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Comment by icanhackit | Hacker News Reader

The gold is at the bottom: “The humble person is probably more aware and accepting of the fact that against a cosmic scale of time and space, every human being is minute.”

If there's one thing that will humble you it's trying to fathom the scale of the universe. You think a celebrity matters at these scales? But don't let it make you feel impotent - rejoice at the fact that you're alive, you exist and the world is fucking interesting. Even if you just stare out the window all day, you're a consciousness residing in a stardust body observing the thing that made you.

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"that against a cosmic scale of time and space, every human being is minute"

There is a paved road to clinical depression which starts with thoughts like these. I know it because I've taken it.

Life stops having meaning if you take this too seriously - I mean, why do anything or achieve anything if we're just specs in time and space destined to die and be forgotten ?

Besides, this doesn't necessarily imply humility. If it doesn't matter then it doesn't matter - if you've got a small/quiet ego or you're a larger-than-universe egomaniac... because... we're just a minute...

We are minute, yet here we are - the Universe observing itself.

"Why do anything?". Presented with these options, which would you prefer:

A. Live a normal life and be promised that after your death people will fabricate a story of your adventure, heroism and glory?

B. Live a life of adventure, heroism and glory with the promise that when you die nobody will remember you?

The point being, why derive meaning from the notion of being remembered by people you will never know, when the meaning may be found in the experiences our actions produce now?

The heights of human happiness (yeah, misery too) are ours for the taking. Derive meaning from trying to squeeze as much of the former from life as we possibly can.

I'm not disagreeing with you but just feeling like I could look at (A) as be helpful too lots of people and (B) live a selfish life of hedonism. Was that your intent or do you see a different way of defining (A) and (B)?

To the universe you are nothing. To history you are probably nothing.

But to a small number of people you can be everything.

'Cause for the world you are someone, but for someone you're the world' ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOlG-H_Pjbg

There's another type of depression that comes from always grasping for (money|acceptance|fame|success|whatever) and never fully attaining it. For people stuck on this treadmill, the long perspective can be a good reminder that none of it is really worth getting too bent out of shape about. On a cosmic timescale, all these things we worry about will be gone and forgotten in the blink of an eye.

The best antidote to avoid swinging the other way, into nihilism, is to simply live in the present as much as possible and enjoy what's there. Things don't need to be permanent and important to be enjoyable. Think about games. We know the outcome doesn't matter in any larger frame of reference, but we still like playing and get wrapped up in them for their own sake. Life is just another game--not ultimately significant, but fun to get wrapped up in if you don't take the outcome overly seriously.

Nihilism is still a form of depression.

Things are not permanent, yes. All things arise and pass, including nihilism and depression.

The folks I know who are truly in equanimity and live in the present, are present in the moment, are among the most vibrant and real people I know. When they laugh, they laugh, when they grieve, they grieve. They are fearless in their love, even knowing that all things will pass.

It might just be that they are positively biased: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism

Balancing this line defines the human experience in my opinion. Objectively it is true, we are minute. But humanity is in the subjective making of meaning. That opportunity to make your own meaning is an incredible one if you choose to accept it. If you don't, it's not, and depression/nihilism results.

And the funny thing is, those who hone that strongest sense of subjective meaning and well being in how they see the world, are the ones who make an outsized butterfly-effect impact on the world, coming closest to overcoming that objective meaninglessnes.

So basically, imo the answer to why do anything? Is because you believe something is worth doing subjectively/on faith/on instinct. Only then does it have a chance to build toward a more objective answer to why do it, in its impact on people & history.

"That opportunity to make your own meaning is an incredible one if you choose to accept it. If you don't, it's not, and depression/nihilism results."

This is not true. There are meditative practices where you end up passing through depression and nihilism, but those are still forms of the ego trying make itself known, clinging to it's existence. This is similar to the Five Stages of Grief, where you are not yet at acceptance and equanimity.

I think there's only danger in taking the cosmic scale of the universe seriously if you also take your selfhood seriously.

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Minuteness is a problem when you feel like an outsider 'brought into' the world to 'confront' it, but is less problematic if you feel like part of a greater whole.

That's the feeling of "insignificance", the lack of agency, and seeing the pointlessness. None of those are humility.

When I contemplate the vast cosmic scale and look up in the stores, my jaws drop open like a kid, and I go "whoa..." That's the sense of awe and profoundness. It doesn't have to be about humility or about insignificance.

You can conclude that in the greater scale of things, you may not have much impact and still enjoy life.

Because being aware that your actions in the greater scale of things mean less, make it easier for you to appreciate the moment and what you can do for those who will be around when you are.

That sounds like what the article describes as high self-esteem coupled with an uncomfortable threat to that self-esteem (the larger the ego, the more likely it is to run into death anxiety).

When nothing we do matters, all that matters is what we do.

"What did your face look like before your parents were born?"

There's a quality in these one-liners from the Zen tradition that I haven't experienced since I was obsessed with physics in high-school.

I never really understood how the 'the universe is vast' argument is humbling. What does size have to do with importance? That's like saying a bar of gold has less value if you store it in a bigger room. There are many humbling things in the universe, like making an off-by-one error in C++ with more than a decade of programming experience, but the vastness of the universe is not one of those things.

I used to think the same thing, but it's not about putting the gold bar in a large empty room. Consider that the our galaxy has a mass of about 6×10^42 kg. The relative abundance of gold is 6×10^-10, so our galaxy has 4×10^33 kg of gold.

The gold bar isn't in a large empty room. It's in a room filled with piles of gold, each more massive than the planet Mercury, for every person on Earth. Amongst those piles, would that single bar still hold value to you?

Edit: Formatting engine didn't like using * for multiplication

The base of that goes back to a very simple realization: On a cosmic scale nothing that we do is of great importance. This planet likely is not as special as we would like to think it is and we are not as special as we like to think we are. We are to the universe as a single bacterium is to us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

Is a nice recap of just how vast the universe really is and how utterly insignificant we are within it, in spite of all we're figured out and have achieved collectively. It certainly humbles me.

I can just as easily extract the opposite conclusion, and say that we must be incredibly special if it took an universe that big to create us. And it's as good as a conclusion until we discover if intelligent is common or not.

I'd side with it not being a good argument.

Another humbling aspect is how fragile we are. Even today, there is a number of unpredictable cosmic events outside our control that can destroy humanity and life on Earth very quickly. And every one of us is just a "meat bag" that doesn't know whether it will wake up tomorrow. I find these realizations humbling. Some people get depressed by these thought but they make me appreciate life even more.

"We're significantly insignificant while also being insignificantly significant."

There's no such thing as importance independent of sentient minds. Importance is what we find important; or to put it another way, whatever we find important - is.

I think that it's not about an argument, its a mental simulation and chemical effect. If you hold in your head the feeling of owning your body completely, for a moment, then start to imagine zooming out to a wider perspective, slowly, like a camera you see the whole world then the solar system, etc. As you scale outwards there is usually a noticeable chemical reaction in your brain and body. You literally feel smaller. My guess is you are triggering a predator-is-bigger-than-me reaction in your brain.

>I never really understood how the 'the universe is vast' argument is humbling.

The idea that if there are millions of planets like ours, containing billions and billions of beings like us, on average your "problems" could be a lot worse. I find it humbling imagining the epicness of some of the struggles going on elsewhere in the universe.

When I do that, I open up to the sense of awe and wonder, but not necessarily humility.

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