# The Liberation of Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

![rw-book-cover](https://i0.wp.com/tim.blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/benjamin-voros-phIFdC6lA4E-unsplash-scaled.jpeg?fit=1200%2C801&ssl=1)

## Metadata
- Author: [[Tim Ferriss]]
- Full Title: The Liberation of Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
- Category: #articles
- URL: https://tim.blog/2021/12/15/the-liberation-of-cosmic-insignificance-therapy/

## Highlights
- The writer of the book of Ecclesiastes, among many others, would instantly have recognized the suffering of Hollis’s patient: “Then I considered all that my hands had done, and the toil I had spent in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”
- It’s deeply unsettling to find yourself doubting the point of what you’re doing with your life. But it isn’t actually a bad thing because it demonstrates that an inner shift has already occurred.
- To realize midway through a business trip that you hate your life is already to have taken the first step into one you don’t hate—because it means you’ve grasped the fact that these are the weeks that are going to have to be spent doing something worthwhile if your finite life is to mean anything at all. This is a perspective from which you can finally ask the most fundamental question of time management: What would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count?
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- A New York writer and director named Julio Vincent Gambuto captured this sense of what I found myself starting to think of as “possibility shock”—the startling understanding that things could be different, on a grand scale, if only we collectively wanted that enough.
- 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 over-demanding 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.