We Are All Stardust... Literally

I spent a lot of time looking at stars this weekend in cottage country. It’s a really humbling experience. For those of us that live in places where we can’t see stars, we forget.

We should get out to nature more.

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” - Carl Sagan

This photo — Earth as a tiny speck suspended in a sunbeam, 3.7 billion miles away — is a reminder of two things at once:

1. We’re cosmically insignificant.

2. It’s a miracle we exist at all.

It’s strange to hold both ideas in your head at the same time. On one hand, your birthday means nothing to the Andromeda galaxy. On the other, the odds of your specific genetic lottery ticket coming up are so low that you being here at all borders on absurd.

An aligned excerpt from a Gurwinder Bhogal essay I read this week:

“Genetically, there are far more people that could’ve been born instead of you than there are atoms in the universe. And yet, you are one of the mere 8 billion of us that are here now. To be alive is to possess an unfathomably rare gift; treat your time in this world with the gratitude it deserves.“

We’re made of stars that were billions of years old from a cosmic explosion. They floated through space and coalesced into people who argue over who's gonna get the first pick in next year’s NBA draft.

Sure, there were some intermediary steps, but the origin is the same.

That scale is freeing. The world is wide open. If you’re going to disappear back into dust anyway, you might as well spend your time arranging the particles in a way that makes you proud.

Too often we find ourselves arranging them into patterns that look good to other people, often to our own detriment.

Omnes Pulvere Stellarum Sumus. We Are All Stardust.

I’d spent years thinking about what I wanted for my first tattoo. At the time it was a subtle rebellion to my semi-religious upbringing. We’re made of stars, how silly is it to think things are a few thousand years old.

But worldviews shift. Over the years, the phrase stopped being about winning arguments and started being about awe. About how improbable it is that anything exists, let alone us. Eventually it turned into more of a question: What if?

What if there’s more to all this?

What if the improbability of our existence is an invitation to live the way we want to?

What if the only immortality we get is the way we show up for the people in our lives?

If you zoom out far enough you can’t even see the earth. Sorry Steve but whatever “dent you want to make in the universe” isn’t visible.

But, you should try to leave a dent on the handful of people who will remember you while they’re still here. Foster the moments that make life meaningfully better for someone else. The conversation that eases a friend’s bad day, the time you drop everything to help your parents, the habit of showing up for your partner.

This week, try closing the gap with someone. Call, write, show up. And if there’s a relationship you’ve let drift into space, do the quiet, awkward work of pulling it back into orbit.

We are all stardust.

But, it turns out, if enough of that dust sticks together, it shines pretty brightly.

Words I Wish I Wrote

Links & Learnings

• An inconvenient truth about families.

• No idea how to work out? Start Here.

• Apparently you can beat hedge funds using TikTok?

Psst… DSTLLD has a podcast now, too. I know — like the world needs another podcast, right? But here’s the thing: if you can tolerate my written rambles, you’ll probably find my in-person yammering… well, moderately tolerable. It’s basically me and a guest chatting about the same offbeat stuff you read here, except now you get to hear me stumble over big words in real time. I’m not saying it’s the greatest thing in the universe (trust me, I’ve listened to it), but if you like DSTLLD, there’s a good chance you won’t hate it. Win-win! Subscribe or follow on your favourite podcast platform:

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PHOTW (Parenting hack of the week): If anyone knows how to get them to not wake up at 4:30 AM let me know so I can put it here next week 😂