We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We... — Charles Bukowski

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

Author: Charles Bukowski

Insight: There's something oddly bracing about Bukowski's bluntness here—the reminder that mortality is the one thing every single person shares, yet somehow that doesn't automatically make us kinder or more connected. If anything, we seem to do the opposite. We get caught in grudges over small slights, we obsess over what someone posted online, we let petty workplace drama consume our evenings. The cosmic perspective is supposed to put things in proportion, but knowing we're all temporary doesn't seem to work the magic we'd expect. What's unsettling is how true the second part rings. We're not usually flattened by tragedy or grand catastrophe—we're flattened by nothing. By the accumulated weight of small annoyances, by scrolling, by comparing ourselves to people we barely know. It's like we have access to the ultimate perspective on life's shortness, and instead of wielding it like freedom, we let trivialities drain us anyway. The gap between knowing we're mortal and actually living like it matters is where most of us get stuck. Maybe that's where genuine love would start—not from shared doom, but from recognizing how much time we waste pretending the small stuff is bigger than it is.

Source: The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship, p. 12, 1998