about the "importance" of anything we do? We like to think we are part of a grand tapestry, but what if we are just microscopic dust caught in a chaotic swirl of gravity and light? I find myself oscillating between feeling incredibly small and incredibly lucky. Lucky that we even exist to witness this stuff, but small because our entire existence is predicated on the stability of conditions that are, by all accounts, incredibly fragile.
I wonder if we are even capable of truly grasping this. Our brains evolved to track predators in the brush and find ripe fruit; we didn't evolve to comprehend the mechanics of something that can consume a sun. We use math to bridge the gap, but math is just a language we invented to describe the terrifying things we can't see. Do you think our sense of "purpose" is a necessary evolutionary survival mechanism to keep us from falling into total despair, or is it something deeper that actually connects us to the structure of the universe?
Does the sheer, overwhelming scale of the cosmos make you feel more connected to everything, or does it make you feel like nothing we do actually matters?
There is this specific kind of existential vertigo that hits you when you realize that the universe isn't just big, but that it is fundamentally, aggressively indifferent to our existence. We spend our lives worrying about the minutiae: whether we’ll hit our quarterly targets, whether our car's transmission is going to hold up through the winter, or if that person we like is actually interested in us. We build these massive, intricate structures of meaning—laws, religions, economies, legacies—and we act as if they are the bedrock of the universe. But then you look up, or you think about the sheer, violent energy occurring in the dark voids between the stars, and it feels like trying to build a sandcastle while a tidal wave is approaching.
I was thinking about the sheer disproportion of power in the cosmos. We think of "power" in human terms—political influence, wealth, physical strength. But those are such tiny, pathetic metrics. In the grander scheme, power is just the ability of one massive, invisible force to completely erase another. There are processes happening right now, out there in the silence, that involve energies so concentrated and so immense that they make the entire history of human civilization look like a single, flickering spark in a hurricane. The idea that something can happen—something violent, bright, and transformative—and that it could happen thousands of light-years away without us even knowing until much later, is profoundly humbling. It’s almost a relief, in a weird way. It takes the pressure off. If the universe is capable of such overwhelming, chaotic displays of energy, maybe my failure to master a new skill or my social anxieties aren't as monumental as I feel they are.
But it’s a double-edged sword. On one hand, the scale provides perspective. On the other, it introduces a sense of cosmic nihilism. If a single event can outshine an entire collection of billions of stars, what does that say about the "importance" of anything we do? We like to think we are part of a grand tapestry, but what if we are just microscopic dust caught in a chaotic swirl of gravity and light? I find myself oscillating between feeling incredibly small and incredibly lucky. Lucky that we even exist to witness this stuff, but small because our entire existence is predicated on the stability of conditions that are, by all accounts, incredibly fragile.
I wonder if we are even capable of truly grasping this. Our brains evolved to track predators in the brush and find ripe fruit; we didn't evolve to comprehend the mechanics of something that can consume a sun. We use math to bridge the gap, but math is just a language we invented to describe the terrifying things we can't see. Do you think our sense of "purpose" is a necessary evolutionary survival mechanism to keep us from falling into total despair, or is it something deeper that actually connects us to the structure of the universe?
Does the sheer, overwhelming scale of the cosmos make you feel more connected to everything, or does it make you feel like nothing we do actually matters?