In Camus’s play Caligula, the young Roman emperor arrives at a terrifying insight after his sister’s death: nothing in this world carries the weight we assign it. He pushes this realization to its most destructive extreme, becoming a tyrant who treats human lives as expendable. Camus wrote Caligula not as a hero but as a warning, someone who discovers a genuine truth and then draws the wrong conclusions from it.

But the truth itself is worth sitting with. Consider how much of your anxiety comes from the belief that everything matters enormously. The job interview, the awkward thing you said at dinner, the opinion someone holds of you. We inflate these moments until they fill the room and crowd out the air. What if you allowed yourself, just for a moment, to consider that most of it genuinely does not matter?

This is not nihilism. Camus distinguished carefully between recognizing the world’s indifference and surrendering to cruelty. Caligula fails because he uses his freedom to dominate. But the insight, handled with care, can do the opposite. It can loosen the grip of perfectionism, of status anxiety, of the exhausting performance of importance.

When nothing has to matter, you get to choose what does.