Be as small as possible. Good happiness advice.

“Be all you can be” used to be a long-time recruiting slogan for the United States army. That implied you could be more than you are now, not less, if you enlisted. But there’s another way of looking at this. What if being all you can be pointed toward being smaller and less significant than you are now?

Before I share some perspectives about this, here’s an addendum to my previous blog post, “If God created the universe, why is it so goddamn HUGE?” — which was a good introduction for the theme of this post.

This post by The Secrets of the Universe popped up in my Facebook feed a few days ago,  having been shared by one of my Facebook friends. I now follow The Secrets of the Universe on Facebook, since I want to learn more secrets like this one.

Our observable universe encompasses about 46 billion light-years, containing an estimated 2 trillion galaxies. However, only a small fraction—around 5%—of these galaxies remain reachable under current conditions. Each year, about 160 billion stars become newly unreachable as they cross this threshold.

The universe is continuously expanding, causing galaxies to move away from us. As a result, galaxies that are currently beyond a distance of about 18 billion light-years are receding at speeds greater than that of light. This means that no matter how advanced our technology becomes, we will never be able to reach them.

The speed of light acts as a cosmic speed limit. When we observe distant galaxies, we are not only seeing them as they are now but also as they were when their light began its journey towards us. For galaxies beyond our reach, even if we could travel at the speed of light, the expansion of space means that they will continue to recede faster than we could ever approach them.

As time progresses, more galaxies will fall beyond our reach, and eventually, only those within our Local Group (a small cluster of nearby galaxies) will remain accessible. This ongoing process highlights the dynamic and ever-changing nature of our universe.

So not only is Earth and everything on our planet utterly insignificant compared to the vastness of the universe, most of that vastness is already out of reach, departing from us at a velocity that exceeds the speed of light — which itself is beyond comprehension at 186,282 miles per second.

Turning to the subject of this blog post, last month The Atlantic had an article by Arthur C. Brooks, “To Get Happier, Make Yourself Smaller.” That’s a gift link (I’m a subscriber), so everyone should be able to read the article. Here’s how it starts out:

Early in my academic career, I noticed that one of the most popular classes on campus was Introduction to Astronomy, a general-science course that anyone could take. The students all loved it—especially the non-science majors. I asked one of them, an economics student, why she enjoyed astronomy so much. She didn’t say anything about stars, but she did say something powerful about earthly existence. “When I go into class on Thursday mornings, I usually am stressed out about my life,” she told me. “But 90 minutes later, I feel relief because I am just a speck on a speck.”

She was expressing a profound philosophical truth. We tend to believe that to be happier, we need to become bigger in our own mind, and in the minds of others. But that’s wrong. What we really need to achieve both the perspective on life we need and the peace we crave is to get smaller in relation to everything and everyone else. When we experience our own littleness, we stop blocking our ability to see our life in just proportion. We can relax into a humble reality of not being the object of attention and criticism, and we can appreciate a magnificent universe without spoiling it with our self-absorption and petty concerns.

Unless you suffer from a narcissistic personality disorder, you know that, being completely honest with yourself, you are not the center of most things in life. Virtually all of the time, other people are thinking about themselves, not you, and the world would continue with little disruption if you weren’t here at all. It is very possible that even your own great-grandchildren will not know your name. And yet, when you aren’t making a conscious effort to recognize these truths, you go about your business with the illusion that you are, in fact, the focus of intense outside interest.

People care what you think and do, you believe—after all, they judge you all day long, both positively and negatively. Or so you think. This self-aggrandizing fantasy is almost certainly a product of evolution: By thinking that they mattered more as individuals than they actually did, your ancestors strove to rise in social hierarchies. This work of constantly comparing themselves with others made it more likely that they would pass on their genes in a competitive mating environment. You inherited their delusions of grandeur.

Good points. As I frequently observe on this blog, evolution doesn’t care about truth. It cares about an organism’s fitness and capacity to pass on its genes. Of course, “cares” is an anthropomorphic term that doesn’t really apply to evolution, which simply does what it does uncaringly.

Brooks suggests three ways we can bring ourselves into a smaller, more truthful, perspective of our place in the world.

1. Stand in awe.
I have previously cited the work of the UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner about the importance for happiness of standing in awe, which he defines as the “feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.” The reason that awe raises happiness is that it makes you smaller—exactly the feeling that the econ student was expressing about her astronomy class. But there are ways to experience awe besides looking at the night sky through a telescope. Keltner recommends spending time in nature, enjoying great music and art, and witnessing acts of moral beauty. Find what leaves you speechless and transfixed, and you will understand.

2. Seek the divine.
A common theme in most major religions involves the loss of self through communion with the divine. In Sufism, this is called fanā’, or “the annihilation of the ego.” The 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi wrote about fanā’in exquisite metaphors; in this poem, he compared his self to a “clear bead”:

There are no edges to my loving now.
The clear bead at the center
changes everything.

Modern neuroscience has revealed how this works. With colleagues, Columbia University’s Lisa Miller has shown that recalling spiritual experiences lowers activity in the medial thalamus and the caudate, brain regions that control sensory and emotional processing; this allows us to transcend our ordinary concerns and focus on deeper questions than how many people liked your latest social-media post.

3. Quietly serve others.
Virtually all of the many experiments on charitable behavior show that giving raises well-being—especially when it is anonymous, with no spotlight on your virtuous acts. One 2020 study demonstrated this in a novel way by studying anonymous kidney donors. The 114 donors were, on average, significantly happier than the general population after their donation to a stranger. You don’t have to give away an organ to benefit from this effect—just give more of yourself, without expectation of acknowledgment or reward. That way, you are truly transcending yourself.

I’m not wild about the reference to “the divine,” since there’s plenty of ways we can have a spiritual experience without invoking divinity. But if a person resonates with something they consider divine, great. We all get to choose our spiritual path, or to not embark on any sort of spiritual path.

Brooks concludes with:

So relax into the reality of your cosmic smallness. The plain truth is that you are a speck on a speck. But you’re a lovely little speck, and beloved by a few other specks. That’s a good life.