Was gonna write something helpful and tactical today. But then I remembered I’m a statistical miracle who beat 13.8B years of cosmic chaos..just to answer Slack messages. So yeah. This one's going to be different.

I was procrastinating on deep work when a Gary Vaynerchuk reel hit me in the face. He said the odds of existing are 400 trillion to 1. I heard him say this before. But today it landed like a cosmic slap. And as massive as 400 trillion odds sounds...it felt undercounted.

For reference, U.S. debt is $37 trillion. Just 11x smaller. Still feels human. Gary's stat covers the odds of 2 people meeting and sticking around long enough to have a kid. The real odds of us existing? Far more cosmic. Made me think. Most people feel grateful when something good happens. But there’s a deeper kind: Existential gratitude.

Let’s start with scale. Light travels 186,000 miles per second. The universe is 93 billion light-years wide. Tiny distance. Now hide one atom somewhere in that space. Then find it blindfolded…on your first try. That’s how unlikely it is that we exist.

It's practically a zero chance, a miracle.

How lucky are we right? But that awe fades fast. Deadlines. Slack pings. Doomscrolling. It was important for me to not lose that perspective. A simple mental model I keep in my back pocket for when things suck real bad.

The Cosmic Contrast Question:

Use it when: You’re catastrophizing over an ignorant comment that hijacked your morning or terrible news.
‍
Ask Yourself:

  • I’m the result of a trillion coin flips landing heads. Am I really letting this ruin my day?
  • Will this matter in 10 years yet alone 10 days? Would it even matter to 85-year-old-me who's just grateful to breathe and play with my grand kids?
  • If my life was the most epic movie ever made... what's the best action here as the reslient main character?‍

Outcome: Reframes the daily minutaue with proportion. Helps you swap panic for perspective.

And just to really feel it, let’s stretch this miracle across time: 13.8 billion years = 436 trillion seconds.

For us to exist? Every one of those seconds had to align.

  • Earth had to cool.
  • Life had to spark.
  • Cells became fish.
  • Fish grew lungs.
  • Mammals made it through.

Eventually, Homo sapiens showed up. Maybe 150,000 years ago, your great-grandmother Kimmy survived childbirth in a cave...That chain never broke. All the way to you.

Zoom in. Out of 100 million sperm, 1 met 1 egg.

Even that was just the last domino.

What if grandma said nah to that dance?
What if dad botched the dad joke to mom?
What if great-grandpa showed up 5 min early for once?

No you.
No doom scroll.
No Monday morning meltdown.

You’re not “one in a million.”You’re one in 10^2,685,000. That’s a 10 with 2.6 million zeroes. A number so absurd, math just called it astronomical. And still, you made it.Existential gratitude.

So if today feels like:

  • You’re 35 tabs deep and forgot why you opened them
  • Life’s hitting like a group chat on 3x speed
  • You’re writing emails...in your dreams.

Pause. Breathe.

Remember:

  • You’ve already beaten extinction, entropy, and a 13.8B-year audition
  • You are the atom that beat infinity.
  • A miracle with calendar anxiety.Counts for something.

Reminded me of something Tim Ferriss asks his guests...“If you could put one message on a billboard for millions to see, what would it say?”

Or, if you had to text everyone on Earth (98% open rate, ya know?)…

I’d write:

You are rarer than finding the same atom in the universe,again and again, every second, since the Big Bang.There will never be another version of you.Not in this time. Not in this space. Not in any universe.You have one precious life.Make it beautiful.

What other absurd human things do we do after beating cosmic odds to exist?What would your one text to Earth say? I think about that one a lot.