[The Drama of Insignificance is a multi-part, ongoing series. I hope you’ll check out other posts in the series. The series runs in conjunction with the launch of the much-anticipated Human Experience Specialist Certification Course. Become one of the world’s first Human Experience Specialists. Learn more about the program here.]
Might one of the central dramas of human existence be our struggle with insignificance?
We arrive in the world with no particular reason to suppose that we matter, except that we matter enormously to ourselves. We are the center of our own universe, the creature whose pains hurt, whose hopes matter, whose disappointments disappoint, and whose death will constitute the end of everything, at least as far as we are concerned.
And yet we are also one among billions of human beings, living on a small planet in an immense universe, destined to occupy a brief moment in time and then disappear. How are we to reconcile these two realities? How are we to live as creatures who matter infinitely to ourselves and, in some larger sense, hardly at all?
This may sound like a philosophical question, but I think it is also a profoundly practical one. Consider the person who has worked hard all his life, made sacrifices, cultivated his talents, tried to behave honorably, and arrived at the age of sixty or seventy with the uncomfortable suspicion that none of it has amounted to very much.
He may have a family, friends, accomplishments, and a reasonably comfortable existence. He may have no particular reason to complain. Yet he finds himself wondering whether he has actually mattered, whether he has made any difference, whether his life has been anything more than a succession of days that happened to him and that he did his best to negotiate. He may be ashamed of these thoughts, since he knows perfectly well that he has much to be grateful for. But gratitude and significance are not the same thing.
Or consider a young woman who has been told since childhood that she is gifted, that she has remarkable potential, that she might accomplish something extraordinary. She has believed this, or at least hoped that it might be true. Now she is thirty-five, working at a job that makes little use of her abilities, watching other people achieve the recognition she once imagined for herself, and beginning to suspect that her promised life is not going to materialize.
What exactly is she experiencing? Disappointment, certainly. Perhaps envy, perhaps regret, perhaps anger. But I wonder if something more fundamental isn’t occurring? She may be experiencing the humiliation of discovering that the world has no particular interest in her potential, that the universe is not waiting for her to become somebody, and that the importance she has always imagined possessing may never become visible to anyone else.
We have many words for these experiences. We speak of low self-esteem, depression, disappointment, frustration, alienation, loneliness, and despair. These words may sometimes be appropriate, but I wonder if they also obscure something. What if the person is not primarily suffering from low self-esteem? What if she thinks reasonably well of herself? What if the problem is not that she considers herself worthless but that she considers herself valuable and cannot get the world to agree? What if the problem is not that she lacks confidence but that she possesses considerable confidence and finds that confidence continually contradicted by reality?
This suggests a distinction worth making. There is the fact of our relative insignificance, and there is the experience of insignificance. The first may be unavoidable. The second is not necessarily so. A person might recognize that he is one among billions, that his accomplishments will eventually be forgotten, and that the universe has no particular interest in his existence, and nevertheless live a satisfying, productive, even joyful life. Another person might possess fame, wealth, power, and the admiration of millions and still feel profoundly insignificant. Evidently the experience of insignificance cannot be measured simply by counting our accomplishments or determining our place in the social hierarchy.
Nor should we assume that the desire to matter is merely vanity. We might wish that human beings were less concerned with their importance, but would we really want to eliminate that concern altogether? Isn’t the desire to matter connected to our willingness to create, to love, to contribute, to stand up for ourselves, to defend our dignity, and to attempt difficult things?
The person who wants his life to count is not necessarily suffering from some unfortunate psychological defect. He may simply be expressing something fundamental about being human. The difficulty begins when the desire to matter becomes a demand that life cannot satisfy, or when the failure to receive recognition becomes an injury from which a person cannot recover.
I suspect that much more of human behavior is organized around this predicament than we ordinarily acknowledge. We pursue accomplishments, seek admiration, compare ourselves with others, become resentful when overlooked, fantasize about future triumphs, and revisit old humiliations. We may exaggerate our importance or minimize our achievements. We may attach ourselves to powerful people, prestigious institutions, or grand causes in the hope that some of their importance will become ours. We may even come to hate people who seem to possess the significance we believe has been denied us. Not all of these behaviors arise from the same motives, of course, but I wonder how many of them are animated, at least in part, by the struggle not to feel like nothing.
And there is another possibility, perhaps a more troubling one. What if the experience of insignificance is not merely painful but dangerous? What if some people, unable to tolerate the feeling that they do not matter, become willing to do almost anything to restore their sense of importance? We can imagine constructive responses: creating something, helping someone, building a life, discovering a purpose. But we can also imagine destructive ones: humiliating others, demanding submission, seeking revenge, embracing grandiose fantasies, or finding satisfaction in the suffering of people who can be made to seem smaller than ourselves. The desire to matter may be one of our great human engines. It may also, under certain circumstances, become one of our great human dangers.
I want to explore this drama without assuming that it has a simple solution. I do not think we can merely advise people to stop caring about their importance, nor do I think we should encourage everyone to pursue greatness as the cure for insignificance. Perhaps the challenge is to find some workable relationship between our actual smallness and our legitimate need to matter. Perhaps we need to learn how to be ordinary without feeling humiliated by our ordinariness. Perhaps we need to learn how to acknowledge our limitations without surrendering our ambitions, and how to live meaningful lives without requiring the universe to certify their importance.
But before we arrive at any such possibilities, we need to understand the predicament itself. What does it mean to feel insignificant? Why does that feeling wound some people so deeply while leaving others relatively untroubled? Why can a person who has accomplished a great deal feel that he has accomplished nothing? And why might the fear of not mattering lead one person toward creativity and another toward cruelty? These strike me as questions worth asking, not because we can expect to answer them definitively, but because the answers we attempt may illuminate a surprisingly large portion of what human beings do, what they suffer, and what they hope for.
CONCLUDING PROPOSITION:
The need to matter is one of the fundamental engines of human existence, capable of inspiring our greatest accomplishments and, when frustrated or distorted, some of our most destructive behavior.
[The Drama of Insignificance is a multi-part, ongoing series. I hope you’ll check out other posts in the series. The series runs in conjunction with the launch of the much-anticipated Human Experience Specialist Certification Course. Become one of the world’s first Human Experience Specialists. Learn more about the program here.]
**