the bigger the universe the more meaningful you are

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“When I talk to audiences about the size and age of the cosmos, people often say “it makes me feel so insignificant, I answer,” the bigger and more impersonal the universe is, the more meaningful you are, because in this vast, impersonal place needs something significant to fill it up.” We’ve abandoned the old belief that humanity is at the physical center of the universe but must come back to believing we are at the centre of meaning.”

Alan Dressler

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“If you think you’re too small to make a difference, try falling asleep with a mosquito in your room.”

The Dalai Lama

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‘7 billion people experienced this day in a different way’

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Feeling insignificant.

I tend to believe all of us, in a variety of situations, have felt insignificant or actually feel insignificant.

Shit.

In a world of 8 billion people, it can be fairly easy to feel insignificant. Conversely, by ignoring the other 7.99999999 billion people it can be fairly easy to feel pretty significant.

Sure, they may not care about you, but you sure as hell better care about them because you, well, if you don’t, someone is going to significantly try and impact you (and they may not care about you).

That said. How do I feel comfortable saying this?

If you believe in something, it matters … it is important.

If you stand for something, it matters … it is important.

And, if it is important, it is, well, significant.

I imagine the biggest question one has if it is significant to me, and speak out, does it matter? Will anyone listen to one person (me)?

Well.

Social contagion is an interesting thing. It is never top down; it is within-to-out. People’s attitudes and behaviors are contagious and it is people who get ‘copied’ which is, at its core, what the stickiness of attitudes and behavior is grounded upon.

Why shouldn’t you be the one who gets copied?

Why shouldn’t what you say or do be significant enough that you create the ‘contagion’?

What this means is if you have proximity to others and if you have something to say that is significant and it has some ‘contagious DNA’, it spreads. Significance is measured by meaning something enough to someone that it gets passed along as meaningful. This isn’t news or anything insightful. Study after study shows if you vote, and tell people you know you are going to vote, people around you are more likely to vote. Same goes with what you are reading, what you find interesting, even what you may eat. At the core of what I am saying is that a crowd is made up of individuals, some of whom create the ‘crowd cohesiveness’ and some are ‘copiers’, but all in that ‘crowd’ find something that when viewed from any angle you want, suggests everyone ‘belongs’ for some reason (that is almost the definition of ‘crowd’). My point? You may be the shaper of an idea, creator of a combination of words or just the last needed leverage point for someone else and someone else’s idea.

Yeah. Things cascade and you do not know if you are the drop that creates the waterfall. Therein lies “significance.”

I would argue most social ‘logic’ is crafted person by person, through connections and conversations (until it hits enough mass to create crowd-like emulation), so why could you not be the one to spark it?

All that said.

I could easily argue we are all significant and our significance increases the larger the universe. But I would be remiss if I didn’t point out significance takes some work.

The truth is that anything significant, i.e., any ‘non airheady argument’, i.e., something knowledgeable, takes work. And that is where significance most often goes to die. If you don’t work at being knowledgeable, the winner is not really ignorance; it is skepticism & cynicism.

Neither of those two things is conducive to persuasion and neither of those two things is conducive to effective listening and neither of them are conducive to being contagious and neither of them are conducive to energizing anything significant.

My last point is really important <and we should, in general, discuss more often>.

People, in general, are not stupid nor are people, in general, ignorant, they have mostly just given up. If they believe if they put in the work, become more knowledgeable and more enlightened, and, yet, believe what they have to say or show will not matter … uhm … then what is the incentive to put in the work? Yeah. That “takes work’ thing I mentioned. Significance demands you decide you have not given up.

In the end.

The larger the universe the more meaningful you are to the arc of the universe. Period.

That means everyone is significant. Period.

So maybe my point is, don’t waste your significance. Period.

Ponder.

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“insignificant”

——–

insignificant

things

that was and were

propose to prove what once

will be

significant

again.

 

insignificant

things

rise again

to the fall of your voice

out of a scene

which takes in

to give

all words not equal

to one

or none.

 

insignificant

things

said so long ago

and now

until now

nothing to hear

anything at all

are heard

and

the insignificant

melts

the soul

to significance.