Illusion of persistence
A person not knowing about it would assume it would take several months for an average city to completely discontinue as a controlled society in the event of the collapse of the supply situation. The truth is, it would take a very few weeks that your neighbor might not value your life anymore.
A person not knowing about it would assume what we do matters somehow to the universe. The truth is, if we would leave any durable traces is very questionable. In 5000000000 years our sun is dying and our solar system would discontinue as such. What we did is at this point will be mostly destroyed. This number of years appear for us as an eternity. Well, for us humans it is as we exist as modern humans for only 200000 year.
By the way: in 3000000000 years, our galaxy we call milky way will seriously interact with Andromeda and it might be that on object as big as a few hundreds of kilometers will end the story of earth much earlier as we may think now when watching our sun.
Electricity we found only 400 years ago. For the universe our existence is incredibly small. That I win in the lottery 100 times in a row is far more likely as us as humans interacting with the universe in a mentionable manner. We are like a tiny insect which lives only 1 day. May be somebody walks by and ends the life of this insect without even noticing.
Most of the people grow up with the self image of somehow mattering. That some of us are on the surface being visible for many others does only define our sense of self to us. Dinosaurs existed over 150 million year. They mattered million times more as we do and probably ever will.
It is a great illusion of a greatness of us humans. We are like a small sentence in a dark isolated room spoken by a tiny voice and this voice speaks millions of sentences.
If we do not achieve something incredible ingenious, we will remain infinitesimal.
But this all is not even the biggest challenge at all. The biggest challenge is our group awareness of this. If mother earth would have a consciousness, we would appear as a grotesque joke which thinks of themselves as the wisdom of some large and old bible.
Without the proper awareness as one or a few mentally majorly strong entity or entities we are damned to burn out the easy life we do currently and end up as a forgotten something which leaves not even traces. In the moment there is most of the evidence pointing exactly to that direction. We are so busy with ourselves and the problems we cause to not even realize the real challenges sitting in front of us. We as humans do not see the reality, we only walk through an imaginative palace of joy we don’t even feel. As more I think about this as more we all altogether appear as a classic psychopath twisted with multiple personalities and hopelessly traumatized by a very bad childhood. I wonder how I can continue to exist as a thinking person without drowning my thoughts in alcohol. Luckily, I seem to be resistant of enjoying drugs of any type. May be I will adjust and automatically turn thoughtless to survive. If this would be the case we are probably like a funny butterfly happily flying into a volcano.