Clara, a successful thirty-eight-year-old executive at a medical instruments company, was flying somewhere over Nebraska when seemingly, out of nowhere, a disturbing thought occurred to her mid-sentence while reading a book: “I hate my life.” [1]
According to James Hollis, the Jungian psychotherapist who later treated her, Clara had identified her life with achieving her professional goals and knew, from that moment on, she had been “walking on the crust of a depression.”
Oliver Burkeman, who recounts the story in his book, Four Thousand Weeks, adds to Clara’s alarming realization,
A malaise that had been growing in her for years had crystallised in the understanding that she was spending her days in a way that no longer felt as if it had any meaning. The relish she’d had for her work had drained away; the rewards she’d been pursuing seemed worthless; and now life was a matter of going through the motions, in the fading hope that it somehow all might yet pay off in future happiness.
The Great Pause
Many can relate to Clara. Maybe not explicitly to the word “hate” or the circumstances in which she experienced her epiphany. But all of us have, at one time or another, questioned whether we are living “on purpose” and using our finite time meaningfully.
Burkeman posits that assuming we live to eighty, we have around four thousand weeks on Earth. Indeed, our time is limited, and upon realizing that reality, we might reason, depending on where we are in life, that we are, in fact, not living “on purpose” and, therefore, not using that time well.
The pervasive belief among many of us, through no fault of our own, is that if we’re not doing something grandiose with our lives, something akin to the people we admire and aspire to be like, then we’re not leading a meaningful life. But this belief couldn’t be further from the truth.
If the Covid-19 Lockdowns taught us anything, it’s that we don’t need to commit hours commuting to an office every day when we can work from home and achieve similar, if not greater, output.
To paraphrase, Burkeman, the “great pause” gave us time to reflect on the tradeoffs we have long been making, and remind us that what we thought mattered—commuting, busyness, the appearance of working hard—mattered far less than we thought.
Embrace Your Irrelevance
“What you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much,” writes Burkeman. “When it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.” To put it another way, paraphrasing writer Sergei Dovlatov, our lives are a grain of sand in the indifferent vastness of space and time.
It’s easy to dismiss such a thought as negative or overly existential. That’s a given. But from another perspective—what Burkeman calls “cosmic insignificant therapy”—we might remind ourselves that, when things all seem too much, we can rest in the knowledge that much of the daily clutter that clogs our minds is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
Many of us adopt similar views in our daily lives already. We overestimate what others think about us before we’re reminded, through experience or otherwise, that most people are more concerned with themselves. While we’re the center of our world, we remind ourselves that we’re not the center of everyone else’s. [2]
Similarly, we might comfort a friend or family member going through a challenging period and remind them that “this too shall pass” and that what feels like a problem today will likely be something they look back at and laugh about a month, if not a week from now.
In both examples, we look at daily issues relative to various vantage points—with the latter in particular focusing on time—but rarely do we look at things in relation to the universe itself.
In its simplest form, cosmic insignificance therapy offers relief from the unrealistic expectations we place upon ourselves.
If we contrast the idea from its opposite viewpoint—the belief that our contributions in life have cosmic significance—we’re more likely to question whether we’re making a big enough dent in the universe and using our time well as we could be, setting an unreachable bar for in the process.
After all, if we’re not writing what we hope will be the next great American novel, building a brand that will eventually IPO, or raising children to perform at the top of their class, are we really doing anything of significance or meaning with our lives?
But if we remind ourselves of our insignificance in relation to the universe; that we will never meet the overly unrealistic standards we place upon ourselves; that our “life purpose” must leave a legacy; then we can give greater meaning to what we’re already doing or what we’re aspiring to move toward in the future.
We don’t know how many weeks we have remaining or how close we’ll make it to that elusive four thousandth week. But there is one certainty: we can choose how we use our time during the weeks we have—however many that might be—and remind ourselves that what we’re doing now, at this moment, is more meaningful than we can ever imagine.
Footnotes
[1] James Hollis writes about an unnamed patient in his book, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life. I gave her a name for storytelling purposes.
[2] For more on this psychological phenomenon, read about the spotlight effect.
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