Enormous From Within, Small From Without

[The Drama of Insignificance is a multi-part, ongoing series. I hope you’ll check out other posts in the series. The series runs in conjunction with the launch of the much-anticipated Human Experience Specialist Certification Course. Become one of the world’s first Human Experience Specialists. Learn more about the program here.]

There is something rather remarkable about the fact that each of us experiences himself or herself as the center of the universe.

We know perfectly well that we are not the center of the universe. We understand that billions of other people are going about their business, that the earth is a relatively insignificant planet in an unimaginably large cosmos, and that our own existence will occupy a barely discernible moment in the history of things. We know all that.

And yet, from the inside, we are enormous. Our toothache is more pressing than a distant earthquake. Our disappointment at being passed over for a promotion may occupy more of our attention than the suffering of millions of strangers. Our death, which will be an ordinary event in the world, is for us the end of the world. What are we to make of this extraordinary discrepancy?

It is tempting to call this egocentrism, but I think that would be a mistake. We are not necessarily behaving selfishly when we experience our own lives as central. We have no alternative. We are situated inside our own consciousness, experiencing existence from a particular location, through a particular body, with a particular history, set of memories, and collection of hopes and fears. We cannot step outside ourselves and experience our lives with the indifference of a distant observer. Even the most generous, compassionate, and self-sacrificing person remains the center of his or her own experience. This is not a moral failing. It is simply how consciousness works.

Consider what happens when you receive some terrible personal news. Perhaps a medical test has revealed something frightening, or a person you love has announced that she is leaving you, or you have discovered that your life’s work has been rendered obsolete. For a time, the entire world seems reorganized around this event.

The ordinary activities of other people may strike you as almost offensive. How can they be laughing in a restaurant? How can they be shopping for shoes? Don’t they understand what has happened? Of course they don’t. Your catastrophe is not their catastrophe. They inhabit their own centers of existence, just as you inhabit yours. Their concerns have not become trivial because yours have become overwhelming.

This is one of the stranger features of human life. We are simultaneously the protagonists of our own dramas and minor characters, or no characters at all, in the dramas of nearly everyone else. A person may spend years struggling to write a novel, establish a business, raise a child, survive an illness, or overcome some terrible injustice. The undertaking may consume his attention, organize his days, and define his sense of himself. Yet almost nobody knows that this struggle is occurring.

And even among those who know, few can appreciate its full significance. The person is living an epic from within and something scarcely noticeable from without.

I wonder if this discrepancy accounts for some of our difficulty in understanding one another. We expect other people to recognize the magnitude of what we are experiencing, while they are occupied with experiences that seem equally enormous to them.

A husband may be astonished that his wife does not appreciate the significance of a professional disappointment. His wife may be equally astonished that he does not appreciate the significance of a conflict with her sister. Neither is necessarily indifferent or unloving. Each is trying to persuade the other to enter a world that cannot be entered completely. We can listen, imagine, sympathize, and make an effort to understand, but we cannot actually inhabit another person’s consciousness.

There is a further complication. Although we know that other people have inner lives as elaborate as our own, we do not ordinarily experience that knowledge with much force. The stranger sitting across from us on a train is, to us, a stranger sitting across from us on a train. Yet that person possesses a lifetime of memories, disappointments, private jokes, grievances, ambitions, regrets, and relationships. He may be contemplating suicide, anticipating the birth of a grandchild, remembering a childhood humiliation, or worrying about whether he can pay his rent. To himself, he is as enormous as we are to ourselves. To us, he is someone who happens to be occupying a seat.

Perhaps this is one reason that recognition matters so much. We want other people to acknowledge something of the enormousness we experience from within. We want them to understand that our efforts have been difficult, our suffering has been real, our accomplishments have required something of us, and our existence is not merely another interchangeable instance of human existence. We do not necessarily need applause. Sometimes we simply want someone to appreciate that an event that looks small from the outside has been momentous from the inside. A person who has spent twenty years caring for a disabled spouse may not want a medal. But she may desperately want someone to understand what those twenty years have meant.

And yet there is no obvious way to reconcile these two perspectives. We cannot reasonably expect the world to experience our lives as we experience them. Nor can we simply abandon our inward sense of importance and adopt the world’s relative indifference. If we genuinely experienced ourselves as no more consequential than any one of the billions of people we will never meet, how would we decide what to do this afternoon? Why would our own projects deserve our attention? Why would we struggle to survive? Our inward enormousness may be an indispensable condition of living at all.

I think this raises an interesting question about humility. We often imagine that humility consists of thinking less of ourselves, but perhaps a more useful form of humility consists of recognizing that everyone else is experiencing the same enormousness. The person who interrupts us, the person who disappoints us, the person whose opinions strike us as ridiculous, and the person whose behavior we find incomprehensible are all living at the center of their own universes. Their lives are not supporting performances in the drama of ours. They are the principal characters in dramas that we can barely glimpse.

This recognition will not eliminate our conflicts, disappointments, or competing claims. Nor will it make us less concerned with our own lives. But it may help us understand why the experience of insignificance can be so painful. We are not merely asking the world to admire us. We are asking it to acknowledge something that feels self-evident from within: that an entire universe of experience is occurring here, that it matters terribly to the person experiencing it, and that its disappearance will be an enormous event, even if almost nobody notices.

Perhaps the problem is not that we mistakenly imagine ourselves to be enormous. From the inside, we really are enormous. The problem may be that we expect this inward enormousness to translate into outward importance, and then feel diminished when it does not. We are left with the difficult task of honoring the magnitude of our own experience while recognizing that every other human being is attempting to do exactly the same thing. We are each the center of a universe, and none of us is the center of the universe. That may be one of the most peculiar, and most consequential, facts about being human.

CONCLUDING PROPOSITION:

Every human being is enormous from within and small from without; much of the drama of insignificance arises from our difficulty in reconciling these two equally real perspectives.

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