What if the belief that you're special is the very thing keeping you from your own life?
In this episode, I explore one of the quietest and most consequential assumptions most of us carry: that we matter in a cosmic sense. That we were meant to be here. That our particular existence is not an accident.
Drawing on Adam Phillips' razor-sharp provocation in Missing Out, Ernest Becker's unsettling theory of heroism in The Denial of Death, and Irvin Yalom's clinical insight into what he called the illusion of personal specialness, I trace where the need for significance comes from, what it costs us, and what might be waiting on the other side of it.
I look at how parents — out of genuine love — install a sense of cosmic specialness in their children, and what happens when adolescence and adulthood deliver the reckoning. I also spend time in the consulting room, where one client's relational struggles turn out to be rooted in something older and deeper than anyone first suspected.
This isn't an episode about giving up. It's about the strange freedom that becomes available when we stop needing the universe to confirm us.