Good points, Bob.

And while I don't disagree with the Chimp, I guess the notion of smallness and significance can get confused in odd ways.

The best way for me to understand significance remains mysterious. It has to do with living in a good way, or living authentically in the best way one can, without too much despair over outcomes I cannot control in any rationalistic way.

I just forget that sometimes, what with all the angst and anxiety over peak oil, climate change, intentional ignorance, war, and other violence going on.

I agree with Chimp that our experience of life with cars has affected our sense of self-importance in the same way that perhaps some royalty, emperors, CEO's, and other "Big Players" were/are given to an outrageous sense of self importance.

Living authentically matters a great deal to me. I fall short of my own sense of ideals, but love, peace, joy, sharing with a small group of loved ones, and positive engagement in the larger community matter to me even if we go out with a poof and a sputter shortly.

Escape from Suburbia may have its shortcomings, but it may also serve as just the right existential provocation to help some people rediscover humane living, which involves survival, but a whole lot more as well.

Survival is not forever anyway...we all gotta go sometime, and so do all species, it seems.

Mere survival is not all it might be cracked up to be. Even so, I do want to keep on surviving so that I can have more opportunities to really live.

Not discounting even more mystical possibilities that may or may not helpfully inform the discussion of the significance of the human being as highlighted by the Long Emergency as we know it.

Significance, leaving a mark, is a human ego delusion.

How many wrong ideas are packed into that statement? Who are the people who have left as their mark this terrible meme?

The people that I emulate most aren't concerned with how they appear to others

So for you significance and appearance are the same thing? Why are you emulating people? Certainly because they left their mark! They were significant! Why were they significant? Often because they were less deluded than their contemporaries. Does being less deluded mean they didn't have "egos"? Not that likely, since the very concept of "ego" is of recent vintage - a mistranslation of Freud, actually, who just used the German word for "I." So when you say "The people I emulate" that's all Freud ever meant by "ego" - what we mean when we say "I." And frankly, if you think you don't mean anything when you say "I," that's delusional, schizophrenic even.

What we need - urgently - is different styles of living. Popular styles can transform at mercurial rates. There's been a noted lack of significant stylistic leadership since the sixties ended. Part of what's holding us back from style is the "anti-style" movement based in the meme of "having no ego." Almost all significant public style leaders have strong senses of self. That coming through is in large part what makes their styles so attractive and emulable. The source of successful style is in part in emulation, but in equally important part in centering in the originality of your own self. In that way the self, the "I," is the key to real social progress.

The widespread belief that it's not is the reason there's been so little social progress over the last few decades.