It removed the stress in my life. I was at a point in my 20s when my failures started to surface and I started realizing that my desires and dreams were likely to never happen. That's when I became aware that I was not going to accomplish 99% of what I wanted to do in life. My idea of happiness was riding so much on "I have to accomplish ________" that it just destroyed me out when I wasn't able to accomplish _________.

After Sleeping Awake the relief was almost immediate. The realization that nothing matters, and more importantly nothing that you do matters or makes a dent in the universe somehow took away all the stress of failure. Failure was ok because it didn't matter, success wasn't all that important because it didn't matter.

When you live your life with the mindset that everything you do will affect someone either now or in the future, doing anything becomes painfully stressful. Because you're afraid of messing up someone else's life. Weather or not you have children now will dictate weather or not millions of people will live thousands of years from now. All of that puts a tremendous amount of stress on me. The realization that none of it matters takes away the pain. Weather I have kids or not, in a few billion years the sun will engulf the earth and everything that humanity has ever built will be destroyed. It'll look like we were never here. No one will care. No one will miss us. We truly will not matter to anyone because there will be no one to even notice we are gone. As depressing as that sounds, there's an upside to it all. Live your life and be happy because you're only here for a short moment in time.

Also we live in a very connected world right now. And the human mind just wasn't made to live with that kind of information. Every time someone dies or is suffering we find out about it. Every war, every conflict, every pain, every bit of injustice is broadcast all over the world. It's inescapable. The more you know the harder it is to be happy with that kind of knowledge. The realization that none of those events matter takes away their ability to deeply hurt you.

The problem is I care too much, other people's problems become my problems. I'm very sensitive and extremely emotional. Which is why I avoid making friends with people. Their life and mine start getting intertwined and it just becomes too painful to go on. Same with family. Sometimes I like to fantasize that I'm the only human left on earth, everyones gone. Because I hate seeing unsolved problems, criminals not brought to justice, people not achieving their dreams (like me) or going through pain.

So with that in mind, realizing that none of it matters, is the only thing keeping me from going insane. It allows me to let go and be at peace with existing in a non perfect world.