Classifying Insignificance

What makes something insignificant?

In the question that we answered for the piece The Death of the Moth, it says “Why does Woolf choose to write about something as insignificant as a moth’s death?” The question itself already infers that a moth’s death is labelled as “insignificant”, and all of us students, including me, didn’t even really question the label placed upon the idea because we most likely agree. If you think about it though, that’s actually really hypocritical of us.

We always see phrases like life is a gift and you only live once plastered everywhere, all over social media. If we’re told that life is something that we should value, why is it okay for us to say that another living organism’s life is not even less important but simply insignificant? It can’t be justified that it’s because humans are the superior species, or because other organisms are plentiful (it would be considered an understatement to say that humans aren’t plentiful-- 7.7 billion doesn’t really seem like unplentiful). I guess the main reason would be that we, as a species, just like to value each other more than other species, which makes sense. If given the scenario of a person and a tiger drowning, the person answering would most likely save the person, not the tiger. But if we were to hypothetically give a tiger the same situation, it would most likely save the tiger, not the person. If we look at it through this lens, we value our lives and other people’s lives because, in a sense, we hope that the meaning of life to us carries the same meaning to others. We view our own lives as significant and we assume other people feel the same way, too. In the context of another organism, like “an insignificant little moth”, its life doesn’t hold the same meaning to the moth as it does to people. In short, we don’t generally share the same view of life as other species. As a result, we come to think that their lives are insignificant due to the fact that life to them isn’t what life is to us.

This week's song:

Queen Naija - Butterflies // https://youtu.be/zjN3D1ZQNHU






I chose this song because the title is "Butterflies" and butterflies are somewhat similar to moths? Yeah, this song doesn't really relate to the post other than the title but it's still a good song and you should check it out :)