This is on my mind a lot -- on the one hand, we are unspeakably small cogs in the machinery of the world, and nothing we do matters on the macro. On the other hand, you can view every act as a thing itself, echoing into eternity, and it's the act and not its consequence that matters.

There are surely other ways of looking at it, but that seems the principal dichotomy that we have to navigate between, or else go mad. Perhaps an inability to come to terms with the left-hand side of the gradient is what leads people to become murdering psychopaths.