Rick: Welcome back to Hotel Bar Sessions. I’m Rick Lee. And as always, I’m joined by Leigh Johnson and David Gunkel. Today we are talking about the significance impulse. But before we find out what the hell that means and how we’re going to talk about it, we need some drinks, and I’d like to know what you’re ranting or raving about. David, let me start with you.

David: So we are now getting autumn weather in Chicago, and therefore I’m looking at something in the dark beer area. I think I’ll go with a Żywiec Porter, which has a nice little licorice-y flavor to it. And I will be raving about silent cinema.

So I’ve gotten really overwhelmed by and saturated by the streaming services, and I’m looking for stuff to watch in the evenings. I’ve gone back and started watching a lot of silent movies from Europe and the United States. I’ve got to say, silent cinema is really in a good place right now because a lot of the old films can be restored using AI tools. I’ve seen some recently restored versions of Metropolis and The Seashell and the Clergyman, and AI is breathing new life into silent cinema and making that experience just that much more enjoyable. So if you haven’t seen a silent film recently, check one out.

Leigh: Nice.

David: Leigh, what about you?

Leigh: I think I’m just going to have a Bloody Mary today, and I am raving about the American folk singer Jesse Wells. Jesse Wells is a young folk singer. I think he’s from the Ozarks somewhere, Arkansas or something like that. I would describe him as Bob Dylan reincarnate, but Bob Dylan is still alive, and I think that might be offensive to Bob Dylan. But he basically is a reincarnation of Bob Dylan. Absolutely fantastic folk singer. I discovered him on TikTok, but I’ve since listened to his full albums. I really encourage everybody to check this guy out. Super politically conscious and actually pretty funny too. Jesse Wells.

So we actually have a guest with us today, Joshua Glasgow. Josh is a professor in the Philosophy Department at Sonoma State University, where he specializes in moral, political, and legal philosophy. He has authored a number of books and articles, including A Theory of Race in 2009; a fantastic book titled What is Race? Four Philosophical Views, which was published in 2019 and coauthored with Sally Haslanger, Chike Jeffers, and Quayshawn Spencer; The Solace: Finding Value in Death Through Gratitude for Life, published in 2020; and most importantly for our conversation today, his most recent book, The Significance Impulse: On the Unimportance of Our Cosmic Unimportance. Still hot off the Oxford University Press, having just been released this past October.

Now, I know Josh from way back in his grad school days at the University of Memphis. That’s way back—that’s like 20 years ago. I haven’t done very well keeping in contact with him in the interim, but I have kept up with his work. He is an absolutely fantastic writer—sharp, clear, funny. And so when I read the introduction to his most recent book, I knew I had to reach out to him to join us here on the podcast. So Josh, welcome to the hotel bar. What are you drinking and what are you ranting or raving about this week?

Josh: Well, thank you for having me, everybody, and thank you for that kind introduction, Leigh. For my drink, I’m going to just have a neat tequila—Clase Azul Reposado, one of my favorite tequilas. Keep it high energy and friendly and fun. And I’m here to rave about ritualized social interactions. So here we are recording this towards the end of November, and it’s getting to be a time when I’m both intentionally and unintentionally falling into patterns where I get to see people that I haven’t seen in a long time. Of course, family events will be coming up in the next few weeks, and I also have just had a chance lately to see my local friends, who I haven’t seen much in the last couple of months. Actually, childhood friends—we get together and play music every so often, and I got to do that after about, oh boy, like a year and a half of not doing it. So all of that has been wonderful, and I could rave about how important that is on so many different levels. I’m here to celebrate it.

Leigh: Nice. What do you play?

Josh: Mostly guitar, but I also play bass and keyboards too.

Leigh: All right, all right. Rick, what about you?

Rick: I’m going to follow David since it’s fall slipping into winter, and I’ll have a stout. Today, I am raving about YouTube’s algorithm for spotting banned content.

Recently, one of our episodes was flagged when we uploaded it to YouTube because of something I said about the mRNA vaccines. Although it was a joke—and we all got the joke and so on—what I said shaded into the not-so-true, let’s call it into the falsiness territory. And although we could have put up a fight and said, you know, come on, there’s nuance here and so on, I really do appreciate that the algorithm caught what was misleading at best content and said, “Hey, you got to rethink this.”

So here’s to YouTube for keeping that crap off the tubes. So, Leigh, we’re talking about the significance impulse. What are we going to talk about?

Leigh: Not to start off on too dark of a note here, but the truth is that there is a clock ticking in the background all the time that none of us can see. And one day, we’re going to die. Whatever contributions to or withdrawals from this world we’ve made are going to be finished, like account closed. None of us are going to be here to see that accounting, of course, but most of us spend our lives worrying about that final ledger of credits and debts we will leave behind.

Despite the fact that we all know that we are, as the popular meme goes, just ghosts driving a meat skeleton made from stardust and riding a rock floating through space, we nevertheless want our lives to have impact and value. We want to matter. We want to be significant.

So our guest today, Josh Glasgow, calls this the significance impulse. He’s interested not only in examining this impulse and critiquing its societal and psychological consequences, but also in offering a path toward liberation through embracing our cosmic insignificance.

Now, that may sound defeatist, even fatalistic, but his is a profoundly optimistic book. So if the thought of embracing your cosmic insignificance makes you want to laugh, or cry, or pour yourself a stiff drink—good, you’re in the right place. Pull up a stool at the bar with us, because letting go of the need to be significant might just be the most meaningful thing you’ll do today.

Like I said, I’m really excited to have Josh with us here today. This most recent book of his, The Significance Impulse, is really a fantastic read. But since we’re going to assume that all of our listeners haven’t read it yet and we want to motivate them to buy it and read it, I’m going to ask you, Josh, if you could just maybe, first of all, tell us what motivated you to write this book and then give us the general argument that you’re making there.

Josh: Yeah, I have to confess my own motivations for writing the book are a little opaque to me. I think about it in terms of being a parent, I think about it in terms of being somebody’s child. I think about it in terms of my place in our profession and just in the broader world. And I think about how I was raised and how a lot of people, I think, are raised, which is to think that it’s really good for us to try to be as significant as possible.

If you can end up on some list of the all-time greats, that would be one of the most amazing things that could happen to us. Guy Kahane wrote a paper that was published in 2014 called “Our Cosmic Insignificance.” He was trying to find in that paper a way to vindicate the idea that we might matter a lot—maybe not any one person as an individual, but that humanity might matter tremendously. And that stuck with me.

Well, here we are 10 years later, and I’m still thinking about it a lot. So between the philosophical reading and my own personal thoughts about, you know, do we need to be important more than just mattering—that’s something that I think is pretty fundamental and hard to reject—but that we want to be especially significant, become great in some sense. That specific drive really intrigued me. That’s what drove me to the book.

The book is an attempt to grapple with that on two levels. One is to ask, well, are we significant? Is there some way that one of us might become especially great or all of us might really matter tremendously to the universe? And I come down on the side of no—even the greats among us don’t actually matter all that much.

I just follow here what, in the book, I call the sage’s argument. It’s a very old argument, right? That you look up at the sky and you notice, as you said so eloquently, Leigh, in your introductory remarks, you know, we’re just another way of reorganizing the dust for a little moment, and then we’re gone. We’re small and we’re powerless. I’m trying to defend that argument against some attempts to vindicate our significance. So part of it is just to argue, boy, I don’t think we really are going to make good on this idea that we can be tremendously significant on a cosmic scale.

And then the second question, as you also alluded to, is how important is that to us? Like, is that a bad thing if we’re not going to be great in some broad cosmic sense? And I argue, no.

So part of it is to look at the things that make our lives go well, just in terms of our personal interests. You know, what is it for my life to go well personally? And I don’t think that becoming especially great actually advances any of those interests we have.

I should take that back. There’s one set of interests that might be advanced. You know, society attaches a lot of rewards to being one of the greats—monetary rewards, attention, all kinds of fun perks go our way for being one of the greats. But in terms of just being great itself, is that good for us? And I argue, no, it’s not. The things that we want out of life, like meaning in life, well-being, achievement, flourishing, and whatnot, are not advanced by being especially great.

And then the second piece of it is to argue that actually, there’s some downside to being great. And so we should really feel good about being unimportant. That is this idea that we might find some sort of freedom and relief in being unimportant.

Rick: That last point is really interesting to me because I think it would be important to separate out the fact that in your book and in your argument, you don’t want to say that not being important is the same as being mediocre. When you were ending that, my first thought that came to mind was the character Salieri in the movie Amadeus. He was, like, I don’t know, the high priest of mediocrity or whatever. So could you maybe tease apart the difference between not being important and being mediocre?

Josh: On my way of analyzing being important, it’s, in a nutshell, being of rare and high value. And I’m following others here; this isn’t something that’s unique to me. That can be contextualized in a lot of ways. So you might be the world’s greatest composer, for example, but not very good at being a chef. You might be really great at being a composer for your moment in time or your location on this planet, but not for all time.

So there are these various contexts we can restrict our evaluation to, but if we’re thinking about it in the cosmic sense, we’re going to remove all parameters, right? It’s not going to be for any one location or moment in time. And it’s not just one standard, like cooking or composing music. It’s for all the things we care most about. I want to argue that it’s that level of greatness that doesn’t add anything to our lives.

So let’s go back now to the question, Rick, about mediocrity. On my way of looking at this, on that question of “Are you of rare and especially high value?”—no. I’m not especially high. Sorry. Excuse me. Let me restate that.

I’m not at all high.

Rick: Because you are especially.

Leigh: Rick’s definitely especially high.

Josh: [laughs] To start over that thought: I claim that we are not of especially high value. And in a sense, that does make us cosmically mediocre. You again might still be the greatest composer of all time. Or you might be a mediocre composer, but even the greatest composer of all time is still mediocre on a cosmic level. I want to suggest that.

So, back to your question—well, we don’t want to strive for mediocrity. I think there’s an ambiguity in that. I think there’s one sense in which we don’t want to, which is that there’s value in trying to be the best version of ourselves we can be. You might cash that out in terms of your individual traits, your strengths—you know, that you’re great at composing music but not cooking food, or whatever it is.

But we also can follow the perfectionists who argue that we should try to strive to somehow fulfill our greatest potential with our physical capabilities, rationality, and so forth. And all of that makes a lot of sense to me. So, in that sense, we would not want to strive for mediocrity. But I don’t think that becoming the greatest tennis player or the greatest at anything is going to make us exceptional in that cosmic sense.

And so I do think that cosmic mediocrity, I guess, is the most we could hope for.

David: Can I follow on Rick’s question with another, probing you for clarification here? I can imagine students of mine who have read 19th- and 20th-century European philosophy, especially existentialism, thinking to themselves, “Well, isn’t this just existentialism 2.0 in a way?” And I’m wondering how you connect those dots and maybe differentiate or associate with the existentialist tradition that has similar kinds of ways of thinking about insignificance and human meaning.

Josh: First off, let me say that I consider myself, you know, not an expert on existentialism, so I’m going to talk in broad and crude terms here. But when I think of the existentialist tradition on these questions, I think of Camus mostly, reacting to nihilism—to this idea that the universe isn’t giving us any value and we somehow have to create it.

And that’s sort of a different starting point than where I’m coming from. I’m taking as my foil people who believe that either we can be, or maybe we even really are, tremendously important. And if that’s my foil, those people are starting from the assumption that there is value in the universe and somehow humanity, or some privileged few within humanity, are grabbing onto that value and getting as much of it as they can, kind of gobbling it all up.

And so I’m responding to that, trying to meet them on their home turf—not so much saying, “What if there’s no value in the universe?” but rather saying, “Okay, let’s assume there is value, as you’re saying.” So I’m starting with that sort of anti-existentialist starting point of assuming there is objective value out there and that we want to try to grab onto some of it. Can we really grab onto that? And is it good for us—good for us personally? Is it in our own personal interest to grab onto that? I’m arguing again: no. We can’t really grab onto that much of it, and we won’t. And in addition to that, it wouldn’t be good for us. In fact, it’s good for us not to grab onto it.

Now, that said, I do think there’s a really interesting parallel between trying to deal with the pro-significance crowd, granting them value, and then saying, “But we’re not that valuable,” and what the existentialists were trying to grab onto. One of the things that existentialists worry about is how we’re going to find meaning in that valueless world—how we’re going to grab onto something that can give us direction and just bear purpose to get out of bed in the morning.

I think that might be part of what is behind what I’m calling the significance impulse—this idea that we should be striving for as much significance as we can get. I am also sensitive to that. And I think that, in a way, there are parallel solutions. One might try to meet that threat of nihilism by saying, “We’re just going to create value where none exists.” If I can kind of talk in that idiom for a moment, there’s a parallel with what I want to say, which is that there’s a liberty—a kind of freedom—in relinquishing our care about how much significance one of us might have. There are similar motivating questions and similar structures of argumentation, but the two pursuits start at different points. As opposed to starting with this principle of, “Oh man, there’s no value at all in the world,” I’m starting with, “There is value, and we just don’t get much of it.”

Leigh: I want to pick up on that point that you made about creating as much value or as much significance as we can. I’m wondering if it’s the case that, for most people, embracing, as you say, the insignificance of our cosmic significance is really the best way to motivate us to still try to create as much significance as we can.

There might be other people—this might be a dispositional issue—for whom embracing this significance impulse is how they create as much significance as they can. And here I’m going to use one of your examples: Muhammad Ali, right? When I look back at the videos of him saying, “I am the strongest, I am the greatest, I’m so pretty,” you know, you think, isn’t that repeating mantra for him, that refrain, that true embrace of the significance impulse at least part of what made him great? I mean, I don’t think that makes him cosmically significant, but it is how he created significance in his own life.

Josh: There’s definitely a truth in that, Leigh. But just to zoom out a second, I do think that, as you hinted at, there’s something maybe cultural about this—that there are different spots in the world and moments in history where communities celebrate greatness and others where it’s really diminished. In fact, individual greatness might even be thought to be suspect in some way, as opposed to community health or excellence in some other sense.

But to zoom back into a culture like the United States of America in the 20th and 21st centuries: yes, we definitely play this up. It’s a telling hypothesis that Muhammad Ali, and others like him, might need to motivate themselves by that attraction to greatness—and in Ali’s case, all-time greatness. Not only did he seek that, but he arguably achieved it.

Maybe that attraction to the significance impulse is part of what drove him to his level of excellence. And so there’s got to be part of us that looks at that and goes, “Well, we don’t want to give that up. We like there being Muhammad Alis in the world.” And not just in sports, but of course in every endeavor: science, culture, and anything else we might care about. There’s certainly something to celebrate about that.

At the same time, I think we also have to remember the risks. There are a lot of inducements to that kind of greatness that really distort people’s ambitions and lead to a lot of psychological maladies for those who fail. Even those who do succeed and achieve greatness often wield that as a really unfortunate weapon. I would not put Muhammad Ali in this class, but there are others out there who, in trying to achieve importance and greatness, genuinely believe in their own greatness and end up doing awful, awful things to other people.

Leigh: See Elon Musk.

Josh: From a social perspective, I think it’s really hard to figure out how to line up the incentives to get the kind of greatness that we want, that is good for us as a collective, and suppress the kinds of greatness that are bad for us as a collective.

You know, my book is really focused not so much on cultural and community health, but on individual well-being—like what’s going to be in my interests or in your interests as an individual. Does it benefit Muhammad Ali as a person? Forget about the rest of us who got to enjoy his fights, his antics outside the ring, and his social activism. Putting all that aside, was it good for him to be the greatest? And that’s where I want to push back and say, it really didn’t advance his interests at all to be greater than all the other fighters in history.

Rick: But it seems to me Muhammad Ali is an interesting example of a distinction we might want to make that is really subtle. One way of looking at Muhammad Ali’s claims to being the greatest and the prettiest and so on was because he was obviously living in a society and confronting a world that was constantly telling him he’s nothing—that he doesn’t even have human worth. This claim to greatness, to being the greatest and the prettiest and the smartest, is a way of him insisting on his own value, just as a moral subject and a person of the worth that human beings have.

That’s different from saying, “I’m the greatest, and somehow the universe is going to mark this for as long as the universe is around.”

Josh: Yeah, I mean, that’s really insightful, Rick. I completely agree with everything you’re saying there. And let me add to what you’re saying by just pointing out that I am taking a stand against our cosmic significance—both having it and it being to our own benefit. But it’s really important to recognize that we are clearly significant in other ways.

Let’s start on a really small scale: we each matter to our loved ones, to our students, to our coworkers, or to our local communities where we’re involved. All of that is really tremendously important. And to go back to what I was saying a moment ago, we all, hopefully, are striving to contribute as much as we can, as well as we can. I think that’s also recognizing our importance, but we’ve got to contain it to that local level.

So to turn it back to that question of celebrating one’s greatness as an act of defiance—as an act of affirming your worth when the world maybe is diminishing or outright invalidating your worth—that can be a tremendously important tool. Absolutely.

So, if we’re cataloging all the ways in which identifying with our greatness can be useful, there’s the ability to marshal one’s value in resistance to being devalued. There’s producing greatness—just having excellent fighting, choreography, science, or whatever we care about. And there’s mattering to the people around us, right? Having a positive impact. I mean, Ali wasn’t just defending his own value; of course, he was defending the value of many, many, many people, and we should absolutely celebrate that.

At the same time—let me pivot back to the more skeptical side of what I’m arguing—I think we’ve let that drive for significance go too far. And I’m not picking on Ali here; I think many, many people have. In the sense that we want to strive to matter somehow to the universe more than anything else ever could, and that’s both unrealistic and unhealthy for us. There’s real benefit in dialing it back and focusing on being small and not mattering all that much, even though you do matter somewhat.

Leigh: So Josh, you use this metaphor of the splinter and the dove in your book. I’m wondering if, for our listeners, you could tease that out for us.

Josh: Sure. Yeah. That’s just a reference to two figures—two other figures besides Ali—that I’m using as my foils. The splinter refers to Ted Williams, “The Splendid Splinter,” the baseball player, one of the greatest of all time without question, who famously would go around saying, “I just want to walk down the street and have people look at me and go, ‘There goes the greatest hitter of all time.’”

And, you know, there’s something wonderfully innocent in that, because I think many, many of us can relate to it. It’d be amazing to be somebody who walks down the street, and everybody recognizes you as the greatest in your field or great in some domain. I think that’s very relatable. And so I need someone to come onto my side besides Ted Williams and all these people who celebrate greatness—because, of course, great people tend to celebrate greatness.

And Frida Kahlo comes along. Frida Kahlo’s parents called her “the dove.” She comes along and says, you know, everybody in the United States—or Gringolandia, as she calls it—wants to be important. They’re striving to be somebody, to stand out from everybody else and be better than everybody else. And that’s not something she’s interested in. I find that fascinating.

That’s the kind of motivating instinct for this book. And it’s not just the motivating instinct—it also, in a way, opens up a question that is closed if we don’t listen to people like Frida Kahlo. If we’re just going around saying, “I want to be the greatest, I want to be the greatest,” or, “They’re the greatest—they’re not the greatest,” and we sit on our bar stools debating who the best athlete in their sport is and so on—if we just have that conversation, then we take the significance impulse for granted.

This idea that there will be something good for us if we are great—if I end up great in some endeavor—that somehow that’s to my benefit. If we start there, we just take that as an axiom, and we live our lives with that as axiomatic. What Kahlo’s comment really does for me is turn that axiom into something that becomes a question-begging assumption.

If we just start with this idea that significance is valuable and move straight to, “Who’s going to get it?”—instead, she opens the door to saying, “No, we actually don’t get any value out of being important.” And once that door is open, now we can’t just assume that being significant is maybe a final good, like getting pleasure or gaining knowledge—things we take as axiomatic in our lay theories of value that are really hard to dispute. I think the significance impulse—the idea that significance is good for us—sometimes works that way, where people just take it as axiomatic. I really love how the dove, Frida Kahlo, challenges that, and that allows us to have this conversation.

David: I want to follow what we’ve been talking about from the first section and open it into the second movement of our conversation here. I want to ask: to what extent is the significance impulse really a matter of context and framing?

In other words, if we frame significance cosmically, that’s one way of looking at greatness and whether or not we are significant. But if we frame it more locally—“I want to be the greatest cribbage player in Milwaukee”—you know, that seems like a really limited way of thinking about significance.

Through the 20th century and now into the 21st, we’ve had this experience where our contexts are just getting bigger because of social media and other platforms where we can promote ourselves to the world in a much larger context than just our small village, city, or town. I’m wondering if the context matters here—and whether the change in context, especially under the pressures of technological distribution, has changed the way we think about this whole impulse.

Josh: That’s a really interesting hypothesis worth exploring. I’m not sure what to make of it at first blush. On one hand, I agree with you that there are ever-greater pressures to have one’s voice heard. That seems to be—just looking at this anecdotally—something that is more powerful today than at any other point in my life, certainly.

And if we think about what the younger generations are working their way through, surely that pressure to have some sort of visible existence that’s recognized and making an impact on a wide scale is something driving people—maybe driving them to excellence, but also driving a lot of anxieties and fears.

On the other hand, in the book, I quote Blaise Pascal saying, “I look up at the night sky, and I notice how small we are, and I’m terrified by that.” I think that is a sort of enduring question: what is our place in the cosmos, and how can we somehow make ourselves important? Some might tell divine stories about this. I’m more interested in it from a secular perspective. In fact, I’m only interested in it from a secular perspective in this book.

But even there, there are repeated attempts to try to claim greatness and to revive humanity’s importance in the cosmos. That seems to have been something that has endured throughout the centuries.

What I worry about, I guess, is that our social media and other technological pressures to connect and network and turn one’s contributions into something that will affect many, many people are having a really unhealthy effect on people’s mental well-being. Maybe not just mental, but also social and physical well-being as well.

But I do think there is something timeless about the question. Like many philosophers, I guess that’s the part I want to grab onto as much as I can.

Rick: Something you said there, Josh, made me think that if I give up striving for importance because I recognize that, from the cosmic perspective, I’m not important, doesn’t this end up meaning that nothing has any significance, nothing has any meaning? In other words, a position known philosophically as nihilism? Don’t I become a nihilist?

Josh: Yes, I think that is a real risk. There is a sense in which I’m not giving a lot of attention to that risk, and maybe that’s something where there’s more room for investigation. Because again, I’m starting from a point where I want to react to what the pro-significance crowd is starting with, which is: there is value in the universe, and we’re going to get it all.

So, one response is to say, “No, there is no value in the universe,” but that’s not the response I want to grab onto. I’m interested in this sort of midway position: that we do matter. We genuinely matter. We genuinely have value. I don’t argue for that; I just assume it. But what I’m interested in is the possibility that we genuinely matter, and it really does have some level of significance, but it’s not tremendous significance.

So, we need to accept our sort of earthbound, small-scale being. Being the best cribbage player in Milwaukee is a very achievable goal, I guess, for people who play cribbage, and it might be quite good for us. Back to Leigh’s question about whether Ali was motivated by that quest for greatness and whether that allowed him and us to benefit in ways we wouldn’t have benefited if he hadn’t been striving for that—I think there’s a lot of logic to that.

But I’m interested in that midway view of, well, okay, we might matter to America in the 20th century, but do we matter cosmically? No.

And once you start with that—“We might matter in America in the 20th or 21st century”—you give up on that nihilist project you’re asking about, Rick. And so I’m really sidelining it. Or—that’s not entirely true, because I do think it’s instructive. I think we can learn some things to apply to the significance question by looking at, “Well, what happens if we don’t matter that much?” It’s a similar kind of question to, “What happens if nothing matters at all?”

One of the benefits of things not mattering at all—well, okay, I shouldn’t say “benefit.” There are no benefits if things don’t matter at all. So, I’ve already misspoken. But one thing that would feel good if nothing matters at all is that you can pursue whatever you want, and there’s absolutely no reason not to. There’s no reason to pursue it, but there’s no reason not to. So you can enjoy yourself in that sense, if you’re constituted to take advantage of that.

I think there’s an instruction there about how to think about if we’re not that important, but we do matter somewhat. So, if nihilism is false and yet we’re still not that important, that’s that liberation I’m really interested in—the liberation from what I call the tyranny of value. This drive we have to make sure that we’re always lining our choices up with what the right answer is.

I don’t doubt that we ought to try to do that, but I do want to call into question how important it is when we succeed or fail. I think there’s a lot of anxiety that attaches to that, a lot of stress, a lot of hurt and sorrow that attaches to maybe not making the right choice. Sometimes that could be something tremendous, like who you partnered with for your life or something like that. Or maybe, you know, somebody died and you played a role or could have done something—something really high stakes like that. But it also can be really small, like, “What should we do for dinner tonight?” That’s a question that has occupied way too much of my time and thought.

Once you accept, “Okay, I don’t matter that much, and therefore this choice doesn’t matter too much,” there still is a right answer out there. I still believe there’s a menu that gives us the right answer, but I don’t care about the menu as much. And that, to me, is a really powerful form of liberation.

That’s where you see common themes with nihilism—at least the kind of nihilism that ends up somehow being positive. Like, again, Camus saying, “We’re going to create value where none exists.” That’s a really inspiring thought to have. And I want to transition that over to the question of, “What if things do matter, but we don’t matter all that much?”

Rick: Right.

Leigh: I’d like to maybe change the perspective of this for just a second. Instead of looking at this from the perspective of each of us indulging or resisting this—what you call the significance impulse, this drive, which I’m not really sure if you think is something that’s innate, maybe you do—maybe we can talk about that in a second.

But rather than talking about that drive, let’s look at it from the other perspective. Why do we feel that drive? Who is placing that importance on us? Who’s driving us to feel like significance ought to be really important for us, and that we ought to want to be significant?

I’ve said before on this podcast that one of my favorite genres of discussions is what I call “GOAT wars”—arguments about who is the greatest of all time in whatever: movies, sports, science, etc. I think that’s a really fun conversation to have with people. But what never comes up in those conversations is how much damage those conversations might be doing to the psychology of the people we’re talking about, the well-being of those people, and the possibility for flourishing, happiness, and meaning-making of these so-called GOATs.

So I’m wondering if you could maybe talk about it from that ethical perspective: Are all of us forcing one another to indulge this significance impulse in ways that we could be helping one another resist a little bit more?

Josh: Yeah, great questions. Back to the innateness question for a second: I have no good argument for this, but my own view is that it is not innate.

I come to that by looking at cultures where it seems like individual greatness, in particular, is suppressed. Some cultures are more focused on the community itself being great, rather than individual greatness. I mean, our country, the United States, regularly proclaims itself “the greatest nation of all time,” as if there’s some trophy we’re going to get for that, and it’s going to somehow benefit everyone in the country. But there are countries and communities out there that are just more interested in healthy, functioning relationships between people, rather than individual accomplishment that outstrips what others are doing.

If we start with that, then to get back to this question of, “Is it bad for us, or are we hurting each other when we encourage greatness?”—I definitely have that worry. Part of this for me is not just about listening to people like Ali and Williams, but I think parents often tell their children, “You can be great one day. You could become the greatest writer or the president,” or whatever the goal is that embodies some form of excellence.

That’s a tremendous burden to put on a child’s shoulders. It’s not just unrealistic—though of course it is unrealistic, even for the most gifted people out there—but in addition to being unrealistic, it’s a distorted value system. It presents the child with the idea that greatness is somehow good for them in a way that they will miss out on if they’re “just ordinary.”

And of course, almost all of us are going to end up as ordinary. Even the greats, even the Alis of the world, surely have paused and recognized that in a thousand years, no one’s going to remember Muhammad Ali. He’s not going to be, in the vast scope of history, that kind of historically important figure. Very few people, if any, will be.

I think it’s incredibly distorted, and it can lead to certain individual and social maladies, where we end up competing and hurting one another in ways that aren’t healthy. I want to emphasize that I do think there are healthy ways of competing, and that it’s great for us to try to achieve our own individual maximizing of our talents and flourish as much as we can. So, I don’t take issue with these great philosophical traditions that emphasize flourishing, for example, or even human perfection.

I just think that oftentimes those traditions get associated with the significance impulse, where, because we’re trying to be as good as we can be, we feel we need to be the greatest thing of all time to the entire cosmos. That’s the distortion—that last step that I’m taking issue with in the book.

I agree with you, Leigh, that there’s some real risk to health and wellness there, for sure. But it’s not just that—it’s a philosophical risk, too. We’re getting a distorted value system. So, it’s not just that this is a self-help problem or something like that.

It’s that we end up thinking that something matters when it doesn’t actually matter. That’s not nihilistic, even on a value system that says, “Oh, things matter more or less.” It’s just incorrect. I argue that we’re not going to somehow end up as, whether collectively or individually, the most significant thing in the cosmos.

Rick: Your raising the issue of America being the greatest country on the face of the earth for all of history makes me see this quite clearly because of two experiences I had.

One was living in Poland in the early ’90s, just after the fall of communism and so on, where being identified as someone from the United States made you immediately interesting. And I’m using that as a kind of analogy with “important.” People wanted to talk with you, wanted to know where you stand on various issues, and so on. So I used to pull what I called the Liechtenstein maneuver. When people said, “Where are you from?” I would say, “Liechtenstein.”

My thought was, first of all, I don’t think anyone in Liechtenstein is desiring to be the greatest country on earth. And secondly, nobody knows what the fuck Liechtenstein is, where it is, or what it’s about.

The other example is when I was invited to teach in China. There I am in Shanghai, and I couldn’t pull that maneuver because I’m walking around and everyone knows I’m not Chinese. I was always the object of interest, and I found that the detriment there, in always being “important,” was that I actually couldn’t be me. I couldn’t pursue many of the things I would otherwise want to pursue because of this yoke of greatness put around my neck that wouldn’t allow me to thrive in ways I might otherwise have.

I almost said “thriven”—in ways I might otherwise have been able to thrive.

Josh: That’s interesting. Just to follow up, could you say more about how that stifled you?

Rick: Well, for example, if I wanted to go and sit in a café and prepare my class or read a book, people would constantly come up to me and ask me where I’m from, what I’m doing there, how I find China, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So, always being an object that was deemed important by others made it impossible for me to do the things that I found important for myself, unless I just stayed in my apartment all the time and never went outside except to teach my class.

Josh: Yeah, there is this isolation that comes from standing out in some way. Back to Leigh’s GOAT wars for a second—which, by the way, Leigh, I want to just confess that I, too, love the GOAT wars and try to start these battles with my friends whenever I can.

Rick: So, who is the greatest cribbage player in Milwaukee of all time?

David: Damn straight. I am. Spend enough time in the bar, you know, working on it.

Josh: I mean, it is a weird thing, right? That somebody might want to be the winner of the GOAT wars and end up where they are at the same time. Celebrate it tremendously, get a huge amount of rewards and attention for that, but also, as you’re pointing out, Rick, a ton of isolation—where you’re sort of put on an island, and being on that island dominates the other things you might really rather be focused on. Like, the thing that puts you on the island—maybe you want to be the greatest cribbage player, and everyone’s focusing on your greatness, which means you don’t actually get to play a fun game of cribbage anymore. That could really be another way in which this can be unhealthy for us, for sure.

Leigh: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it does seem like it wouldn’t be a misinterpretation of what you’re saying to describe this activity of overindulging the significance impulse as pathological. And it does seem to me that, just like there are countries in which this pathology is more widespread, there are also individual domains of human activity where this pathology is more dominant. I’m sure this is not going to come as a surprise to anyone here, but academia is utterly pathological in this particular way.

Not only are academics themselves perhaps pathologically indulgent of the significance impulse, but academia’s number one message is how overly significant everything is. How overly significant your work is going to be in the world after you finish your education. How important your degree is. I’m wondering if you see other domains of human life where this pathology is very dominant, in the way that I think all of us see it in our domain of human life.

Josh: Just to go back to putting words in my mouth for a second—maybe it’s pathological. I do think it’s dangerous. But it may indeed be a form of true disease, a true dysfunction in our system of values and cares that we center this so much.

Yes, I’ve noticed it showing up in academia and among academics. We’ve had the GOAT conversation, of course, about philosophers just as much as about fighters or musicians, right? And all of that can be really bad for us, for sure. Again, I’m a little more focused on the value scheme it implies and wanting to challenge that, rather than focusing solely on the negative effects on, say, mental health. But I completely agree with your characterization, Leigh.

In terms of other domains: my own view is that it crops up in just about every domain of life. I have friends who work as transportation planners, and they care about who is excellent in that world. I don’t know if they have GOAT wars, but maybe they do. I have friends who work in just about every broad category of our society, and in every domain, I think these kinds of questions come up.

That said, I do think there are little pockets and islands of resistance. I think in a lot of places, if we open our eyes to it, we’ll see people saying, “Well, this isn’t going to make me the greatest guitar player of all time, but I’m going to have an excellent gig at the bar this weekend, and it’s going to be a lot of fun, and that’s all I really care about.”

That kind of perspective also comes with age, a little bit. Once you get into your middle years, it’s easier to identify with that. And I’m hoping that as I enter my more senior years, I can grab onto that a little more. Bertrand Russell has that great line about being an academic—I’m going to mangle the metaphor, but it was something along the lines of: as a young man, he wanted to make a big wave, but by the time he was older, he was just interested in keeping the ocean going, keeping the project alive, and fostering younger thinkers. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that.

David: I know you said earlier on that your interest here is mainly in a secular understanding of this, but I want to ask how this plays on the register of religious traditions and theology.

It seems that, especially within Judeo-Christian and other monotheistic traditions, there’s this idea that we are the best of all creation—we are above all the other animals—and there’s this significance imbued to humans that feeds this whole notion. I’m wondering—maybe this is a chicken-and-egg problem—does religion culturally feed the significance impulse, or is the significance impulse manifested in various religious traditions that we then invent to mobilize this desire?

Josh: That’s a fascinating thought—that religion might be a byproduct of the significance impulse. You know, we create stories, or we identify with stories, that somehow help us make sense of being important in a universe that can feel cold and uncaring at times. And that is cold and uncaring. I mean, the stars do not care about us.

So, we have these stories. I’m not sure whether the chicken or the egg is first here. I will say Robert Nozick and Thomas Nagel make this point: that, in a way, the religious story is bound to fail to a degree. Because even if a religion has identified itself as special in some way and its deity as the deity to end all deities, it makes us subservient to that deity. It makes humanity a secondary player at best, below the divine players.

If religion is an outcropping of the significance impulse, in a way, it’s a misfiring—because it’s never going to make us the most significant thing. It’s always going to make us, at best, the second most significant thing, and maybe worse—a tool for the most significant thing. That’s not going to achieve what the impulse is pushing us toward.

So, it’s a complex interplay for sure, as to whether religion reinforces or, in some way, diminishes and humbles us in the narratives that attach to it.

Rick: That point about, “I might be important, but I’m not the most important being there is in the universe, or even among all humans, I am not the most important,” allows for a certain opening of other aspects of what it means to be human that are actually central to our importance.

I’m thinking here of the tennis player Andre Agassi. You know, he fell off the top of the ranks because he wasn’t having fun anymore—he wasn’t enjoying playing tennis. And he went back, got fit, and started playing in tournaments where he had to keep his own score. They were calling their own lines and things like that. When he came back to the top ranks, he was committed to actually enjoying tennis.

It seems to me that being freed from the tyranny of importance, or the tyranny of value, allows for flourishing that is based on a certain form of playfulness. I take things less seriously in one way, but I also enjoy them more. This makes me—you know, what we used to call—a well-rounded individual. But that’s precisely what it is that makes a human, as a human, important.

That I could beat every other tennis player on the planet does not add to my dignity or worth as a human being. Perhaps the fact that I flourish and enjoy the talents I have and the life I have is what gives me moral worth.

Josh: That’s a great question: what part of our value system is importance supposed to reside in? It can’t be moral. We’re not going to say that the more important people matter morally more than the rest of us. I mean, I suppose there are some value systems that have said that, but it seems to run against pretty much all of our bedrock moral principles that focus on our moral equality.

So, it’s almost like it’s an aesthetic judgment—that importance is supposed to play a role in a “cool” life or a “beautiful” life or something along those lines, as opposed to a moral life.

When you look at Ali saying, “I’m the greatest,” there is something cool and attractive about that, right? It’s that aesthetic level that we might latch onto. I’m really not sure how to think about it in terms of where these values lie. But, Rick, I think you’re 100 percent right: we get that playfulness, and there’s something incredibly beneficial about it once we try to step off the significance impulse train.

The term I focus on in the book is irreverent contentment, and both of those words in that phrase matter to me. We need to be irreverent about our importance. We need to downgrade ourselves and not take ourselves as seriously as we often do—even, again, about small decisions like what to make for dinner. You can just take it all down a notch. In addition to that, there’s a great amount of contentment that comes with it.

Once you’re like, “Okay, it doesn’t matter which dinner I have,” you’re happy with the dinner in front of you. Or, “It doesn’t matter that I’m the greatest tennis player.” I mean, Agassi is such a wonderful example because he was so miserable for so much of his career, apparently. You look at that and go, “You were great, but at what cost?”

The fact that he could come back and learn—you know, we talk about playing for the love of the game—but even just playing because you want to be good is fine. Not misvaluing—that’s a better word for me—this idea of being better than everybody else is to our benefit. It’s not just mentally healthier; it’s actually better for us to embrace not mattering all that much.

Because we can be free. We can have a more playful attitude. When life becomes game-like, it becomes recreational. It becomes lower stakes. And that’s something that is truly to our benefit, I want to argue.

Leigh: So, Rick hates it when I talk about generations in broad, descriptive terms, but I do actually think that generational differences are there and that they are, for lack of a better word, significant. And it doesn’t surprise me that a book like this would be written by someone from Gen X. It just seems entirely appropriate for a Gen Xer to say, “You know what? Everybody, your insignificance is not that significant—it’s not cosmically significant.”

But, as you probably know, the sort of broad caricature of millennials was that they were the generation where everyone got a trophy. Everyone had to be significant. Everything they did had to be important. It does seem to me that, talking about the generation that’s in college now, the Gen Zs, they seem to be more on board with exactly what you’re describing. They seem to be pretty much okay with the unimportance of their cosmic unimportance.

As a group, I think they’re more creative and playful. And, as you said earlier, they’ve taken everything down a notch in a way. I think that could possibly be attributed to the fact that their doomsday scenarios are probably more realistic and more proximate than any generation before them. But it also could be that there has been more of a shift toward exactly what you’re describing—that perhaps this significance impulse is something we ought to spend more time resisting instead of indulging.

I mean, you’re a college professor. You’ve seen the changes in people over the last 25 years. Do you see that?

Josh: I’m going to take Rick’s side that I’m afraid to make broad generalizations about generations. But I am intrigued by what you’re saying, Leigh—you might be onto something there. I don’t want to dismiss that so much as I’m just afraid to make broad characterizations of large groups of people.

That said, it’s interesting because, if it’s accurate to define importance as not just being of high value but being rare—you know, you don’t just want to be good at cribbage; you want to be the best. You want to be better than everybody else. Then, when we give every kid a trophy, what we’re essentially saying is, “None of you are that important.” Like, you all have value—we’ll give you each a trophy for the value you bring—but none of you stands out above the rest.

If that was the parenting and socialization ethos of the last 30 years, or roughly the last 30 years, maybe that is producing a generation of people who are taking it down a notch. Who are saying, “I want to contribute, I want to be of value, but I don’t have the expectation that I’m going to somehow change the world or win the GOAT wars.” I think there’s a very natural connection to draw there.

It’s interesting because I think when parents or coaches or whoever decide, “We’re giving everybody a trophy,” a big part of that is to build confidence. It’s about building mentally healthy skills for children. That’s what we should be aiming at, without question. And it’s telling if one of the ways we need to do that is to flatten the valuations we place upon kids. You know, the best kid is 1 percent better than the worst kid on the team, or whatever, in terms of talent. That’s exactly the ethos of the book.

So, maybe you’re right, Leigh, that if that generation has grown up with this different ethos, then hopefully my book is connecting with that spirit on that front.

Rick: I think the point that among millennials—if Leigh is right about these generational divides, which I am suspicious of, but let’s grant the point—if it is the case that, in order for them to be made to feel important, they have to be made unimportant, I think that’s a really nice way of summarizing what the general outlook of your book is.

That, in a sense, if we’re really interested in finding significance, we’re probably going to have to give up significance.

Josh: Or maybe, to put it slightly differently, the only significance that’s achievable is the significance that flattens out the differences between us—that doesn’t make anyone stand out too much.

Again, I don’t want to diminish the fact that Ali was a better fighter than just about everybody else of all time, and I think we should recognize that. Back to what Leigh was saying earlier, there are reasons to incentivize those attitudes, because we get excellent fighting, excellent science, and excellent music when we praise people for their achievements that truly do stand out.

But at the same time—back to what you’re saying, Rick—if we overstate that, we’re essentially working with a distorted and false value system. We are diminishing our significance as a species, or as a community of thinkers, because we aren’t as significant as we could be. Precisely because we are striving for something that is both unachievable in terms of cosmic significance and not actually good for us in itself, other than the social rewards we attach to it.

Leigh: And it is interesting that you use the word “significance.” I mean, in order for significance to be significant, it has to be signifying something, so it can’t, of course, be an end in itself, right? It would just be an empty concept.

Josh: Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, connecting the different senses of significance is really weird. Sometimes we use “significance” in the sense of “meaningful.” Sometimes we use it in the sense of, like you’re saying, a “signifier.” Other times, we use it in the sense that’s central and prominent in the book, which is “greatness”—that you somehow are greater than everybody else in terms of your value.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about the ambiguities in that word “significance” and how they relate. And I still, after all this thinking about it, haven’t come to any settled conclusion that somehow being a signifier of something else is related to having outsized value, like being the best at something, for example.

David: Hmm. And it could be that the slippage in the different denotations and connotations of “significance” is part of what makes this difficult to grapple with, right? Because when we use that word, we might mean “a sign of a signified,” or we might mean “something that is elevated.” You’re exactly right. The fact that that word is so rich opens up a lot of the conversation we’re having here, but also a lot of the problems we’re having in finding our way through this.

Josh: Yeah, 100%. In my speculations on why the significance impulse is so powerful—why so many people succumb to it—part of what I worry about is exactly what you just said, David. We want to make a meaningful contribution to our communities. And one way of talking about that is, “I want to be significant.”

But that’s really close to, “I want to be the most significant I can be,” which is really close to, “I want to be the greatest of all time.” There’s slippage between those links that starts with a well-principled position of wanting to be meaningful in some way and slides into an unprincipled position of, “I want to be the greatest of all time.”

Leigh: Yeah, this kind of goes back to what you were saying earlier, which is that you don’t think the significance impulse is an innate feature of human beings. I think I might disagree. I do think it’s an innate feature of what it means to be a human being. At the end of the day, I think human beings are meaning-making animals. And at the point that we stop making meaning—stop finding significance or creating significance—we die. I mean, that’s basically what happens.

But the subtitle of your book, The Unimportance of Cosmic Importance, is the kind of thing that I don’t think is necessarily innate. I find your book really persuasive—first of all, so well-written, and really, really persuasive. And on this point exactly: that, going back to what you said at the very top of the episode, we do want to create as much meaning as we can while we’re here. But that doesn’t have to be of cosmic significance.

Josh: Yeah, it doesn’t have to. And it’s not going to help us if it is. Like, if somehow you became godly—you know, the next god is Leigh Johnson—that’s actually not to your advantage. It doesn’t improve the meaning you’re going to take from life. It doesn’t improve your achievements. It doesn’t improve your flourishing.

That’s how the argument is supposed to go. By that, I just mean that the person who theoretically becomes a god is not flourishing more than the person who becomes the best cribbage player in Milwaukee. Both are forms of flourishing that have the same benefit to us, because they’re maximally flourishing lives. It’s just that the two people have different capacities and flourish in different ways.

Leigh: And one of them has a much fuller email inbox.

Rick: I’m just still wondering where, Josh, you get off saying, “What if Leigh becomes a god?”

Josh: Good point, good point. When. Past tense, right?

Rick: To bring this back to Andre Agassi—because I think it really exemplifies one of the points here—I remember seeing him and Pete Sampras play in a quarterfinal match at the U.S. Open. One of them would be in the argument for the greatest tennis player of all time—that’s Pete Sampras.

Andre Agassi lost that match in four sets. It was some of the best tennis I have ever seen. When they met at the net at the end of the match, they exchanged words. You couldn’t really tell what was being said, but afterward, it was reported by Pete Sampras that Andre Agassi came to the net and said, “Man, we played some tennis, huh?” And Sampras said, “Yeah, we did.”

Andre Agassi walked off thinking, “We played great tennis.” What was not significant here was their significance in the universe—or maybe even in the smaller tennis universe. And there, I think you see those two levels of significance. I think your book argues that the search for cosmic significance diminishes, if not outright cancels, the significance of this match as being great tennis.

And that’s all the value we should want—that’s all the value we should care about: the playing of great tennis. To be cosmically great in some way is sort of beside the point. It actually detracts from and invalidates what we ought to care most about—and care most about for our own good.

It’s not just looking at it from a sour grapes perspective of, “Oh, I lost to my competitor,” or, “I’m not even on the court with these two guys who are much better at tennis than I am.” It’s that we can all flourish. We can all find maximal meaning in life without that.

There’s no additional meaning or value we’re going to grab from ascending to that higher cosmic level of greatness. There is nothing else for us out there. And when we act as if there is, it certainly diminishes the things that truly do have value for us.

David: This might go back to something you said earlier—there’s a difference between aesthetic and moral values. One of the ways in which we slip in these conversations is that we take something that is an aesthetic achievement—it’s cool—and we turn it into a moral position. To go back to existentialism here, I think Kierkegaard is a really good thinker of the aesthetic as a way of thinking outside of this moral charge that we give these things.

Josh: Yeah. And if that’s right, what does that mean for our overall rational calculations of all the values we care about? So, if I care about morality and I care about aesthetics, but I also care about my own well-being, and I want to rank that very high, let’s say—if, for example, I’m right that our well-being and the meaning we draw from life are not advanced at all by being great, even just the greatest cribbage player in Milwaukee, then even that is not advancing my own interests.

But if I’m somehow promoting some aesthetic good—doing something cool that hasn’t been done before—how much weight do I give that in my overall calculation? I think we look at that and go, “Well, if it doesn’t matter to morality and it doesn’t matter to my well-being, and there’s only aesthetic value there, then it should kind of come in third.”

I don’t know how to rank personal interests and morality—that’s a really hard question—but I do sort of feel like aesthetics is a tier below those two, however you trade those two off. That’s not to diminish it entirely. Aesthetics is great. I love art and sports. All of that is wonderful. But do we want to let it dominate the things that maybe are more valuable? No, we don’t. We want our well-being and morality to maintain their proper place at the higher end of our axiology.

Rick: I think there is one indisputably important human being, and that is our bartender. Unfortunately, she’s issued last call. But before we leave the bar, Josh, I just wanted to be the first to thank you so much—both for the book and for this really delightful conversation, as unimportant as it is.

Josh: Well, thank you. And by the way, yes, while we’re all celebrating our unimportance, I think it is worth emphasizing that you all have created a really wonderful podcast. Not just for the philosophical content, but for keeping it friendly and curious—and the laughter. Really, a wonderful resource you’ve provided the community with. So, thank you for that.

David: Greatest philosophy podcast of all time.

Leigh: Before we get out of here, I also just want to put a call out to whoever the actual greatest cribbage player in Milwaukee is: hit us up. We will send you a Hotel Bar Podcast coffee mug. We will even have you on as a guest.

Thanks again, Josh. This has been so great, and it’s really great to reconnect with you. I do encourage everyone to go out and buy this book immediately.

Josh: Thank you. It’s been wonderful.