Oliver Burkeman’s Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
This is the second of two posts inspired by Oliver Burkeman’s book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Burkeman 2021), which puts productivity in perspective.
Here, I’ll be considering what Burkeman calls “cosmic insignificance therapy.” We start, perhaps, with why we might need some therapy, some healing, around our ideas of what it means to create a well-lived life.
For Burkeman, the first step in creating a well-lived life is to separate the idea of a well-lived life from the pressure to have your life be considered “significant” by the culture at large:
…it comes as a relief to be reminded of your insignificance: it’s the feeling of realizing that you’d been holding yourself, all this time, to standards you couldn’t reasonably be expected to meet. And this realization isn’t merely calming but liberating, because once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a “life well spent,” you’re freed to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time. You’re freed, too, to consider the possibility that many of the things you’re already doing with it are more meaningful than you’d supposed—and that until now, you’d subconsciously been devaluing them, on the grounds that they weren’t “significant” enough. (Burkeman 2021, p 212)
How Significance Gets Redefined as Consumer Success
Our 21st century American culture is not neutral about what it means to be significant. In commercial and social media, significance is defined as success; success in turn is all about doing or having things that impress people who are strangers to you.
Furthermore, commercial and social media-promoted success is a) in the context of the marketplace, and is b) quantifiable by the marketplace.
So “significance” means you have a six-figure follower count; it means you have dollars in the bank (preferably millions or billions); or it means you have dollars you’ve turned into something almost no one else can afford (say, your own space ship).
I call this “consumerist* significance.”
Some examples of consumerist significance:
Your life is considered significant (”successful”) if you display luxury goods. You have the latest and greatest iThing, exercise gear (lately this seems to be a Peloton), an on-trend freshly (re)decorated house, stylish clothing.** Compare this to news stories we occasionally hear about secretaries, teachers, janitors, who lived quietly and left millions to charity. To the culture at large, they do not appear significant while they are alive: they drive beat up old cars, wear old clothes, live in boring houses, and pack simple lunches (NBC News, no date).
Your life is considered significant if you make lots of money providing something consumers like, and especially if you spend some of that money in a splashy way. This is financial and career significance as a consumerist-entrepreneur: Consider the Great Billionaire Space Race of 2021; compare this to Nobel prize-winners Jennifer Doudna and Emmannuelle Charpentier, who developed the gene-editing tool CRISPR, but who made far less of a media splash than, say, our culture’s ongoing obsession with Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk.
Here, we find a bit of a gender divide with consumerist significance - ladies, our lives are significant if we frequently post images of ourselves portraying domesticized, female perfection: Beautiful clothing, beautiful make-up and hair styling, beautiful home, beautiful children, beautifully staged for online consumption; ideally leading to financial success as an influencer, in a way that reinforces traditional ideas of what women are supposed to be like. It is time-consuming, expensive, demanding work (Petersen, 2021), and it is also an algorithm-driven consumerist model. (Digression, maybe: Why was Elizabeth Holmes able to con so many? In large part, I would argue, because she fulfilled a cultural fantasy of a female consumerist-entrepreneur who was still considered womanly.)
Consumerist ideas of a life of significance are the most common, but for those of us who are book-reading introverts, here is one more: the idea that you are significant if your name is in history books. So perhaps this is a cultured consumerist ideal. (You are successful if somebody memorializes you in the literature or in a museum, and we can consume your creations or your life story.) Through this lens, you achieve significance through doing or creating something whereby, several generations after you die, bookish people like me still know your name and something about you. Dostoevsky. Queen Elizabeth I. Aesop. Hildegard of Bingen. Shakespeare. Jane Austen. Darwin. Harriet Tubman.
Burkeman’s Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
We must push back against this idea that we are failures if our real lives don’t impress strangers. All of this opposes simplicity and self-direction, real agency, in one’s own life. Burkeman points out that from a truly cosmic view, “you almost certainly won’t put a dent in the universe.” (Burkeman 2021, p 212)
He writes about how the experience of living becomes something joyful when we let go of the idea that a meaningful life must make a lasting cultural mark:
“From this new perspective, it becomes possible to see that preparing nutritious meals for your children might matter as much as anything could ever matter, even if you won’t be winning any cooking awards; or that your novel’s worth writing if it moves or entertains a handful of your contemporaries, even though you know you’re no Tolstoy. Or that virtually any career might be a worthwhile way to spend a working life, if it makes things slightly better for those it serves. Furthermore, it means that if what we learn from the experience of the coronavirus pandemic is to become just a little more attuned to the needs of our neighbors, we’ll have learned something valuable as a result of the “Great Pause,” no matter how far off the root-and-branch transformation of society remains. Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can. (Isn’t it hilarious, in hindsight, that you ever imagined things might be otherwise?) Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely—and often enough, marvelously—really is.” (Burkeman 2021, p 214)
Burkeman’s notion of cosmic insignificance helps us release the idea that our lives, to be meaningful, must impress strangers. He writes instead about the impact we have on the people we know and love, and how so often we discount the significance of this.
I completely agree.
What I Learned About Significance from Officiating at Funerals
By now I have officiated at many funerals. I have never led a funeral service for someone famous. But everyone, in one way or another, is remembered — is known for some things — and usually not for their careers or possessions. Most of the funerals I do are for people who retired decades before. They might have been ill and home-bound for the last ten or twenty years. The people who show up at their funerals are, by and large, not work colleagues, unless someone dies before they retire (or very soon after).
My sketch of an old family cemetery near Oyster Bay, Chincoteague Island.
What people are remembered for, is their impact on their close relationships. It’s not about how they impressed strangers. It’s how they impacted their family and friends.
The only time I heard anyone talk about work at a graveside was from a man who traveled a couple hundred miles to attend the funeral of an elderly man. He told a story of how the deceased, who was a manager at a local factory back in the 1900s, would coach struggling employees so they did not lose their jobs. Don’t show up late, don’t come to work drunk, he would tell them. Other managers had zero-tolerance policies. At his funeral, this person said that when he showed up impaired one day at a job he really needed, the older man had coached and encouraged him. “He changed my life,” the speaker said.
At funerals I’ve heard stories about women who quietly made meals for neighbors in need, or delivered Christmas cookies to people who were widowed and living alone. One of these women also had someone travel a long distance to speak at her funeral. This person remembered, from decades earlier, how when they were growing up in a chaotic home, that there was always room at her table, always more food to fill another plate for another kid; no questions asked.
Another woman, while she was dying, joyfully welcomed a visitor who had booked a cross-country flight to visit her at the hospital. “She was like a mother to me,” he told me. “She was like a grandmother to my children.”
Another story: Years ago, and not where I am serving now, I recall a funeral for a man who was angry about dying. But some people are; and I do not make assumptions about what they were like before. I met his family for the first time when we gathered to plan the service. When I asked if anyone wanted to share remembrances during the service, his grown children began to talk over each other — “we cannot say this, we cannot say that.” It turned out he had been angry all his life. In the end, after a heated discussion, they agreed that no one would speak at the funeral. That service was rather brief.
The meaning you make out of living your own life will go with you into the grave. What you remember about your own life (based on my conversations with people in hospice) are your experiences, your relationships with others, good and bad, and the stories you tell yourself about what any of it means. A lot of people talk about times when they were very young. And about their own parents, usually long gone. Almost no one talks about work.
And, based on my experience at funerals, the meaning others make of your life is largely about your impact on them. Perhaps curating your image for thousands of strangers is easier; I don’t know.
But impression control with family and friends is useless. They make of you, what they make of you. The stories other people tell about you are almost never the stories you tell about yourself. (Sometimes I recognize myself when others tell me how they see me; sometimes I am startled by their assessments.)
Burkeman recognizes the high cost of believing that our lives are meaningless unless strangers know our names. (Consider that the names everyone knew in the popular culture of 1910 are largely forgotten now.)
In the cemeteries where I pronounce the last words over people’s caskets, I do not know of anyone famous buried there. Odds are, the people who come to your funeral will be the ones you see every day, or on holidays. Odds are, if someone visits my grave two or three generations from now, my name will probably not ring a bell.
I wonder if this still rings a bell…? Should I try it, and run away?
Photo: Anna Havron, October 2021
This is the cosmic insignificance therapy Burkeman recommends: that we recognize the power and beauty of our small, unrecorded, daily, living actions and experiences.
Havron’s Cosmically Significant Pushback
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m kidding.
Kidding aside, Burkeman is right that it is rewarding to savor our real, everyday lives, in real time, with real people.
But I don’t conclude that your life and mine are cosmically insignificant. Whether you believe your life is cosmically significant is a spiritual matter.
The great religious and wisdom traditions claim, paradoxically, that our small, regular, anonymous kindnesses reverberate with cosmic significance***, if not cultural fame.
One last story: not long before the lockdowns of the pandemic, I chatted with a young man who worked for a filter company.
“You know,” he said, “filters. For pipes and vacuum cleaners and stuff.” (He thought that what he did was unimportant. I said, “Your job allows people with asthma to be able to breathe, and for me to be able to drink clean water, so thank you very much for that.”)
He said his boss at that company told him, "I have a responsibility toward you and your home life: if I treat you with fairness and respect, you go home in a better state of mind. If I treat you poorly, you'll go home and the frustrations at work will spill over into your home life."
His boss wanted to be sure he did not harm his employees’ personal lives, or their families, through his own actions. This company also energetically fostered what they called a 'no blame' culture. They knew mistakes and accidents would happen. When something happened, they asked people to report it right away — with no blame — so they could all work together effectively toward solutions.
I believe that this filter company is cosmically significant.
References
Burkeman, O. (2021) Four thousand weeks: time management for mortals. First. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
Housel, M. (2020) The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness. Harriman House.
They lived modestly and quietly saved. Then they left millions to charity. (no date) NBC News. Available at: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/sylvia-bloom-frugal-secretary-hid-9m-fortune-she-joins-list-n871996 (Accessed: 26 October 2021).
Petersen, A.H. (2021) ‘The Ideological Battlefield of the “Mamasphere”’, Culture Study, 20 October. Available at: https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-ideological-battlefield-of-the (Accessed: 27 October 2021).
Notes
*In the 19th and early 20th century, Americans were described and addressed as “citizens.” For the last several generations, we’ve usually been described and addressed as “consumers.”
**For a wonderful examination of how luxury goods often reveal financial struggle rather than success, check out Morgan Housel’s book, The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness.
***I love Burkeman’s “cosmic insignificance therapy,” but in my own soul, I don’t feel pressured by spiritual ideas of cosmic significance. I think there are spiritual ecologies every bit as real as natural ones, where our actions interweave in a meaningful way with something immense, hidden, mysterious; and most of all, alive.