The Scoreboard Nobody's Watching
Why cosmic irrelevance might be the freedom you've been looking for
Last week, I was on a long run in Atlantic Beach, training for the Grindstone 100km, when I heard something that really made me think…
“People will argue about appetizers at your funeral.”
It came from a podcast I had playing … 41 Harsh Truths Nobody Wants to Admit. The sun had just started creeping over the rooftops, the streets were still half asleep, and I was deep in that zone where my body moves on autopilot and the mind can actually think.
Hormozi was talking about cosmic irrelevance … the idea that when you zoom way out, nothing we do really matters in the big, universal sense. Earth is a rock. We're just a blip. There are stars out there older than human civilization. We measure our lives in decades. The universe thinks in billions of years.
And for someone whose been keeping score his whole running life, that line hit differently.
Every training cycle, I’ve been chasing something. A time. A milestone. A sense that I was doing it “right.” But lately, I’ve been asking myself, right by whose standards? What am I actually trying to prove? To who?
This training block for Grindstone feels different. I still care. I’m still putting in the work. But I’m not clenching so tightly to the outcome this go around. I’m not obsessing over the splits. I just want to finish feeling good.
And weirdly, it’s this idea of cosmic irrelevance that’s helping me get there.
Because if none of it really “matters” in the big sense … the time I hit, the miles I miss, the pressure I put on myself to perform … then I’m free to make it matter in the way that actually counts: how it feels to me.
It’s like dropping the weight of trying to impress some invisible scoreboard. I run because it clears my head. I chase the thing because it’s mine to chase. I stop needing validation to justify the effort.
That’s what running does for me. Always has since I started taking it more seriously 7 years ago. It’s the one place I can hear myself think … not in a noisy, spiraling way, but in a quiet, truthful one. The rhythm of my feet gives my mind room to breathe each day. It’s where I process life, uninterrupted.
And that morning, as the miles added up, something loosened a bit more and drove a sense of clarity I think I needed at this point in the training block, and, well, life as a whole.
Nobody at my funeral is going to care about my finishing time. But I’ll remember how it felt. And that’s enough.
I wrapped up the run and rinsed off the sweat with the cold hose water on the side of my parents house, made a coffee, and sat on the floor with Dakota while she played with her toys … and I thought, this is the same thing. Showing up. Being here. No scoreboard. Just my presence.
I guess cosmic irrelevance doesn’t mean nothing matters.
It simply means the little things matter more.