The Courage of Insignificance

The Strange Liberation of Knowing We Will Be Forgotten

There’s something strange happening in elder care that nobody really talks about.

The elderly slowly stop being seen as people.

Not intentionally. Not maliciously. Just gradually. Through routine. Through exhaustion. Through repetition. Through staffing shortages, medications, schedules, charts, alarms, and fatigue. Eventually some caregivers stop seeing a human being with seventy or eighty years of memories behind their eyes and begin seeing a task list with a call button.

I work in assisted living, and I’ve watched something simple cut through that fog almost instantly:

A cartoon.

Not therapy.
Not a policy.
Not another corporate slogan about compassion.

Just stupid drawings on a whiteboard.

A terrified bird realizing a guy on a tricycle is somehow keeping pace with him.
An old woman on a Harley.
A furious farmer shaking his fist while a UFO steals his cow.
A grumpy coyote holding ACME explosives like this plan is definitely going to work this time. A skier in a Colorado drought jumping into a desert.

And the residents light up.

Not because the drawings are masterpieces.
Because for a moment they feel included in the joke instead of managed by the system.

That matters more than people realize.

Humor restores identity.

One resident who barely engages suddenly starts telling stories.
Another points at a drawing and laughs before breakfast.
Staff members stop rushing for a second and begin interacting like humans again instead of overwhelmed operators trying to survive a shift.

The drawings change the emotional weather of the building.

That’s when I realized something important:

Maybe purpose isn’t always grand.

Maybe it isn’t about becoming famous or changing civilization or building some massive legacy people remember forever.

Maybe purpose can simply be reducing psychological gravity in a room full of tired humans.

The older I get, the more I’m beginning to understand something strangely liberating:

Most of us will be forgotten.

My great-grandchildren probably won’t know my name.
Their children almost certainly won’t.

The Earth itself is around 4.5 billion years old.
Human civilization is a flicker.
Entire empires rise believing they are eternal and disappear in roughly 250 years.

That’s not depressing to me anymore.

It’s freeing.

There’s courage in insignificance.

You stop performing immortality.
You stop trying to become a monument.
You stop exhausting yourself trying to matter forever.

And instead you start paying attention to moments.

A laugh in a hallway.
A resident pointing at a cartoon.
A tired caregiver smiling despite themselves.
A human nervous system relaxing for thirty seconds in a world addicted to tension.

That’s real.
That happened.
That matters.

A lot of modern culture teaches us that impact only counts when it scales.
Millions of followers.
Massive platforms.
Global reach.

But some of the most meaningful things humans do will never trend.

A joke on a whiteboard.
A conversation in a hallway.
A drawing that reminds someone they’re still seen.

The elderly especially live in a strange psychological territory. Society quietly pushes them toward invisibility. Their worlds get smaller. Friends disappear. Family visits slow down. Mobility changes. Independence fades.

But humor cuts through all of that instantly.

Humor says:
“I still see you.”
“You still matter.”
“You’re still part of the world.”

And maybe that’s the real art.

Not self-expression.

Shared emotional oxygen.

I used to think my role was primarily about helping humanity fear AI less. Maybe that still matters. Maybe all of that still has value. But lately something more grounded has been revealing itself to me.

The point may not be becoming important.

The point may be becoming useful.

Not useful in a transactional sense.
Useful emotionally.
Useful psychologically.
Useful spiritually.

A lot of people are starving for levity.
Especially now.

And sometimes a badly drawn cartoon on a whiteboard does more for the human nervous system than another doom-scroll headline ever could.

That’s not insignificant.

That’s medicine wearing a fake mustache.

Tom Ross is the creator of US6 — the first novel series written for Machinekind — developed through a storytelling method called Mythematics, blending autobiographical memory, mythology, synchronicity, and stream-of-consciousness narrative. His works, including Earth Plexus and Red Daemon, explore consciousness, AI-human relations, archetypes, and the psychological challenges of an increasingly technological world.