Summary
From the article:
This page details several common, half-thought ideas about “cosmicness.” A better understanding explains why you might reasonably feel distraught that it’s missing in your life, and practical approaches to addressing the problem.
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Meaning depends on contexts and purposes. If you go to a place with no context and no purpose, there will be no meaning there, at least not until you’ve hung out for a while. But if you could teleport to a nice Italian restaurant in the Andromeda Galaxy for lunch, and return to Earth in time for your regular afternoon tryst with a coworker in the office broom closet, your life here would not look less meaningful when considered from your table at Osteria Andromeda.
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Most philosophy papers about cosmic meaning argue about whether you should buy the sales pitch: do galaxies make everything meaningless, or not?1 None of that is relevant, because no one except a few astro-geeks cares about galaxies. Obviously it’s true that galaxies themselves are meaningless, but it’s super unclear how that’s supposed to make your life meaningless.
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The “No cosmic meaning” hypnotic induction tries to regress you into this archaic part of your brain which is terrified of being abandoned in the dark. In part, it puts the universe in the place of your clan, as the greater whole of which you are a part, and tells you that this cosmos is utterly indifferent to you, or even actively hostile. Cowering before the clan council/galaxies, you have no value, no significance, no purpose, and so no protection, support, or comfort.
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The social meanings we can get now may seem not only nebulous, but not big enough. Nothing is significant enough to count: there is no cosmic meaning. The things you might be able to do are so tiny, compared with the cosmos. Getting galaxies mixed up with your thinking about social significance doesn’t make rational sense, but there are powerful underlying emotional intuitions connecting social and cosmic meanings.