Does a single individual even matter

[Tintypographer]

I'm so down. In the face of bureaucracy, all the details, all the contracts to force a person to do things and the guarantees an individual has to give against the list of things and organization guarantees they will not provide I feel like I simply matter only as a source of energy to the "machines" around me. I know that no matter what I will age and inform, I will constantly have to struggle for money and resources, I will forever have people trying to force me to do things, if I refuse to do those things there will be an unfeeling machine of rules and bureaucracy to force me to do them.

If I don't choose a philosophy of "making others happy around me", "seeing the joys in little things", "building interpersonal relationships", and "becoming part of a local community while being anything but anonymous" then I can't exist and be happy

I am positive that if I extend the timeline of the world 500 years that I won't matter. I am already irrelevant today, my death will make a few tweets and a few family members sad but even their future won't matter in 500 years. I'm torn between the thoughts of the main character in Camu's "The Stranger" who felt that nothing he did mattered at all and therefore his life did not matter, and an even bigger picture of in the history of all life and matter anywhere and all life and matter at any point in the future; will my life or death have any impact on the universe? I'm basically a middle aged person who has worked on a series of things like powerpoints and IT projects that have not really improved any part of life other than justifying things, my family will live in and in reality their thoughts and emotions will not matter in 500 years either and all things in the universe will continue their inexorable march toward maximum entropy. We simply don't matter unless we want to reframe to some sort of intimate joy of the small things type of world.

I'm tired of not mattering and in reality, it doesn't really matter!

 

[BottomlessPit]

You see the world from the bird's point of view. If you zoom out enough, all the little details of everyday life start to become tiny and insignificant. I like to use this point of view when I think about the consequences of my suicide. My death won't matter in the grand scheme of things, the universe couldn't care less about some mediocre lifeform on a speck of dust ceasing to exist.

But I think it's also important to come back to the human point of view now and then. The fact of the matter is that the people around us are emotionally attached to us. The fact that this occurs in a meaningless universe doesn't make their emotions less real, less worthy of consideration. At least in my view.