{"id":4990,"date":"2014-12-16T20:26:57","date_gmt":"2014-12-17T01:26:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=4990"},"modified":"2014-12-16T12:06:26","modified_gmt":"2014-12-16T17:06:26","slug":"cheer-up-youre-special-after-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=4990","title":{"rendered":"Cheer Up, You’re Special After All!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a quick blog thought for when you’re feeling blue — perhaps the December blues, when “the holiday season” is getting on your nerves and the cold and early darkness is starting to bring you down.<\/p>\n

Or let’s say that your life seems disappointing, because the great dreams and promises of your youth just didn’t come to pass . . . There’s an article in this months Atlantic about the “U” shaped curve<\/a> of life satisfaction. According to various studies and interpretations of those studies, we are generally pretty happy with our lives as children and in our early adulthood, then things go downhill until bottoming out in our mid to late 40s. We hit bottom, but things start seeming better to us in our 50s and better still in our 60s and 70s.<\/p>\n

So maybe you’re now 46 years old and don’t feel very optimistic, maybe you are fighting off a mid-life crisis. Or maybe you’re like me, having gotten thru my 40s, 50s and 60s without any great crisis, but still wondering just when that upward trend is going to kick-in. <\/p>\n

Let’s say that you wonder every now and then, was it all worth it . . . was I nothing but another little spec of dust, another sad life, ultimately insignificant . . . .<\/p>\n

Well, there are various cures for this, including booze, spiritual nostrums, anti-depressants, and friends (real friends, that is, not the Facebook kind). And maybe also family (if they don’t make you feel even worse, which they sometimes do) . . . <\/p>\n

But here’s another thought — this one is from the perspective of “Big History<\/a>“. (Recall that I just finished listening to the Teaching Company lectures on Big History by Prof. David Christian). To have the thought that I’m referring to, think about the vast scales of the Universe since the Big Bang; consider the vastness of space, the 13+ billions of years, all the gadzillions of swirling particles of energy and dust . . . <\/p>\n

And yet, in only a tiny, tiny fragment of it all, and for just a tiny fraction of time, has life as we know it emerged. And in just a tiny fraction of that life, has self-aware, self-conscious, emotionally sentient life (such as the human race) happened. <\/p>\n

This (hopefully) makes one realize that we human beings are a tiny but extremely rare and privileged portion of creation. We soak in tremendous levels of information, levels entirely unavailable to 99.9999999% of the universe. We experience things that just cannot be experienced by most of what’s out there. Yes, little old us . . .<\/p>\n

So each one of us is special and extremely privileged to have experienced the honor of being a conscious human being. If you catch my drift, you might then see that it’s really pushing things to get so upset about the fact that we weren’t on top of the human list, that other humans may have done this or that better than we did. So Beyonce, the Dali Lama, Kim Kardashian, Paul Krugman, LeBron James and Hilary Clinton are in the news and on the screen, and you are not. So what. It’s like sniggling about a 0.000000000000000001% cut of the cake, after getting 99.9999999999999999% on your plate. We’re quibbling over crumbs here, in the grand scheme of things. Really, Lady Gaga and Aaron Rodgers and Ted Cruz are ultimately just crumbs . . . and just like crumbs, celebs get stale very quickly.<\/p>\n

Does that help? Well, go out and look at the stars (not the Kardashian kind) . . . and remember that you can see those stars, but they can’t see you. They don’t see nothing. The bits of matter and energy that came together to form you are very blessed pieces of the universe, as they have the opportunity to look out and see the rest of creation. So enjoy it and make the best of it! And have a wonderful “Holiday Season” and “Happy New Year” after all. It’s your celestial mission!! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s a quick blog thought for when you’re feeling blue — perhaps the December blues, when “the holiday season” is getting on your nerves and the cold and early darkness is starting to bring you down. Or let’s say that your life seems disappointing, because the great dreams and promises of your youth just didn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4990"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4990"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4999,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4990\/revisions\/4999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}