Write from the cosmic perspective.

The fact that we are enormous masses of particles gathered together in a very brief cosmic event is something I have found deeply useful when facing all kinds of disappointment and tragedy, and when trying to see them differently—whether they concern us or the world around us. To look at ourselves as masses of particles that have brought together several rare phenomena—the emergence of life, then of a nervous system, then of consciousness—is something worth pausing over, especially since it happens as a very temporary event in a cosmos that is almost entirely inert and unfit for even the simplest forms of complexity across the overwhelming majority of its expanse. Even when life does arise, it is most often simple, single-celled life. How, then, should I regard myself when I have failed at something, fallen short with someone, failed to form a relationship, or to have children, or to hold a certain job, or to live in a certain place? To stand before life itself as a phenomenon is to earn the right to meet any crisis with a little irony, and to feel wonder at the plain fact that we breathe, eat, speak, and think about our own existence. Religions have addressed something like this in many ways, and the success of that view within religion makes it, without doubt, worth noticing as a narrative that works.

Using the modern, reflective parts of the brain to overcome the primitive emotions of threat, shame, failure, and fear can be achieved through narratives like this one. Even so, I don’t claim that anyone can simply take pleasure in being a single, unrepeatable moment of life. Not everyone can arrive at any feeling toward the idea that we exist in a cosmos where life is rare, in a moment of consciousness within a moment where consciousness is rare even where life exists. For me, and for some people I know, it helps. If we are in a unique moment, we ought to recognise that in it, however deep the darkness, the fear, the pain, or the sorrow.

I remember the text of a Sumerian tablet in which a student complains to his father about something to do with his clothing and his food. What would that student feel about his own moments if he realised that there are billions of moments still to come, across the tens of thousands of years in which humans will exist, and that his existence means nothing to them? He certainly could not strip away pain or sorrow or worry in that instant—but when it comes to other people, would he see them the same way? Would he feel shame before them, or anxiety about what they do, knowing that he and the people around him are this small and this forgotten—not only before the cosmos and its scale of time, but at the scale of the world and of the people who will one day live in the very same city we live in? What does it mean that you failed at something, when your own grandchildren will have to make an effort to recall your name—and, most likely, your grandchildren through your son will not even know it? Even your nearest grandchildren may not remember your name. So live inside the shame, the sorrow, and the fear that may surround you—but try, for a moment, to place the matter on this scale, if your sorrow or fear or embarrassment has to do with other people.

This narrative is like the striking of a particular chord, or a recurring theme in a dream—the dreams of flying, or of trying to find one’s way home—or like the lingering effect of a scene from a horror film.