This is in response to the huge Cyphus post, which I will not quote, for obvious reasons. I'd also like to add that I read it (or tried to read it) at least 20 times last night because I was smashed (three nights in a row, I'm on a roll). Today, I think I get it (sometimes it's good to be sober, though many will disagree with me).
Assuming that you're talking about our existence (that's how I perceived it, if I'm way off, tell me), whether existence is an overstatement or not, I've always thought of it like an army (probably from all the Stephen Pressfield novels. Man, that guy's just my kind of boring). Optimists (and/or the naive [sp?]) will believe that everyone in that army is important, from the general to the grunt. Pessimists will say that no one is important, and that may very well be (now you might see the parallels between the two, so perhaps I'm not just talking out my ***). The pessimist will say that in an army, it doesn't matter whether an individual lives or dies. They will, however, agree that the important thing is the outcome of the battle (death is a part of life, so soldiers are simply expendable resources). These are the same people who say there is no difference between someone of importance (Napoleon, for example) and the plethora of nameless people who came before and will continue to go after him/her, the outcome is the same, though the path to that outcome may change due to direct or indirect influences. A. Graham Bell invented the telephone, which is a major impact on the world (esp since the introduction of the cell phone), but it has little significance in the grand scheme of things, says the pessimist. No one escapes death, and their existence (if you wish to call it that) will be forgotten, their life like a burning cigarette and their memory like a discarded butt. To an optimist, a general and a peon have the same value, but instead of both being nothing, they are everything. No, a single warrior can't go up against an army; in that instance, he would be insignificant. But part of a group of other individual nameless faces, he becomes something powerful. His place seems apparent, his worth is made clear. His place in the line all of a sudden means the difference between victory and defeat, the outcome a direct result of 10,000 insignificant beings all of a sudden becoming significant (I will end the army correlations here to avoid deviation from the original point). Everyone in the world will not be as big as, say, Jesus, but without everyone in the world, it would be incomplete, the course of everyone's life would change (butterfly effect). No one, of course, is an absolute optimist/pessimist, even on this subject, but somewhere on the spectrum between.
Of course, I'm a Kinisiology major, so maybe in this case I am insignificant.
