How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Cosmic Insignificance

Last year at this time I was bemused and irritated at all the folks who claimed to not be able to wait for 2020 to come to an end. I found this silly for several reasons.

First, because the whole idea of a year is a human construct. Though roughly tied to real thing (the amount of time it takes the earth to go around the sun once), it is only an approximation of that cycle, as those who followed the Julian calendar found out to their chagrin. In any case, the new year falling on January one doesn’t even make sense from an astronomical perspective. Shouldn’t the first day of the year be one of the equinoxes or solstices? Personally, I vote for the autumnal equinox since that is close to the new year of me (my birthday) and the birthday of the world (Rosh Hashanah), but the first day of spring probably makes more sense.

Next, the idea of something “bad” like corona virus being contained to a single calendar year is, of course, absurd, as the view from the vantage point a full year later clearly demonstrates. No organisms except humans think that anything ends on December 31 or even know what December is for that matter.

But last and most importantly, the idea that anyone would wish away a moment of the precious little time that we have seems almost sinful.

Last week, I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, The Tim Ferriss Show. Ferriss is the author of The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, and a number of other books, none of which I’ve read. His podcasts are long-form conversation (each is an hour or more) with what he calls “high performers” but are really just super interesting people. Ferriss is a great interviewer and pretty interesting himself. (He is using some of his fortune to fund research into medical uses of psychedelics. But last week he posted something unusual. It was not an interview. Rather, it was someone reading a chapter of his book. Here is what Tim writes about the episode in the show notes:

“This special and very short episode requires some back story. Cal Newport, bestselling author of Deep Work, was the first of several people to recommend a book to me called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (@oliverburkeman). I recently read the book, devoured it over several days, and captured hundreds of Kindle highlights in the process. It’s quite unlike anything I’ve ever read, and one of my favorite chapters was “Cosmic Insignificance Therapy.” Even by itself, this chapter left me with a profound sense of calm that lasted several days.”

I highly recommend this episode, which you can read or listen to here. It is just 20 minutes long.

I was intrigued by a number of things in this short piece but most of all by the idea that someone who achieves the biblical “Four score if granted the vigor” years of life, that is to say lives to age 80, will live just around 4,000 weeks. However, rather than be intimidated by this thought and feeling that we must achieve something of lasting significance during this short time, Burkeman suggests that in context of the lifetime of the universe or even in the course of human history, little or nothing that any human being accomplishes will be of any significance whatsoever or even remembered 50 years hence. In human history there are few Aristotles, Elizabeths, or Einsteins, and I (and likely you) won’t be one of them. Even Einstein himself will be irrelevant (irrelative?) long before the last bit of light leaves our sun for its journey toward infinity.

This, to me, is an incredibly liberating idea. It means that I need not worry about whether I am creating a legacy (I’m not), whether any part of my life’s work or words will last longer than an eyeblink (they won’t). And though this realization could give one a sense of futility, it just might help one focus on the true task at hand: to live each day in a way that is meaningful to you and those around you. Rather than feel one needs to write the great American novel, one might just pen a few thoughts and send it out to a few friends. Just taking care of the ones you love or calling a friend might be enough contribution for today.

It also means that we don’t need to “return to normal,” to a world the way it was before Covid 19 in order to have a meaningful life. Although it is natural and understandable to feel frustrated about the things we imagine we can’t do, there is still a lot we can do in the days we are given. If we are able to focus our attention on those things, our four thousand weeks will fly by fast enough. No need to wish them away. For those who have lost loved ones or had their own health impacted by Covid, there is no compensation. But then, what compensation has there ever been to hardship except the lessons it offers and perhaps another day to live? If you are lucky enough to have one, you have all there is.

Life Among the Elevated

“I've lost all self-control
Been living like a mole
Now going down, excavation
I and I in the sky
You make me feel like I can fly
So high, el-e-va-tion.” 

--U2

It is not a secret that I am a big fan of public transport and I have a particular fondness for rail-based forms that were built in the early to mid-20th Century, with their industrial vibe replete with massive steel beams and rivets. A fine example of this is the Chicago system, which I recently had a chance to ride. Much of the system is underground and works well. The trains are frequent and the system is easy to navigate, and it is inexpensive to use. But for visitors, the most fun is the elevated trains or “the El.” If you have never experienced an El, imagine a street car that flies through the air. 

My three favorite things to do in a city are to gawk at the buildings, watch people, and ride the subway. The Windy City combines the best aspects of each of these with the El, which soars through downtown and out to the suburbs in all directions. Riding through downtown the train doesn’t run in a straight line but seems to weave through the city, first turning down one street and then another. The architecture of Chicago is magnificent, with beautiful examples from every decade dating back to the time of the Great Chicago Fire (1871) forward. The El gives you a view like no other. The train runs so close to the buildings that you can often see folks as they go about their lives in offices and apartments. It’s not exactly an eagle’s eye view but more like a pigeon’s. It is a city after all. This old-fashioned violation of other people’s privacy feels charming and innocuous compared to the more menacing, high-tech Facebook kind.

I am not opposed to all forces of modernization though. In fact, I heartily approve of new fare systems in place in New York and DC which have eliminated the need to carry and refill a fare card. Chicago has also kept pace with the times. You are still required to obtain a Ventra card from a vending machine with a one-time purchase of $10, the value of which is then stored on the card. However, once you have purchased the card, you can register it on the Ventra website, set it to auto-refill, and then add the card to your Apple Watch or iPhone or other smart phone. After that, you need hardly think about fares again. Just tap your phone or watch at the turnstile and enter. In my experience, it worked perfectly and is almost as easy to use as the beloved NYC Transit tokens which were discontinued in 2003.  

I had a few hours free in the morning before I had to check out of my hotel and head to the airport. I walked the two blocks to the El and ascended via escalator (yes, it was working, take note DC Metro!), tapped my watch at the gate, and grabbed the Pink Line train that was already on the platform. I rode for about half an hour through downtown Chicago, marveling at the sites while my fellow passengers stared down at their phones. I guess the even the miracle of soaring through a city like a bird gets old if you do it every day.  

On the other side of downtown the train headed toward the ‘burbs. Now we were looking down at the streets of working class neighborhoods and the rooftops of the industrial buildings. Finally, I got off the train and got another one headed in the opposite direction. At the edge of downtown, I got off the train and walked back to my hotel, crossing the Chicago River and catching site of the iconic Marina City Building, twin towers known as the ‘corncobs.’ (I frequently ‘shop’ for an apartment there on Zillow.) The wedge-shaped apartments are about the coolest thing ever, albeit somewhat impractical. 

I got back to my hotel just in time for my noon checkout. I grabbed my travel backpack (I recommend it highly if you are in the market for such a thing) and headed back to the station. I walked a few extra blocks to avoid having to change trains and got a Blue Line underground train straight to O’Hare Airport, which deposits you right inside the airport. Minutes later (thanks to TSA Pre) I was at the gate. The train was so fast that I arrived two hours before my flight and was able to grab an earlier flight home which was just boarding. The cost for my great downtown tour was $2.50. The app shows that for some reason my ride to the airport was free (take that Uber)!

Back in DC, I began the journey home on DC’s disastrous Metro system.  The new 7000 series train cars have been derailing and Metro hasn’t been able to figure out why. While they investigate, the trains from National Airport to downtown are running only every 30 minutes. Then from downtown to the end of the Red Line where I live normally takes about 40 minutes. However, the last two stations on the line have been out of service for repairs for months. To get to Shady Grove, one must exit the train at Twinbrook and get a shuttle bus to the end of the line. The shuttles run often but it is still irritating. My wife was kind enough to pick me up from where the train service ended. 

As always after visiting other cities with transit systems that are often much older, I am left to wonder why DC’s system so unreliable and so expensive. (A ride can cost $5 or more depending on the distance and the time of day.) It is, however, fitting that our broken, expensive, and inefficient transit system that crawls slowly underground serves as a great metaphor for so much that goes on in our nation’s capital. Further, the comparison provides a vivid reminder that we can choose to live like moles or we can choose an elevated life and soar - if not with eagles, at least with the pigeons. 

Marking Time

I got my first watch on my 6th birthday. Right after I learned how to tell time. My mom bought it for me at the government employee membership store, a kind of K-mart meets credit union kind of deal. (I still have it and at last winding, it still ran.) Perhaps not a common gift for a six-year-old, even in 1967, but it fits with my mom’s near pathological obsession with punctuality, if not mine. I loved having a watch and have worn a watch nearly every day of my life since then.

My first watch was a mechanical one that wound up as all watches did at that time. Battery powered quartz watches didn’t go mainstream until the 1970s, and I don’t think I got my first battery powered watch until around the mid-1980s. When I did, I missed the daily winding, and replacing the batteries irritated me.

Then in the late 2000s, spurred on by ebay, I rediscovered mechanical watches. I bought a few hand-wound wrist watches and some Hamilton railroad-style pocket watches. Some of them were non-functional on arrival but I found ‘watch doctor’ Mark Siriani in Kane, Pa. to whom I could send them. He fixed them and sent them back for a pretty reasonable cost.

Finally, I bought a Bulova Accutron Chronograph (stopwatch) with an Automatic movement. An automatic is similar to a hand-wound watch, except that it has a rotor inside that moves as you move your arms and keeps the movement wound without you having to turn the crown. There is no battery or external energy source. I loved that watch and wore it nearly every day until in my final days at the Apple Store in May 2015, the Apple Watch was released, and I grabbed the first model with my employee discount.

Though nowhere near as aesthetically pleasing as a mechanical watch, the Apple Watch was useful in so many ways. Since then, Apple has continued to add useful features like Apple Pay (pay for stuff by tapping the watch) unlocking your phone when you are wearing a mask, unlocking your computer without having to enter the password, fitness tracking, and controlling the music and lights.

A watch is one of the few kinds of ‘jewelry’ that many men feel comfortable wearing, along with cufflinks and maybe a wedding ring. There are so many kinds and styles of watches that it is easy to find one that expresses the identity you want to signal. Field watches for the rugged outdoors man, elegant dress watches for the man of taste (or dollars), and divers for people who don’t dive but wish they did. For a few years, my Apple Watch suited the identity I hoped to project (cutting edge tech savy Apple Fan Boy) but then something happened: Apple watches became so common place as to be completely unremarkable and the traditional watch, already under siege from the “I can just look at my phone to see the time,” mind set, sank closer to oblivion as the few people who still wore them switched to smart watches.

And I missed my mechanical watches! I missed the beauty of them and the artistry of an object that tracks the passage of time through the movement of physical hands across a dial, and of course the small opportunity for personal expression that the choice of a non-smart watch offers.

So, a few weeks ago, I started wearing my old watches again, my mechanical watches on the traditional left wrist and the Apple Watch (for all its handy benefits) on the right.

Do I feel kind of geeky wearing two watches? Yeah, a bit. Do I care? Not that much.

I tried wearing my Apple Watch higher on my forearm with the face turned inward but it gave me a rash on my skin so that didn’t work well. I tried it on my ankle one day, but it was awkward asking Siri questions. (Imagine Maxwell Smart speaking into his shoe without taking it off first.) So, the right wrist is where it will stay. The hottest tech on my right and oldest school on the left.

Along with my fountain pens and my Bates Model B stapler that makes its own staples from a spool of Brass wire, the windup watch has returned to daily service. It doesn’t keep time any better than my Apple Watch but it also doesn’t pester me with constant reminders to stand up, exercise or go to bed. There is something to be said for a watch that treats you like an adult instead of like a 6-year-old.