The Wreck Of Time Taking Our Century's Measure Analysis

Living a life of significance or making life significant may require us to make decisions and to take a path that some people do not completely understand. Can it be assumed that life is already significant, or do we need something to make life significant? Life is significant because we take action and find ways to interest ourselves and to explore the world. Jon Krakauer writes about a young Chris McCandless’s disconnect from society in Into the Wild. Annie Dillard discusses our general ignorance from everything but ourselves as human beings in “The Wreck of Time: Taking Our Century’s Measure.” Alain de Botton introduces the concept of the travelers’ mindset and becoming more aware of our familiar surroundings, and disconnecting from

Detaching from society, separating from familiar ideas, and disconnecting from reality makes life significant by introducing discovery into our lives.

When we are disconnected from society, we are able to explore ourselves exclusively and find new significance in life. The concept of disconnecting from society refers to a person isolating himself from everything that happens outside the realms of his personal life. Dillard discusses the insignificance of humans in “The Wreck of Time: Taking Our Century’s Measure”, noting that mass tragedies do not affect us. In Dillard’s article, Stalin is quoted: “A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic,” (72). This is true because only deaths that occur to people who we personally know affect us, while the millions that die in a mass tragedy do not carry any personal significance. Thus, we regard the millions as a statistic. We are disconnected from everything but only our own lives, with the people and experiences that we know, and ourselves. In this way, our focus is centralized around our own

By living with a familiar perspective, we become ignorant to our familiar surroundings. What happens when the familiar becomes the only thing that we experience? Life becomes insignificant. In “On Habit”, Xavier de Maistre comes up with what he calls a “travelers’ mindset”, in order to look at things in a new and different perspective. In “Nocturnal Expedition around my Bedroom”, de Maistre describes as he looks up at the sky through the window: “Its beauty made him feel frustrated that such ordinary scenes were not more generally appreciated,” (de Botton 243). The travelers’ mindset involves moving away from viewing things in a familiar perspective in order to find new significance in a well-known setting. Alain de Botton, the author of “On Habit,” tries to apply the travelers’ perspective to his own life. He does this by trying to notice the little things around his city that he had simply ignored before due to it being too recognizable. It is remarkable how descriptive he is in talking about the architecture of the cities when taking this new mindset: “The power of my primary goal had drained me of the will to reflect on the layout of the park or the unusual mixture of Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian architecture along a single block,” (de Botton 246). By disregarding the fact that he had travelled down that path