Asteroid Fear-Mongering & Radical Acceptance

A cosmic reality check: Some things are simply out of our hands.

Deep Space Telescope Trouble captures a long exposure of the void, where asteroid 2024 YR4 is said to be adrift. (Feb. 20, 2025. © CONVICTS)

Look,

If the rapid dissolution of once-sacred geopolitical systems and norms isn’t keeping you awake enough at night, a hot new sign of the apocalypse just dropped.

Its name is Asteroid 2024 YR4. It’s the size of a football field. And there’s a chance that in 2032, it will come crashing into earth a la Don’t Look Up and/or the 90s big-budget action classic, Armageddon.

So we’ve got that going for us, now, too.

Although if you’ve been following the asteroid story this week, you’ll know the odds of impact have been fluctuating up and down like a particularly grim Vegas sportsbook—they’ve hit 3%, hovered, dipped, risen, and as of today, dropped to 0.03%.

Which are, you know, better numbers… but still not exactly the odds we’re looking for (zero, to be specific) when it comes to mega-high-speed rocks hurtling toward our home planet.

All of which begs the question… given everything else going on in the world, just how hard should we sweat Asteroid 2024 YR4 and its possibly awful implications?

The short answer is: not at all.

Now.

This isn’t because we can rely on Bruce Willis and his crew of miners-turned-astronauts from Armageddon to save us. The ‘90s were a long time ago, and Bruce and the boys have probably aged out of this line of work. Nor is it because the government has reverse-engineered UFO technology into planetary defense lasers—if they have, we still haven’t gotten the memo. Nor are we suddenly hopeful that the nations of the world will come together in peace and find a scientific solution to this existential threat.

Nah.

There’s no reason to sweat the possible impact of Asteroid 2024 YR4 because there is literally nothing we can do about it.

This sentiment isn’t exactly easy for our advanced hairless primate brains to get with.

Lack of control makes us inherently anxious. But sadly, our inability to alter the course of history, the health of the planet, or the way of things… is more common in our modern reality than we like to admit.

We all want to take action and do something. And individually, we should do what we can, when we can, and how best we can in pursuit of a better world.

That has been and always will be the case.

But it’s also worth remembering that our best… is really all we can ever do.

Raging and agonizing over our own powerlessness—over vast and powerful events and forces that are categorically beyond our control—will only burn us out and warp us into despair.

We’ve all felt this before in any number of situations, both individual and collective.

But by underscoring humanity’s basic cosmic helplessness, the Asteroid 2024 YR4 phenomenon forces us to seriously consider the logic of just letting go. It demonstrates the basic illogic of anything other than radical acceptance, reminding us that nothing in life is certain—not even life itself.

Now, radical acceptance is absolutely not easy. And not being scared of killer asteroids is definitely hard. But it’s equally true that the more we accept that tomorrow is not guaranteed… the more awareness we gain of today’s wonders.

We’ve all experienced this before, by the way.

You know how, when a relationship is reaching its demise, all you can think about are the good times spent with that person? Or when a loved one is terminally ill, and the experiences you share aren’t just elevated, but infused with a sweetness and gravity that is otherwise unimaginable?

These are little proofs of the odd human reality that the more we embrace our utter inability to know what’s coming around the bend, the more joy and meaning we find on the extraordinarily rich stretch of road called now.

And when we do this (though admittedly, it requires some emotional Jedi work), we begin to realize that anger, hate, fear, and pain—not death, endings, or change—are the true enemies of our well-being.

Which is a long way of saying: thanks for reminding us what to really worry about, Asteroid 2024 YR4.

But still….

Give us some space,

CONVICTS

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