"Cosmic Joke"

Looking forward to learning more about the "cosmic joke," May.

The joke's closely related, I think, to what Burkeman calls "Cosmic Insignificance"...

...To be reminded of your cosmic insignificance therefore isn't just relaxing, but actively empowering. Because once you remember the stakes aren't anywhere near that high, you're free to take meaningful risks, to let unimportant things slide, and to let other people deal with how they might feel about your failing to live up to their expectations.

It's not that nothing matters from your perspective, obviously: it doesn't stop being important to feed a newborn baby, or keep up your rent payments, just because nobody in a million years will care whether you did so or not. What cosmic insignificance therapy™ does, though, is to recalibrate the yardstick with which you measure what's important from your perspective.

This results, if you're anything like me, in the realisation that 99% of what you worry about isn't worth the worry. The universe will trundle on its way regardless of what you do or don't do. So you might as well focus your time and attention on what you care about most deeply yourself – and let everything else join the infinite list of things that people have been fretting about since the dawn of humanity, but that never really mattered to begin with.

In other words: plenty matters. But we've only got so many weeks, so we've got to prioritize what matters most to us. That's not selfish, it's sane and sensible. It's inseparable from our happiness.