So my day was going really pretty well, until about three hours ago when all at once it turned into a giant cluster fuck.
The application I was working on suddenly didn't work in a way that was utterly inscrutable. What's more, the part that broke had exactly zippo mcnothingpants to do with what I had been working on.
I got stressed out. I asked $friendly_coworker for help, and he genuinely tried to help me, but none of his advice panned out for me.
So I did the "nuke it from space" option, and blew away everything I had been working on that day, to the point of utterly rebuilding my development client. Those who do dev work know, this is a big deal.
No effect. Same problem persisted, but only for me.
Great. I sought advice from someone else, still no joy.
Hours later, Friendly and I figured it out. It was because of something HE had done.
I twiddled some things, rebooted, and VOILA!, everything was aces.
Except I had thrown away my day's work.
I was feeling totally crushed and retreated to the sweet embrace of my Twitter feed when I saw this retweeted gem:
"About me: I'm enjoying a vacation as an alive person on Earth in between my multi-billion-year segments of nonexistence"
All in one fell swoop, the absolutely minute, minuscule, irrelevancy of my stress, situation, and setback were driven home to me.
Millions of years from now, or millions of light years from where I'm sitting, what just happened to me is utterly meaningless.
It's as ridiculous as getting upset when you go to the beach because a particular grain of sand you were looking for isn't there.
My stressful moment is GALACTICALLY INSIGNIFICANT.
At the time it didn't feel that way. But even now, just minutes later, as I age beyond it, I can see that that is so. It's blissfully liberating.
One day, in a galaxy far from here, beings may come to exist who have no idea that I ever existed, and may never, as I will have long since perished.
Weird as it sounds, I'm grateful for that