…And my work here is done.
Read A Fan’s Notes by Fred Exely.
It deals with this in a very painful but cathartic way.
My view is that people like Einstein are statistical anomalies. You can’t have a brain that is one in a million without 999,999 normal brains to measure against. I am proudly one of the 999,999!
Was gonna leave this thread alone, but for this reference. At some point in high school, my nickname became The Nowhere Man. I think it stuck so well because I just didn’t care.
My family history pretty much guarantees the heart attacks to start in a couple more years. As I’ve done the vast bulk of what I’d ever be likely to accomplish, my plan is to accept them with grace and excuse myself from the party as soon as possible. There is a certain relief that comes of being a small man–one, maybe two people will truly miss me, but everyone and everything else I’m involved with will click right along without me. Ultimately, I have no responsibilities of consequence, and that is immensely liberating.
Your user name made me laugh, when read in the context of this post. 
An interesting thought that occurred to me was that each person is like a whole little universe. Our whole world revolves around ourselves. We are the most important person in our own little drama and everything that happens only happens to us.
Sometimes I look at a road with cars driving down it and each car has a driver in it. To each driver his or her experience is the only thing that matters. Their whole world is inside their head and what they see around them.
To me they are just other people - kind of insignificant in that I get a fleeting glimpse of them driving past and then I never see them again. They play a very small part in my life - maybe they enter my life just for a couple of seconds and then they’re gone. But for each driver in each car they are the most important thing in their lives. Everything revolves around them. I see them concentrating on driving, getting annoyed at being held up behind someone and to them a temporary hold up probably feels like a big thing because it’s them that’s being held up. But from my perspective, looking at them, they are just other people of no real significance at all.
Then I realise that that’s all I am to other people - this insignificant nobody that they may see for a few seconds. But to me I’m all important because everything takes place in my head or around me. The only things I experience are the things that happen to me or that I see or feel.
The things I experience are the whole world to me and everyone else feels the same way. Probably not explaining this very well.
Just kind of interesting that each car that drives past contains a person who is experiencing a whole world at that moment. And if you watch a fairly busy road for a few minutes then dozens of cars might drive past each containing someone’s whole world. They’ll all be completely caught up in their world - talking on the phone, concentrating on driving, listening to music, getting annoyed at other people’s driving. They only know things from their perspective and yet from a different perspective eg mine they’re just other people
You folks really get me here. I’m just an insignificant insect, dealing with a bunch of shit. 
You can spend a hella lot of time, trouble, and frustration trying to be somebody only to discover, eventually, that you’re a nobody and always will be.
Best to get that epiphany done early in your life and save yourself all the effort.
Like someone once said, “Everybody is the main protagonist of their life’s movie.” Nobody is a supporting or extra actor.
There will come a day when the earth will have forgotten humanity entirely. It will have reclaimed the nations, devoured their cities, leaving nothing stone intermittently covered by the wind blown sand as the only trace we ever existed.
So, don’t feel so bad! 
One of many appropriate demotivators:
Right, I don’t want to own an elephant. I don’t hate elephants, in fact, I’m rather fond of them in an abstract way, but I recognize that there’s very little to be gained by owning one. Some people are the same way with children. It’s better if they learn that before they have them.
Maybe in the future we’ll all be able to join our consciousnesses together and we’ll all be able to experience what’s like to be each other (like Odo’s people on DS9) and then we won’t feel insignificant because we’ll all be joined to each other. If one of us does something noteworthy we can all bask in the glory.
Tom Lehrer: “When Mozart was my age, he had been dead for five years.” (Or something like 5.)
Even if you do amount to something, by some metric, it is not satisfying. If you get one award you don’t get a bigger one. There is someone more successful and smarter than you are. You might have wanted to accomplish five things - if you managed two of them, pretty good, you’ll feel bad about the other three.
I know someone who has been honored as a poet, a mathematician, an engineer, and a mycologist. And he was a great manager. He still was dissatisfied in a lot of ways.
I know what you mean.
Quite frequently I read about some guy my age who just heads out of town one day. I mean, gets up, looks like he’s going about his regular day, and then just goes off the grid.
Inevitably, his body is found one or two weeks later, somewhere in a remote rural location.
I have to say, I’m understanding these men more and more each day. I seriously know exactly what they were thinking.
It’s a worry for me. No joke.
This is what triggered it for me - I have ancestors who actually did interesting things. Like fighting in the American Revolutionary War, or being a justice of the peace and all-around bad-ass during the California gold rush. Even being the first woman draftsman in the Army Corps of Engineers.
Me? A run-of-the-mill high-tech worker, wife, mother. From a historical standpoint, there is absolutely nothing about my life that makes me stand out in any way. I am disappointing my descendants.
Those people all probably were just trying to be happy. So, if you’re happy, you’ve met the same goal.
Huh, I’m kinda in the reverse position.
I had incredibly low expectations as a young adult. Stewed in a home filled with chaos, addiction, mental illness. Things I felt were surely coming for me. And I wasn’t wrong, those very things took out my siblings. So looking at my life today, is pure enchantment, though mine is a small life of insignificance, by most measures.
I have a wonderful 30 yr relationship with a partner, something I’d have bet my future could not happen. No way. No how. Midway through my twenties I had accepted this as certain fact. And yet today…here I am. I could continue in this vein over many facets of my life, but you get the point.
I have had a life of surprising adventures, some remarkably rewarding. I’ve seen and done things I could not have dreamt of, truly.
So, on the one hand, I have a simple and small life compared to most of my peers. The hey have acquired more, and have a much higher standard of living by most metrics.
On the other, we think we’re the truly richest of the bunch, mostly because we have enough for our meagre needs. We mostly spent what wealth we did generate having fun and acquiring experiences, not so much on things. And we continue to do so with no plan to change it as we become seniors.
As we face retirement we’re not the slightest concerned about being able to get by on a government pension, because we’ve always gotten by with so little.
So we’re not remarkable, have created no dynasty, but hey, look what we’ve made of our lives! We reflect on our good fortune quite often, in fact.
Truth is we have both exceeded expectations spectacularly, I think.
(Plus, I’m pretty sure there’s still time for me to ‘paint my masterpiece’!)
I know the feeling. It’s just . . . I only have this one life, as far as I can tell. This is it. And I guess the best thing is to be happy - would you rather be a cheerful, average Joe or Van Gogh? - but there’s a sense of waste.
Interesting tidbit: “Nowhere Man” is autobiographical - John Lennon wrote it about himself. So even those people we see as having “done something” or “changed the world” still feel the same emptiness. Humanity, eh?
Folk-philosopher Robert Ringer (author of Winning Through Intimidation and Looking Out For Number 1) said somewhat the same thing in his Iceball Theorem: (quoting inexactly, from memory):
Ten million years from now, when the Sun is a burnt-out remnant of a super-nova and the earth is a frozen ice ball – None of this will matter!
Gives one a good long-range perspective, no?