The Cosmic Calendar
There's an upside to feeling insignificant | Social Psychology in 5 Minutes
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Apparently, the universe is 14 billion years old. A length of time so large that it is incomprehensible to us mere mortals. But let’s try and comprehend it anyway and see what happens.
Imagine the entire history of the universe was condensed into just one year, what would that year look like? The Big Bang happens at the first moment of January 1st, and galaxies start forming later in the month. The Milky Way takes shape around March, and way later, our solar system is born in September. The first sign of life on Earth however, doesn’t appear until the start of November. We arrive extremely late to the party, recorded human history only appears in the final few seconds before midnight on December 31st. And we don’t stick around too long either, the average human lifespan takes about two-tenths of a second on this scale.
This thought experiment, where the history of the universe is squished into one standard year, is called the cosmic calendar. I’m not trying to be dramatic but thinking about the age of the universe in this way really makes me feel like a teeny-weeny crumb of space dust soon to be brushed off the celestial fabric into inescapable obscurity. But what if that was a good thing?
Contemplating that one’s entire life, all the love, tragedy, fear, all of that sweet glorious meaning, all of it which in full thrust barely even chips the body of the cosmos, can be, to put it plainly, quite confronting. One could argue that the cosmic calendar might even prompt a nihilistic mood, a sense that all our struggles are absurd, that we’re insignificant in the grand scheme and so forth. It might even trigger death anxiety, look at all that has come and gone and very soon it’s going to be my turn.
Or, and bear with me here, this surrender to the vastness of everything that has been, could instead be strangely comforting. Maybe all those instances you messed up, the failures and humiliations, the grudges, maybe they were just fractions within fractions of all the time that has ever passed and so it would be a colossal waste of the fractions remaining, to keep fussing over it. What if picturing the history of the universe leads not to anguish, but a sense of catharsis?
This is what Hornsey et al. (2026) tested in a recent paper called “The cosmic calendar: being reminded of the vastness of time can improve wellbeing” published in The Journal of Positive Psychology. Across two experiments, they asked whether confronting people with the vastness of time would damage wellbeing or improve it. You can read it here.
In the first study, participants completed wellbeing measures at two time points, one week apart. At the second time point (week 2) some participants were exposed to a cosmic calendar exercise. They watched a short video adapted from Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, then worked through slides showing the history of the universe compressed into a single year. Afterward, they spent two minutes writing about how this perspective affected their thoughts about their own life and significance.
At both time points, the researchers measured the participants’ state anxiety, perception of life satisfaction, ability to cope (with tragedies), as well as their ability to forgive others and themselves. The results of the participants were compared to a control group, who did not undergo the cosmic calendar intervention and simply just answered the scales on both time points.
And the results were encouraging. Compared with the control group, people exposed to the cosmic calendar became more forgiving of others, more forgiving of themselves, less anxious and more satisfied in the moment, and more confident in their ability to cope with future problems. This doesn’t mean that the cosmic calendar turned everyone into a monk, the effects were modest as this was a short-term experimental induction, but the direction of these results are nonetheless hopeful. Being reminded of how tiny their lives were in the context of deep time didn’t crush people but helped loosen them up.
(We discussed a similar finding last week. Researchers found that reducing people’s belief in their free will, while typically considered an existentially bleak perspective, surprisingly helped people become more forgiving of themselves and others. It may be that these existential crises regarding apparent meaninglessness of the human condition are overblown.)
The researchers looked into possible reasons for the positive effect of contemplating the cosmic calendar. The most consistent mechanism they found was something they called ‘vastness relative to the self,’ which means people felt themselves in relation to something much larger. The effect was driven by a feeling of being situated within something grand, a perception that we are small parts of an enormous thing, and so our immediate worries are not the whole of reality.
As with all papers we cover, there is a lesson here. A lot of modern advice is about making the self-bigger. Become the main character, build your confidence, get swole, buy this quick program and you’ll start mogging everybody. While there certainly is a place for that (subscribe to my Substack and you’ll start mogging everybody), the cosmic calendar paper suggests that it’s beneficial to see yourself as a teeny-weeny crumb of space dust as well, floating somewhere far from the centre of the big story. If we sincerely confront how minuscule our existence is, then we might realise, so are all of the problems that define it.
Aisham Ali | Mental Gymnastics
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