This is not an age of humility. It is an age of celebrity and self-promotion. Youtube has enabled the ad man in everyone with a digital camera or mobile phone. "Look at me." is the underlying mantra of videos of cute cat tricks and gurgling babies. There are, of course, exceptions, but Google Ads belie a certain egocentric materialism generally.
As a humanist and atheist who admits ignorance of what I cannot see or understand in The Universe, I do experience a natural humility every day. My tenuous grip on life and consciousness allows me to appreciate the vastness of The Universe. I do not live comparatively in relation to other human beings. I understand that we are all smaller than bacteria in the great Universe around us. The famous will sicken and die no more elegantly than the man sleeping under a bridge.
Admission of the smallness of my life in the great sea of life and non-life around me is liberating. My greatest possession, perhaps my only possession, is this moment. Though it is precious to me, it is fleeting and so easy to miss. I choose to share my moments with you because I feel our greatest quality as human beings is our ability to share our internal experiences of The Universe with each other. Bringing our shared awareness to life's successive moments breeds compassion and mindfulness. Each tiny light of shared consciousness, like my own, joined with millions like itself, may eventually illuminate a world darkened by selfishness, poverty and violence. This is my idea of a great vision of a better world.
