Sometimes the mind gets loud.
It says you are small. Replaceable. Not enough. That you don’t matter. That you’re just one of billions.
So let’s take a look at the numbers, shall we? Not to overwhelm, just to remind…
Right now there are about eight billion humans alive. That sounds like a lot. But there are roughly 20 quintillion other animals on Earth (that is 20 with eighteen zeros!). And then there are bacteria, viruses… life in forms so tiny and so numerous it almost collapses your sense of scale.
For most of Earth’s history (billions of years) life was entirely microbial. No nervous systems. No humans. No awareness wondering about the meaning of life or the purpose of being. Just life lifing.
Now that life has evolved and diversified, imagine being randomly assigned a living body. The odds of being born human rather than insect, fish, worm, or microbe are staggeringly small. Already miraculous. And that is just at the species level!
Every human conception starts with roughly 300 million sperm competing to meet one egg. The combination that happens is you. Not a version of you. You only. One-of-a-kind.
Now imagine every generation before you. Every pairing. Every single person that had to survive long enough to meet and reproduce. Every storm that didn’t take them. Every illness they survived. Every moment that had to line up juuuuuust so in order to make it all happen exactly as it did. If even one thing had been different, you would not exist. Not a slightly different you. Not even a maybe-someday you. Gone.
And then there is the bigger scale. The asteroid that struck the Earth about 66 million years ago. The dinosaurs that did not survive. The mammals that did. The primates that eventually emerged. The humans who eventually existed. All because one massive rock hit in exactly the right place.
Tiny events cascade into huge outcomes. That brachiosaurus stepping just a little to the left. One ancestor reluctantly going out to socialize instead of staying home. One rainstorm lasting a day longer than a river could contain. It all mattered.
And the entire universe itself had to be exactly so. Stars had to form and die to create the atoms in your body. Earth had to land in a habitable zone. Water, a magnetic field, plate tectonics… everything had to line up so that complex life could even have a prayer of existing.
So when your mind whispers (or shouts) that you don’t matter, when it doubts your uniqueness, or when purpose feels unclear (or even unreachable), look at the data. Look at the chain of improbable events that made you, you.
The odds of being human are tiny. The odds of being this exact human are astronomical, miraculous, and almost impossible to imagine. One in a chain so long (stretching back to the very first cell) that it almost hurts to think about.
And yet. Here you are.
Breathe that in.
Let it settle.
Let it remind you:
You are extraordinary simply by existing.