Usually it is nothing to worry about, except when you get obsessed by it and it starts to control aspects of your life because you build a worldview around it or try hard to avoid it or explain it away: then it is called an existential crisis. But what it really means is that the mind gets overwhelmed by the fact that the universe is orders of magnitudes more complex than what the self has ever encountered in our daily lifes. Our brains have evolved so that bipedal apes that migrated from forests into the steppes can survive and cooperate in groups. It was never meant to be confronted by questions of this dimension, but yet here we are.
You can make your peace with it, and embrace it. It can also be a source of endless curiosity, spirituality and creativity.
Somehow the perspective of my life just being a tiny sparkle in the grand scheme of things would render any stress moot.
There is no reason that a superintelligent AI cannot do the following: create superintelligent theories about the universe (using superintelligent intuition), create superintelligent tools to prove its superintelligent theories, leading to superintelligent empirical observation, ultimately producing the answer to the question of our existence far faster and far more eloquently than is predicted.
Existential anxiety isn't per se about the relative size of self to the world but more about the inability to grasp and control the understanding of it. Pretty much everything living strives to "control" things, and in the case of human beings this applies to mental things too. Controlling things on a mental level is usually about understanding them, not necessarily about bending them to our will.
Anxiety is tied to a difficulty in dealing with perceived lack of control (over others, over our emotions, over the future..), and existential anxiety is an example of anxiety when it comes to existence. We simply don't know enough to say something that cements control.
Thankfully one of the coping mechanisms is humour, so I'll leave the reader with the very well known Douglas Adams bit:
“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
I decided to accept the Douglas Adams perspective: In an infinite universe, an infinite number of seemingly improbable things will inevitably happen, including a random number of particles ejected from astronomical explosions collecting together in one spot in such a way and for just enough time to create life as we know it, and for some of that life to think, "Why am I here?", before entropy rips all of it apart again a cosmic blink later. We exist because in an infinite universe, all things that can happen will happen, including you. There's even a universe in which a god did in fact create everything... which is an interesting question: How do we know if we're in that universe or not?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit... ?
That's fantastic.
Not the dread of an insignificant existence, rather, the dread of an unending existence.
If you approach with a healthy nihilistic attitude, it's just cool stuff but doesn't matter(because nothing matters and as a nilhilist that's OK). But if you're chained to upholding or championing something, the existence question may become an enemy, one that is so hard to dismiss that it drains you.
I always wondered whether other people experienced this too, now I know. Thanks!
I take solace in some way that I am not alone in this and that there are other groups of trillions of atoms somewhere else in spacetime pondering the same questions with the same intensity.
For whatever reason, it makes more more anxious than it should. The concepts involved are so far removed from my brain's understanding of reality that it makes me uncomfortable.
Like you're about to touch something that could cause everything to blink out of existence.
It actually causes physical discomfort and an increased heartrate and rapid breathing, like you need to turn back, NOW.