Living with Cosmic Anxiety

When you look up and gaze at the stars above, what do you think of? Are you trying to find the Big Dipper or Orion’s Belt? Are you in awe of the beauty of the Milky Way? Or are you wondering about the possibility of life out in the Universe? If you’re anything like me, you do all of these in one fell swoop. But have you ever felt anxiety when looking up? A feeling of dread about the sheer emptiness of interstellar space, the vast distances between celestial bodies, or the incomprehensible scale of the Universe compared to our human microcosm? No? Okay, let me explain.

It was a night like any other before it. I was daydreaming (nightdreaming?) while staring up into the stars. Completely marveled at the unknowing waiting to be discovered and then it hit me: I am nothing. This is nothing new to philosophical thought whether it comes from Nietzsche's nihilism or Lovecraft's cosmic horror. We've been told for as long as I can remember in one way or another about how insignificant we are in the ever-expanding universe, but something different happened to me that night. This never-ending scratch in the back of my conscious pricking away at the idea of the self. I've always know of my cosmic insignificance and its never bothered me until now.

Living with anxiety is one thing. I understand my feelings of fear, worrisome, and restlessness in a societal context and can work to alleviate them. But what is there to do when the anxiety isn't within life itself? The term "larger than life" is used to describe the disproportionate importance of something, but how do I grasp with a literal astronomical anxiety that is larger than "larger than life?"

For example, the famous Hubble photo of the Pillars of Creation above are awe-inspiring sights until you realize the true scale of these behemoths. It takes roughly 4 light years or 40 trillion kilometers to reach from top to bottom. In addition, the small speck highlighted in the photograph above dwarfs our solar system.

The sheer scope of cosmic oddities is what terrifies me. I can see them in photographs, but I cannot comprehend them. No word in the world can truly describe the scale of these nebulous formations. The indescribable-ness contributes to the uneasiness. Imagine if you will, you were placed into a unspecified sized dark room with no discernable features and all you had were your eyes to see. No matter how far you walked in one direction, your hands would never feel the walls. For all you know, this is all you know. How would you feel? Anxious? Terrified? Probably. We're more or less comfortable within our worldly scope because this is all we have. We never worry about the void around us because none of our senses can detect it. Does the ant ever know the true size of the boulder it walks on or what lies beyond?

Now, I know what you're thinking. Why feel anxious about something so abstract? We, as people, want security and assurance more than anything in life. The unknown has always and will always terrify us. Maybe it's man's hubris or our insatiable desire to acquire knowledge or maybe I'm a "know-it-all" and hate that there's things out there that my mind cannot comprehend. I don't know. I don't have the answers but I have the questions.

"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love." - Carl Sagan