According to my beliefs, I am only here by chance. I don’t believe that there was a greater power, be it God or the stork, that took a look at me and said, “Send her to Earth!” The fact that I am here is due to a series of events that just happened to create the consciousness that ultimately creates me. There was no formula or decision-making that resulted in the world needing a version of me. The world will be the same with or without me. My friends and family will obviously feel a difference, but the entire known universe will not stop progressing to maximum efficiency when I’m gone. The world will not stop turning. In the grand scheme of things, I am pretty insignificant in terms of the rest of our known reality.

With that being said, this is not an existential crisis nor is this me in a depressive state saying, “No one loves me.” I have my relationships, and I have myself, so this statement can’t be true. This, instead, is me reclaiming my individual existence. This is myself addressing the status quo by saying, “Me as an individual has absolutely nothing to do with you,” and I encourage you to do the same.

I encourage you to find a spot where you can address thoughts like these. The best spots are those which gives you a view of many different things at once. In Seattle, we have places like Gasworks Park which gives us a stunning view of Downtown.

While is it an amazing place, I encourage you to go somewhere where it’s quiet. This forces you to speak only to your thoughts, which can easily be drowned out by music or the low hum of the city. For me, as indicated by the picture, I had hiked to the top of Little Si with a close friend (slightly in the picture) and I captured this moment. I could see much further than what the eye at ground level could capture, not to mention I had the mystic clouds suggesting that there were people and places further beyond what I could see in that moment. Talk about feeling incredibly small.

When standing here, even though it was only a few minutes, I was able to readily dissect my actions up until that point. I also dived deep into the supposed “life I wanted to live.” I thought of all the times I have tried to impress someone, and I thought of the job I thought I should have if I wanted people to respect me. I thought of money, and how most of my life I was chasing a salary instead of my dreams. I thought of my hobbies and passions I had pushed aside of years because I was embarrassed of them, or afraid people wouldn’t accept them.

I then thought of the life beyond those mountains, the lives I had never encountered and the lives that probably would never cross paths with me. I thought of how they didn’t even know me, and they would go throughout their lives not knowing me, and so what I did or didn’t do would never matter to them.

Beyond that, the people I thought mattered in terms of my own identity aren’t even in my life anymore. I have no reason to involve myself with them. Our social worlds do not intersect. Both their physical and emotional presence was fleeting, and so it had me thinking: just how many people am I going to run into during my lifetime, and how many of those people are going to stick around? What you have to remember is that you are a small pocket of energy existing among billions (way more than that, technically). Most people won’t mean very much to you, as some people you’ll interact with for seconds at a time. They’ll simply be that one person you talked to at the grocery store or some nonsense.

Then there are the people who don’t even know you exist, and they never will. Their world functions just fine without them knowing you, and your world functions just fine without you knowing them. Does that mean we all need to fend for ourselves? Absolutely not. We can still look out for one another as human beings. It just means we are all so incredibly small, who we decide to be cannot mean so much so as to change the way we navigate our lives.

Like I said, we are all incredibly insignificant. The entropy of the universe is not bothered by what you decide to do with your own life. Others’ opinions are what force you to conform, and I urge you to ignore those opinions because the entropy of the universe does not care about those people either. In my opinion, I’d rather follow in the footsteps of the very framework that keeps us all alive versus someone who doesn’t accept me for who I am.

So, moral of the story, be insignificant. Be you. The universe literally does not care.