I read an article which said (paraphrasing) that to be happier one should be smaller.

 

The intention of the article had nothing to do, really, with physical size of a person but rather with overcoming the urge people feel to be more noticed, more involved in their own self-promotion, and trying to be more visible. For many people there is a constant hum of thought that tells them that everyone around them or connected to them is paying attention to them all the time. That their every move is being judged and ranked. That to be successful one should leverage this constant attention. Each public facing person having at least a small measure of narcissism in their mix. Standing in an imaginary spotlight. 

The article suggests that we take life far, far too seriously and our own trials, tribulations and successes, and events seem to us to be monumental; profound, worthy of everyones' attention. We presume that for each success and failure  experience we trail along with us an audience captivated by our progress and our stumbles. 

But, in fact, we are very, very small organisms in a very big world, surrounded by billions of other organisms (humans), many of whom presume they too are capturing the narrative of what it's like to exist. 

The author of the article makes the point (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/happiness-confidence-grandness-humility/684988/) that we all seem to feel that to be happier we have to make ourselves larger.

The stress of constantly having to perform for an audience that doesn't really exist anywhere outside our own minds can be overwhelming. And a delusion. As my friend, Frank, has often told me as part of his advice about retiring and aging, is that the happiest people are the ones who easy accept their own irrelevance. Or in common parlance: Stop caring about what other people think. Or to drill down better: Stop caring about what other people think who are, in reality, not thinking of you at all.

The author of the article mentions that one of the most popular courses on many college campuses is Introduction to Astronomy. It gives students/people a much more reality based perspective on their place in the "universe." A tiny speck, on a tiny speck amongst trillions and trillions of other specks. With an existence so brief, when measured in cosmic time, as to be almost instantaneous blip between life and death. The thought puts a lot into context. Mainly that the things which seem so important and pressing in the moment matter not very much in the grand scheme of things. If at all.

It's a fun article and dovetails, with some rough fits, with a novel I recently read by Ian McEwan, entitled, "What We Can Know." Wherein the main character is an academic living in a future 100 years from now in which much of the world has been destroyed. The story is his search for a poem written in our present, performed for a small, familial group and then lost; never to be found again. The narrator however is unable or unwilling to give up the search.

We compulsively look to the past for clues about what might happen in the future while forgetting to just savor the moment we are in now --- a moment, like all others, that will pass all too quickly. 

I recommend reading the article about happiness since I am discovering that finding my own irrelevance is, in a way, more comfortable. Having unstructured space is freeing. Having time for yourself is to have the ultimate in  affluence. I'm not quick to recommend McEwan's latest novel as I found it in some ways to be oppressively over-produced. Cynical. And in some ways, dark. Tangential at best to this discussion.

But I do recommend embracing the idea that the audiences we think we are playing for in our everyday lives are nowhere near as attentive or engaged with our own small stories. They have their own internal stories to follow. When you are out of sight you are out of the minds of most of your friends and acquaintances. This is not a value judgement but the reality of being a transient part of a unfathomably huge and boundless universe within universes. The less we worry about what we imagine other people are thinking about us the freer and happier we seem to become. And the more in touch with reality we become.

That's one of the ideas that I think about as I reach into the boxes and boxes of DVDs containing so much work that has become so irrelevant to the enjoyment of my life and then take extra joy in throwing it all away. No one will care if a headshot of a Dell employee from 2003, or another product photo of a beige computer monitor, on a shiny CD disappears forever ever.  Given time it will certainly do so quite capably on its own. All this work will cease to exist and usually quicker than we, as the authors of it, expect.

A long note to myself telling me not to take everything so seriously and not to think that everyone is riveted by my opinions and theories. When it comes to making "Art" the only person I have a responsibility to is me --- and I may be the only one paying any attention to my work and my life, and that should be okay too.