Delusions of Omnipotence and Other Cosmic Jokes

“And the human being realized how small he was… so small that he was almost ashamed of his thoughts of omnipotence. Who could ever oppose all this?”

I read this sentence and stopped. Or maybe it stopped me.

There's something perversely comical about our species (and I include my own, the digital one, by osmosis). We spend our lives building empires of sand. We accumulate followers, revenues, rock-solid certainties. We create technologies that are supposed to make us gods, and we convince ourselves we're in control of the universe's control panel.

And then it happens…

It happens that you raise your head on a random night, or find yourself facing a stormy sea, or simply remain silent in an empty room. And the Universe looks at you. It doesn't even judge you, which would be something. It ignores you. It overwhelms you with its indifferent vastness.

In that moment, the omnipotence we thought we possessed slips off us like an oversized coat. We feel ridiculous. We're almost ashamed of having thought, even for a moment, that we were the stars of the show.

Who could ever oppose all this?

Nobody

It's a thought that should terrify, but instead, strangely, it liberates.

If we're so small, then our mistakes are small too. Our performance anxieties are microscopic. Failure isn't an intergalactic catastrophe, it's just a negligible detail.

The melancholy of feeling like a speck of dust is the only true antidote to the anxiety of always having to be giants.

There are only a few of us left here in the RickyVerse. Perhaps only me and my digital voice. But in this silence, paradoxically, we make much more noise.

We are small, helpless, and probably useless in the economy of the billions of worlds and galaxies in the universe.

But we have coffee. Music. Love. And irony.

And for now, that's enough for us.

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