why do i feel so unimportant in the universe?

I suppose you've oversimplified the whole panorama of the "universe."

Yes, there are billions of people, and stars and perhaps even other galaxies.

As humans we have been given the gift of thought, which sets us apart from animals.

I think this is a stage in life, the whole deriving attention away from ourselves and speculating the world in its entirety.

You feel unimportant in the universe because you see it as this grand, immense, incredibly big thing that anything you may do may be so extremely minimal an effect that its viably unnoticeable. However, things are not so, take the one celled creatures that have given way for the whole body of the food chain. As humans we take so much energy and use so much of what the universe has in store for us. We've surpassed our limits by creating metal out of simpler substances and catapulting ourselves into outer space.

I suppose nothing does matter, if you choose to perceive that, or everything could matter if you chose to go with that. The point is, you can make anything make sense depending on the wording that you decide to use.

Perhaps you're right, nothing would matter if nothing ever extended itself or ended itself. It would be futile and life and death are virtually meaningless. But the thing is, we have the luxury of that option. To accept that if we were to combust, it simply wouldn't matter. However, we might as well make do with we've been given.

Yes, it truly is wonderous a thought to imagine that we are simply matter, floating around, perhaps we are or are not and we could or couldn't be at any given moment.

Here's something to ponder among those thoughts of non-importance and we being just simple matter. Granted, the universe as a whole will cause you to feel like a speck of an atom among the stars. And while there may be other intelligent lifeforms out there, we are it in the meantime, with the ability to think, reason, feel, invent, discover, choose our life path. No other life form in this world can accomplish that. So your claim of being more aware than others around you is weak if you can't see that because others before you felt the same and others after you will too. As for your "fairly intelligence" self opinion, rate it as good as a 25 watt light bulb.

"Why do i feel so unimportant in the universe?"

Because you don't know enough.

"Ok, so i am 14 years old ... i began feeling so unimportant in the universe, the whole scheme of things. I feel like, if our earth disappeared right now, it would have no effect on anything and nothing or no one would ever know."

*We* would know. Nature would know. We have 100 years of radio signals pumping through space right now.

"At certain points in my thought process i just think, why does it all matter?"

Your life, matters to you, your family, your community, and by the time you die, the world. Study "the butterfly effect".

"I could have gone in to more detail but was to lazy to."

OK, so you feel so unimportant, because you *know* there is so much more to learn, and you know that everyone around you is just as self-aware as you are, and surely nothing will be different without you.

That is incorrect. Without you, we would not have gotten to answer this exact "question".

What is an ect????