I think each scientific discipline offers a perspective that puts into context a functional view of your personal fears and insecurities.

The size of a nebula or the machinery inside a cell or the length of time between yesterday and a dinosaur''s foot pressing into the mud - these things can make your anxieties seem like a small, yet integrated part of something too immense to hold in one thought.

Psychology offers another. There is a vulnerability that you must accept once you start to unravel biases, fallacies, heuristics, decision making, judgment, tribalism, justifications, schemas, and all the rest. The story you tell yourself to explain yourself to yourself is imperfect. Your personal narrative is bent and twisted and inaccurate, and that''s beautiful because it''s true for us all.

There is unity in the humility, in the recognition that we are a community of messy, stumbling, fumbling beings tumbling through space, wrestling with the confusing gift of consciousness.

It can lead to a sense of wondrous empathy, to see your own flaws reflected in the species as a whole, and the flaws of the species reflected in yourself.

David McRaney - You Are Not So Smart - March 2018