Insignificance, a feeling that everyone has experienced at some point in their life; but can a man truly be insignificant? The world we live in makes one feel insignificant by feeling like they cannot achieve a specific something, posts on social media, not being helpful to anyone around, etc.. These things might be true about such a person but do these reasons truly make a person insignificant?

Kikuchiyo, in the Seven Samurai, was not born a samurai and was born a farmer. Knowing at the time farmers were always brutally bullied by people with power, and his parent’s death Kikuchiyo felt insignificant and defenseless. This led him to try in any way possible to become a samurai and hide from his insignificant past. He even tried to fake a birth certificate in order to show he was born a samurai. Kikuchiyo was a hot-headed, brutal character in the beginning which led the audience to possibly find him annoying, insignificant, etc.. Towards the end of of the movie, we see the true bravery and heart of his character and how his death did not come to waste. He might’ve felt insignificant, but was he really?

Insignificance comes from a lack of something in one’s life that derives this feeling of uselessness. As we witnessed in Kikuchiyo’s life, he might’ve felt insignificant on the inside; but that does not mean that he was truly insignificant. The dictionary definition of insignificant is, “too small or unimportant to be worth consideration”. A person might feel small, unimportant, but they are never truly insignificant. Any person contributes to the cycle of life even if they don’t feel like that is so.